Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I certainly appreciate the opportunity to speak to our two guests here today.
Dr. Yang, are you familiar with the name Huseyin Celil? He was a Uighur who became a Canadian citizen. He went back to China to see if he could get his two elder sons out of the country. He was arrested and has been detained there since.
At any rate, in the year 2007, Peter MacKay, who was our foreign minister at the time, was travelling to Beijing, and I had the opportunity to travel with him. I just wanted to reaffirm something that you were talking about.
At one point, another opposition member and I met with the foreign affairs committee and we were talking about how human rights were evolving in China. The people from the committee talked about the disparity between what was happening in Beijing and what was happening in the provinces. They were saying that Beijing was the light of democracy compared to the provinces. I kind of chuckle at that because it's a pretty dim light sometimes from our perspective.
I wouldn't mind your comment on that comparison because you mentioned earlier that the administration today, the government of the day, is starting to become fragile and that there's potential for change going on. I sensed that talking to those people three years ago.
Also, I had a meeting while I was there, a breakfast meeting we attended with some people. Two were from NGOs. You could see they were busting to say some things. Clearly, if they said anything that was the slightest bit out of the way, the heads of the officials in the room turned and looked at them very abruptly. That was very concerning.
My last comment is that when I arrived there--we were in a rush, as you are when you're on these kinds of tours--I was given an offer to go to the Great Wall or Tiananmen Square. They gave me ten minutes either/or. So I chose Tiananmen Square to stand for those ten minutes with the people who had lost their lives there.