Canada-China Relations committee  Very much so. The way politics are configured in China right now, the entire state architecture is an instrument for the will of one man. He has more political power gathered into his hands than anybody since Mao. Just yesterday, the American Secretary of Defense said that it a

Canada-China Relations committee  Canada should continue the course that it is on right now with multilateralism. Canada should use its special relationship with the United States to encourage the Americans to continue to become more multilateral. Maybe doing the right thing is more a matter of not doing the wro

Canada-China Relations committee  The question of Taiwan will, I think, boil down to a matter of regime survival. If—and this will never happen—Xi Jinping were just to announce “Okay, we're giving up on Taiwan. We're not going to use coercion at all. We're just going to woo Taiwan into coming over and joining wi

Canada-China Relations committee  China craves positive public relations, internationally, so creative embarrassment with other allies will work, to some extent, even if China denies that it will. Diplomatic démarches can work. Quick reprisals for trade coercion should be engaged. China says that politics shoul

Canada-China Relations committee  My instinct on looking at questions like this is to take a longer-term view, like historians do over decades. As far as Chinese media is concerned, I read some of those newspapers, and sometimes it's disturbing. These are strangers in our land. Do they not really understand the

Canada-China Relations committee  We should prepare ourselves for the possibility of a big, ugly and surprisingly strong conflict. That may be the price of standing up to Beijing on this. It's a price that we, as a democracy.... I don't see how we can not pay it, if it comes to it. As far as what Canada should d

Canada-China Relations committee  The economic decline is going to be very difficult for China, I think. China is still an overwhelmingly export-oriented economy, and as world economic conditions worsen, they will worsen in China as well. There will be a lot of political implications to this, and I think Xi Jinpi

Canada-China Relations committee  Thank you. I teach a course in Taiwan history at the University of Calgary. Every other year, I teach it. I'm now completing a book on the White Terror in Taiwan, or Chiang Kai-shek's crackdown on suspected Communist agents between 1947 and 1986 or so. I've been thinking and w