Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Nov. 21st, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Good morning, colleagues. I'd like to call to order this meeting of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. This morning we continue our ongoing review of the Canada-China bilateral human rights dialogue and related issues.

We have a panel before us this morning from a variety of groups concerned about this question, all of whom are signatories to a joint letter to the Prime Minister requesting a review of the Canada-China human rights dialogue. We're pleased to have them with us today.

I think we're missing one witness at this point, Sheng Xue, but presumably she's on her way. We do have with us right now Mr. Xun Li, president of the Falun Dafa Association of Canada; Mr. Cheuk Kwan, chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy in Canada; and Mr. David Cozac, program coordinator for PEN Canada.

Welcome to all the witnesses. Each of you has a limited period in which to make a presentation. It will be followed by questions, beginning with the official opposition. If you require translation, it's available on the translation devices attached to the desk.

I'll invite Mr. Xun Li to give the first presentation.

[Xun, Shawn) Li (President, Falun Dafa Association of Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the committee for holding this hearing and for inviting the Falun Dafa Association of Canada.

Lawyer Gao Zhisheng has been called “the conscience of Chinese lawyers”. China's Ministry of Justice hailed him as one of China's top ten lawyers in 2001. He's not a Falun Gong practitioner, yet he himself is currently under arrest for defending human rights in China--in particular, for his three open letters to Chinese government leaders calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong.

Mr. Gao wrote, in his letter dated late 2005:

Among the true accounts of unbelievable brutality among the records of the government’s inhuman torture of its own people, the immoral acts that shocked my soul the most were the lewd yet routine practice of attacking women’s genitals by 6-10 office staff and the police. Almost every woman’s genitals and breasts or every man’s genitals have been sexually assaulted during the persecution in a most vulgar fashion.

Below are two accounts of the cases he cited. In the first case:

Ms. Lijun Wang was tortured in a small metal cage three times. Inmates tied many knots on a thick rope and pulled it back and forth in a sawing motion across her vagina. Her entire lower body swelled up. The head police then ordered inmates to jab her swollen vagina with the thorny end of a broken mop stick. This torture caused Ms. Wang's vagina to bleed profusely. Her abdomen and vagina were so swollen that she could not pull up her pants, or sit, or urinate...

In the second case:

Mr. Liu Haibo was stripped of all his clothes and forced to kneel down. The police pushed in the longest electric baton they could find from the bottom and gave his organs electric shocks. Liu died immediately on the site.

These are only two accounts of the numerous atrocities suffered by Falun Gong practitioners daily in China over the past seven years. The majority of the brutal cases remain unreported. Revealing such information constitutes the severe crime of “leaking state secrets”.

Yue Yao, wife of Canadian resident Wenyu Liu in Calgary, is one of 14 jailed practitioners with Canadian ties. In 2001, she was sentenced to 12 years in prison for downloading information from Falun Gong websites and printing materials for distribution.

Introduced in China in 1992, Falun Gong is a peaceful spiritual belief that cultivates the mind, body, and spirit through gentle exercises and by following the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Yet the nature of the Chinese Communist regime is quite the opposite. It advocates violence, deception, and the destruction of traditional moral values and beliefs.

By official government estimates, there were over 70 million people practising Falun Gong by 1999. The regime formulated the following policy against Falun Gong: “Defame their reputation, bankrupt them financially, eliminate them physically” and “Count the death of Falun Gong practitioners as suicide.”

Communist China regards Falun Gong as its number one enemy and has utilized the cruelest means imaginable against its practitioners. Over 100 means of torture have been documented.

According to a 2001 Australian Broadcasting Corporation report, “Falun Gong practitioners make up close to half the number of Chinese people being held in labour camps, a process that requires no legal or judicial ruling.”

In March 2006, Manfred Nowak, the UN’s special rapporteur, reported that torture remains widespread in China and that Falun Gong practitioners represented 66% of all the alleged torture cases. The persecution spans all of China; nearly 3,000 verified death cases have been reported. The real number is unknown and is believed to be much higher.

Recently, David Kilgour and David Matas concluded in their independent investigation report that there has been and continues today to be large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners by the Government of China and its agencies in numerous parts of the country.

The vast widespread killing of Falun Gong practitioners for profit to provide organs for transplants is “so shocking that it represents a new form of evil on this planet”.

Pursuant to these vital findings of organ harvesting of live Falun Gong practitioners, I strongly believe that it warrants a formal hearing by the committee.

I want to highlight two key findings from Professor Burton's report on the assessment of the bilateral dialogue:

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' mandate is to defend China's interests abroad. It has no institutional interest in promoting respect for China's human rights domestically.

The dialogues involve only a small number of Chinese people and have no mechanism to spread the information beyond this small group.

These findings underscore the futility of the dialogues. The persecution of Falun Gong was in fact launched and has continued to escalate after the bilateral human rights dialogue process began in 1997. The systematic eradication of Falun Gong through hate incitement, torture, and killing constitutes severe crimes against humanity.

We believe China does concern itself with world opinion, and more and more Chinese people are aware and want a society that provides for human rights and fundamental freedoms. The international community, including Canada, has a crucial role to play to help uphold these values and principles.

We also recommend that the Canadian government: one, call on China to stop the persecution of Falun Gong and release all practitioners being held in custody; two, suspend the bilateral dialogue until the critical concerns from Professor Burton's report are adequately addressed; three, put human rights at the forefront of Canada's China policy, using every opportunity to promote respect for human rights in China and to speak publicly against human rights abuses in China; and, four, include civil society such as Falun Gong representation in any future human rights engagement with China.

Democratic countries are ultimately held accountable to fulfill our responsibilities. Only by ending crimes against humanity and protecting the safety and well-being of our fellow world citizens can we truly protect the security and dignity of our own country. There is no other choice we can make as human beings.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Thank you, Mr. Li.

We'll now pass to Mrs. Sheng Xue, from the Federation for a Democratic China.

[Xue Sheng, Vice-President, Federation for a Democratic China]

Ladies and gentlemen, honourable members of Parliament, first of all, I would like to thank the subcommittee for inviting me here.

My name is Sheng Xue, and I am vice-president of the Federation for a Democratic China, which was established by those who fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre and other pro-democracy dissidents outside China. It is headquartered in Germany now, with more than 20 branches across the world, including Canada. Some of our members, including those from the Toronto area, are at the moment joining the rally on Parliament Hill to give our support to Prime Minister Harper for his courageous efforts regarding human rights in China.

The official bilateral Sino-Canada human rights dialogue has been going on for nearly ten years. Throughout this period the Chinese government has learned to be more cunning in its response to the international community's concerns and the criticism about its human rights record. They are at the moment hosting a large-scale Human Rights in China exhibition. This so-called “let the whole world witness the new development of China's human rights cause” is in fact a sham.

What is really going on? I am going to describe a few cases that are related to me directly. In the spring of 2004, in preparation for the memorial service for the 15th anniversary of the June 4 massacre, I e-mailed some pro-democracy friends around the world asking whether we should use the opportunity to try to visit China, since we had been barred from visiting China for 15 years. Soon after my e-mail, the newspaper office in Shanxi province, where the writer Shi Tao was working, issued a notice from China's central government that stated that pro-democracy elements of foreign countries should be strictly prevented from entering China during the 15th anniversary of the June 4 movement. After learning this, Shi Tao e-mailed the information to a friend in New York through Yahoo. Shi Tao was then arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of leaking state secrets. One e-mail message landed him ten years in prison. This case makes me very sad, because I was the one who initiated the discussion of entering China. This is a picture of Shi Tao. He married just one year before he was arrested. His wife was forced to divorce him.

Another case is about Zhang Lin. He graduated from Tsinghua University, China's most prestigious university in the field of science and technology. Because of his pro-democracy activities, Zhang Lin was given a prison sentence for three years followed by two years in a forced labour camp. He came to the United States in 1997, but in 1998 he decided to return to China to continue implementing his vision. Because of his dream for a better China, he was sentenced to three years again of re-education through labour right after he entered China.

Last February, I sent him an e-mail invitation to join the memorial service committee for Zhao Ziyang, the former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party who was ousted and put in house arrest for fifteen years for sympathizing with the June 4 student movement. Zhang Lin readily accepted. He was then stopped by police on the way to the home of Zhao Ziyang in Beijing to offer condolences. He was arrested at the train station on his way home. He has totally lost his freedom. On July 28, 2005, last year, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, a jail term even longer than before, on charges of inciting subversion of state power.

This was Zhang Lin with his wife and two-year-old daughter.

Mr. Jason Kenney had an experience when he was in Beijing where he was stopped by plainclothes police.

Finally I'd like to mention Yang Tianshui. He was a freelance writer who had already served a ten-year prison sentence between 1990 and 2000 for counter-revolutionary crimes. As a dissident in cyber space, he was sentenced in May 2006 to twelve years in prison for subversion of state power. The trial was rushed through in three hours. So he got an even longer sentence for the same reason.

Among the thirteen items of the so-called proof of guilt, two of them are related to me. First, a 500-euro donation for his lawyer's fee that I collected for him was labelled by the court as a fund to subvert the government. Second, my invitation to him to join the memorial service for Zhao Ziyang was defined as an anti-government crime.

Reports by Reporters Without Borders have shown that each and every year the Chinese regime has arrested and jailed more journalists and writers than any other country in the world. Hardly anyone who dares to advocate democracy or establish an organization based on this work can escape the fate of persecution.

In conclusion, I believe that in the past ten years there has been no progress in the improvement of human rights in China. The official bilateral human rights dialogue between China and Canada has not been helpful. Therefore, we call upon the Canadian government to suspend the closed-door human rights dialogue with the Chinese government and replace it with a more effective approach.

Second, if talks must continue, the Canadian government should invite non-governmental organizations, such as the Federation for a Democratic China, Canada, to participate.

Third, we call upon the Canadian government to develop a structure that will help organize and finance the human rights dialogue between non-governmental organizations in Canada and China.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Thank you very much, Ms. Xue, for your testimony.

Mr. Cozac from PEN Canada is next.

[David Cozac, Programs Coordinator, PEN Canada]

Honourable members of the Parliamentary Subcommittee on International Human Rights, I thank you for inviting PEN Canada to present its views on the Canada-China bilateral dialogue on human rights. I'm here today on behalf of the president of PEN Canada, Constance Rooke, and the chair of the writers in prison committee, Alan Cumyn, both of whom were unable to attend today.

As you are probably aware, PEN Canada is an autonomous and apolitical centre of the writers' association, International PEN, whose mandate is to defend freedom of expression around the world. Currently, International PEN monitors the cases of 33 imprisoned Chinese writers. PEN Canada has adopted seven of these cases for particular advocacy.

PEN Canada is a case-based human rights organization and works on behalf of individuals who have been persecuted for writing freely online or publishing news articles in Chinese media that were deemed to be too sensitive, or who have been sent to jail for speaking out in the autonomous regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia.

In regard to the issue at hand, PEN Canada is of the opinion that the bilateral dialogue on human rights, in its current form, should not continue. We believe that the dialogue has consistently been hampered by a lack of clarity and well-defined objectives, inadequate transparency, and the absence of benchmarks. As such, the results obtained from the years of dialogue have not served to advance the cause of human rights in China.

PEN Canada welcomes this opportunity to put forward suggestions on a new dialogue process that would strengthen advocacy on the part of the Government of Canada vis-à-vis human rights in China.

First, there must be transparency in the process. Up until now, the dialogue has been conducted in secrecy, with little or no disclosure to civil society of the talking points or of the results achieved. This practice has to change. At the very least, interested stakeholders in the issue and Canadian civil society must be apprised of the discussions that take place and their outcomes. Civil society, both in Canada and in China, should also be allowed opportunities for intervention and participation in the dialogue process and should benefit from frank assessments on the part of the Government of Canada when it reports back.

Second, the dialogue must be viewed as merely one tool at the Government of Canada's disposal. Ten years ago, the government chose to stop co-sponsoring a resolution of the former Human Rights Commission at the United Nations in favour of quiet diplomacy. Given the failure to achieve positive results, it is imperative not only that the dialogue become effective; it must also be used in the context of other instruments, such as a return to Canada co-sponsoring the human rights in China resolution.

The government must take advantage of all its interactions with China to press for improvements in human rights. It should also work directly with other nations and groups of nations, like the European Union, to put forward a more united front.

Third, the dialogue must count on the presence, on both sides of the table, of high-level government representatives. It is our understanding that both the governments of China and Canada have sent only middle- or low-ranking foreign affairs officials to these meetings. However, for the dialogue to be fruitful, it is essential for officials with influence to be present.

China also needs to have on hand representatives of domestic ministries, not just foreign affairs, so they can act on recommendations to implement measures that will show a demonstrable, positive effect on the human rights situation within China's borders. For its part, Canada should consider involving new officials from CIDA and Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada to put in place the new dialogue policy.

Also, PEN Canada would encourage the Government of Canada to undertake an analysis of the effectiveness of prisoner lists in the bilateral dialogue process. We feel that little or nothing has been accomplished with these lists, and that, more importantly, the safety and well-being of certain prisoners may have been put at risk by highlighting their cases. The Government of Canada should therefore analyze the information given by their Chinese counterparts to see if anything new or useful has been provided.

While this study is being done, the creation of a prisoner list with information provided by such civil society organizations as PEN Canada should be suspended. For its part, PEN Canada will withhold prisoner lists while we clarify reports that these approaches may have made situations worse for some prisoners. We will proceed on a case-by-case basis and assess which approach works best.

In conclusion, PEN Canada would like to strongly emphasize two points. One is that by adopting a consistently forceful attitude on the deplorable human rights situation in China, the Government of Canada need not fear any adverse outcomes for trade relationships. There is no substance to the claim that a decline in trade will result if one country takes a critical stance toward the other nation's human rights record. This is the case with Canada and China, and our government must address human rights at every opportunity, either through bilateral dialogue or through other channels.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, PEN Canada believes that the universal right to freedom of expression is fundamental.

Were China to permit its citizens to practise the right to freedom of opinion and of expression without fear of persecution, as guaranteed by article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by article 35 of China's own constitution, the foundation would be laid for the respect of all other key rights.

Chinese human rights defenders must also enjoy this right and the related right to association, in order to promote respect for human rights and enable this respect to evolve from within Chinese society.

The Government of Canada can contribute significantly to the promotion of international standards of human rights in China by developing an effective new bilateral dialogue process, in consultation with Canadian and Chinese civil society, that can yield concrete results.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Thank you, Mr. Cozac.

We'll now move to Mr. Cheuk Kwan of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China.

[Cheuk Kwan, Chair, Toronto Association for Democracy in China]

Thank you, Mr. Kenney.

Thank you, members of the subcommittee, for inviting the Toronto Association for Democracy in China, TADC, to present our views on the Canada-China bilateral dialogue on human rights.

Our association is a member of the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China, which wrote the October 6 letter to Prime Minister Harper.

TADC was founded a few weeks before June 4, 1989, to support the aspirations of millions of Chinese students and citizens gathering around Beijing's Tiananmen Square and in campuses around the country, demanding immediate political reform and an end to corruption.

The movement came to a brutal and crushing end when, on the morning of June 4, Chinese tanks literally crushed the protesters, killing, in the estimates of the international Red Cross, thousands of innocent people.

The Tiananmen Square massacre was not the first time that China had suppressed its own people. As early as 1978, during what is now called the “Beijing spring”, an unexpected blossoming of freedom of expression led to a demand for political freedom. The government quickly put an end to that and arrested and imprisoned Mr. Wei Jingsheng, perhaps one of China's best-known dissidents. But it was Tiananmen Square, a media-saturated, made-for-TV event, that galvanized the world and led to international interest in the Chinese people's yearning for political freedom, democracy, and human rights.

As the world began to take note of human rights violations in China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, western countries began offering public criticism of China by sponsoring resolutions condemning China's human rights record at the annual United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.

Since 1990, every attempt by countries to table a resolution before the committee was skilfully deflected by China and her allies via a procedural motion known as the “no-action motion”. As a result, China's human rights record was never properly discussed, much less debated, in a multilateral forum.

That, however, was not good enough for China, as China had to undergo an embarrassing situation every spring in Geneva, when the commission sits, to make countermoves to deflect public criticism. In 1997, China used its market of 1.3 billion citizens as a bargaining tool and devised a very effective divide and conquer strategy to break down western resolve.

That year, China offered that Australia and Canada carry out bilateral dialogues in each other's capitals on condition that they forgo co-sponsoring any resolution condemning China at the commission. In the same year, China applied the Airbus-Boeing carrot and stick to the European Union, forcing our European allies to abandon their resolution.

The sole exception was Denmark, which was brave enough to break ranks to co-sponsor the China resolution with the United States. I was in Geneva at that time, as I have been every year since 1991, and watched first-hand the breakdown of the western coalition.

To this day, many within the international NGO community believe that if all members had joined forces to sponsor the resolution or defeat the no-action motion, the danger of China playing one off against another would have been eliminated.

Worse still was the timing of this breakdown. It was only months before the 1997 Hong Kong handover, and the signal that the world sent to Hong Kong was devastating. The message was that large and powerful countries such as China can intimidate members of the commission into ignoring serious abuses, leaving the impression that human rights in China were no longer an international concern. In other words, the world doesn't care.

To quote a Human Rights Watch report in 1999, two years after that breakdown:

Countries offered various excuses for not backing the resolution. The European Union, Australia, and Canada all said that their ongoing human rights dialogues with China were more productive than public criticism. ...Some countries remembered the treatment Denmark received when it co-sponsored a China resolution in 1997 — China threatened to cancel all business deals with [Denmark and] Danish companies, a threat that was never carried out.

We believe that bilateral dialogue on human rights, in its current form, should not continue. For any real dialogue to happen, there needs to be a fair and equitable participation among interested stakeholders in the issue. We would like to see, for example, a real dialogue amongst genuine NGOs from both countries so that they can have open and frank discussions, and not just hand-picked, pro-government Chinese NGOs or Canadian NGOs deemed acceptable to China, all going through a charade shepherded by ministry officials and diplomats.

For too long, we have let China dictate how we should act towards them, threatening us that they would leave the negotiating table if we do not do the right thing. Worse, some of us have even used a pretext of “oriental culture” to justify our less-than-forthright position at the bargaining table.

Canada needs to adopt a consistent and principled stance when dealing with China. Only then will we earn their respect and not wrath. Canada need not fear any adverse outcomes for trade relations. There is no substance to the claim that a decline in trade will result if one country takes a critical stance towards the other nation's human rights record.

I'd like to remind the subcommittee that Denmark is a good case in point.

In summary, our government can contribute significantly to the promotion of international standards of human rights in China by using all the tools available to us: effective bilateral dialogues; public criticisms in multilateral forums; high-level exchanges at diplomatic meetings; and on-the-ground CIDA-funded projects that will benefit a maturing civil society.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Thank you very much, Mr. Kwan, and thanks to all of our witnesses.

We'll turn now to the question period, beginning with the official opposition and Mr. Irwin Cotler.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have to apologize, in that I must leave after my question, inasmuch as I have to chair a session at Carleton University that is almost about to begin on preventing genocide.

Let me just make full disclosure at the outset, Mr. Chairman. I've acted as counsel for political prisoners—Falun Gong political prisoners and members of the democracy movement. I've been able, through that prism, to be witness to a pattern of arbitrary arrest, of incommunicado detentions, of coercive interrogations, of denial of the right to counsel, torture, and then the laying of trumped-up charges, false witness testimony, and the denial of a fair hearing, all leading to ultimate conviction and sentencing.

This is apart from the singling out of the Falun Gong, for example, for state-sanctioned persecution and prosecution, in denial, as I've said elsewhere, of their fundamental rights to freedom of assembly, association, and expression—for no other reason than for their advocacy of what are in effect ancient Chinese values of compassion and tolerance and forbearance. I've witnessed equally the singling out of political and cultural and religious dissidents, journalists, and the like.

You have made, each of you, a number of recommendations today—important ones—with respect to calling on China to release political prisoners, suspending the Canada human rights dialogue, making human rights a priority in our relationships with China, ending the state-sanctioned persecution of dissidents, and the involvement of NGOs, particularly Canadian NGOs and Chinese NGOs, in a dialogue.

My question to you would be this. Do you have any specific recommendations concerning the role Canadian parliamentarians can play with respect to the whole question of advancing the case and cause of human rights in China?

[Cheuk Kwan]

I will take the question first.

I would encourage even stronger participation from Parliament and parliamentarians in our government's dealing with China. As examples, in the past there were parliamentary delegations to China as part of an investigative trip to prisons to view first-hand the signs and symptoms of human rights abuses. I would like to encourage our government to do the same thing.

I know that sometimes it might be very difficult to approach the Chinese on this. But if we can be persistent enough and perhaps a bit more forceful when we're dealing with China, certainly we can witness those kinds of human rights abuses, which are everyday events.

As my colleague, Sheng Xue mentioned, Mr. Kenney had his first-hand experience the last time he was in Beijing.

[David Cozac]

Let me add that I think there is a role for parliamentarians on this issue. However, I'd underscore the point I made in my presentation, that the most effective way Canadian government officials can exert influence on China and its human rights record is at a high level. This is at the ministerial level, perhaps even at the level of the Prime Minister or at the very least of the Deputy Prime Minister. The effort should be focused on those levels rather than on lower government levels.

Also in terms of parliamentary visits to China for prison visits and so forth, I would reiterate what I mentioned in my presentation, that you have to go very cautiously on this, because there are concerns about the welfare or the well-being of the prisoners themselves, should anyone attempt to contact them. There have been documented cases where diplomats from other countries attempted to visit prisoners, and this resulted in worsening conditions for those prisoners—just as a caveat.

[Xun (Shawn) Li]

The issue of Falun Gong was ranked among the top three issues in 2005. In the election campaign, it was reported that the Prime Minister's office received a volume of concerns about the Falun Gong issue.

I'm not speaking only on behalf of my organization; it is the aspiration of Canadians. Canadians wish to end the persecution, to uphold Canadian values.

So at any level—as a member of Parliament, as the government, and as an individual—we can make a significant difference in this issue, because what is happening in China towards the Falun Gong and other groups is not the normal human rights issue. It is an issue of crimes against humanity in legal terms for their systematic as well as widespread nature.

In the past, we collected and presented a petition to the Prime Minister with over 100,000 signatures, so it is the will of Canadians.

Secondly, Falun Gong was singled out not because of any crimes its members committed. It was not for political aspirations; we don't have a political aspiration.

But as Irwin mentioned, I do agree that the Chinese Communist regime has treated Falun Gong as the political enemy. We don't have political aspirations; we only want to end the persecution.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Sheng, do you have a brief comment? You don't have to.

Irwin, do you? We have one minute left.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

No, that's fine, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Actually we have fifteen seconds left, so we'll pass to the next round.

Madame St-Hilaire, c'est à vous.

[Caroline St-Hilaire, Bloc, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Gentlemen, Madam, I thank you for appearing before us this morning.

Mr. Cozac or Mr. Kwan, I would like some clarification on what you said earlier, about the fact that we should put an end to the bilateral dialogue because it doesn't work.

In the past, some people have told our Committee that there were serious shortcomings in that dialogue, but that it should be continued. If we stop dialoguing, how can we communicate with the Chinese government or its representatives? This is my first question.

Secondly, I was very surprised to hear you say that if we stopped the dialogue and put more pressure on the Chinese government, there will be no trade retaliation. Then, you mentioned the case of Denmark and other countries. This is an example, but we can also see others.

Can you assure us or demonstrate to us that there couldn't be any trade retaliation? I personally believe that trade retaliation is the trump card in the Chinese government's hand. This is why we are walking on eggshells each time we talk about China. It is an important economic player. At the same time, we all agree on the fact that human rights are probably more important.

I would like to hear your answers to these two questions. Thank you.

[Cheuk Kwan]

Thank you, Madam.

To answer your first question, we do not advise that the government discontinue its bilateral dialogue process. However, we do want the government to discontinue this current form. As I suggested and as one of my colleagues also mentioned, bilateral dialogue should involve better participation from non-governmental organizations, what we call people-to-people participation. Let us have communication and discussion with our counterparts in China, not with what I would call pro-government counterparts from China but genuine non-governmental organizations from the civil society. The civil society is growing right now in China. At last count, there were 30,000 non-governmental organizations growing in China. We certainly would like to have the opportunity to talk to them as well.

On the second question, the China threat, I've been to a lot of media interviews in the last few days on the subject of our Prime Minister's trip to APEC. Unfortunately, the media has tended to associate the so-called China snub, or the Canadian snub, as a backlash to our stance on human rights. I want to assure the committee members that this is far from true. In fact, even domestically we have a lot of support from our business people. They may have been upset with the China snub, but not because of our human rights stance. It was purely from the point of view of perhaps their criticism of the current government's other dealings with China.

Now, as far as the trade sanctions are concerned, I can assure you, Madam, that the Chinese are just like any other merchants in the world. They pick the best price and the best quality of goods whenever they can. Certainly they would not ignore, because of political considerations, a good bargain.

We certainly have a lot of good bargains for China. We have a big trade deficit with China. We import much more than we export. However, we do have resources that we can export that China has been eying as it progresses to the 21st century. So even in the trade consideration, in the trade equation, I think we have certainly an advantage. I don't think we need to fear the so-called backlash.

I want to point to the example of Bombardier. They have been very successful in China. They've been selling many rail cars in China, not because we do or do not mention human rights, but because of their persistence, their patience, and of course their far-sighted approach to a big market.

As for any local governments, or any medium- to low-level contacts in terms of business contracts, we are no longer dealing with national institutions or national state enterprises. We are dealing more with local officials. A lot of experts from inside China will tell you that there is a growing dissatisfaction among local provincial governments with the central government. Even if the central government was displeased, I think the local governments would go their own way.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Do any other panellists have a brief interjection?

Go ahead.

[David Cozac]

I have a couple of words to reiterate in terms of ending the dialogue. Again, PEN Canada is not calling for an end to the dialogue but rather a suspension until it's improved. As I mentioned, those improvements involve incorporating high-level officials on both sides of the table into the dialogue and bringing in civil society players from Canada and China so they can be more active players in the dialogue.

In terms of the issue on trade and human rights, China's successful survival as a country and as a nation depends on its economic prosperity. I think there's no way its going to jeopardize that just because of some human rights spat.

A case in point is when Parliament recently bestowed honourary citizenship on His Holiness The Dalai Lama. Chinese officials responded shortly thereafter warning of serious consequences. To my knowledge, those consequences haven't happened, nor do I expect they will.

China may talk in a threatening manner, but we suspect they won't carry it out because they really depend on these economic relationships.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Mr. Li, you had a brief interjection.

[Xun (Shawn) Li]

I think we should understand the nature of this dialogue. As Professor Burton mentioned, and I'll reiterate:

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' mandate is to defend China's interests abroad. It has no institutional interest in promoting respect for China's human rights domestically.

Their mandate is not for the protection of human rights through this dialogue. Their mandate is to show we care about human rights, but no one will speak publicly.

The end result is that this becomes a reward to the country, the dictatorship, and the committee of human rights, for crimes against humanity. They use this as a licence to kill, and they continue to escalate.

We have to seriously consider that it's not one-sided. I know Canadians have compassion and kindness, but it's not a one-sided wish. It depends on the bilateral wish. If the other side has no wish to promote human rights, what's the point of continuing these human rights?

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

We have to wrap it up.

[Xun (Shawn) Li]

Yes. Number two is about the consequences.

Not only in Denmark, but in the Netherlands in February 2001, the Minister of Foreign Affairs from the Netherlands cancelled a trip to China or postponed indefinitely a trip to China. He had arranged a meeting with Falun Gong representatives in Hong Kong and with other groups, but China protested and he cancelled the trip.

In the second half of the year, Denmark signed the largest trade mission to China.

[The Chair, Conservative, Jason Kenney]

Do you mean the Netherlands?