Just days before Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was to embark on an official state visit to China, Beijing announced that one reporter who was to be part of the delegation would not be allowed to enter the country and denied him a visa.
China and Canada signed various agreements on Wednesday covering the energy, investment and other sectors, as relations between Ottawa and Beijing continue to improve following a decision by the Harper government to soften its rhetoric on China’s human rights situation.
Looking on as a delegation led by Harper brushed elbows with Chinese officials during the three-day visit were oil and business executives, as well as a retinue of reporters. However, one figure was missing: Matthew Little of the Epoch Times, an accredited member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
Beijing’s decision was hardly surprising, given that the paper has a long tradition of criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its treatment of activists, religious groups and ethnic minorities in China.
Predictable though this was, the denial of Little’s entry visa is yet another example of the manner in which, little by little, China uses its influence to warp liberal democracies by imposing a series of conditions for conducting business.
The visit was far too important for Harper to have allowed the issue of one hapless reporter to derail everything — and Beijing knows that. As long as countries seeking to build a relationship with China continue to approach it as beggars rather than equals, CCP officials will have little compunction in drawing red lines over free speech or human rights.
We’ve now entered a period that we could call “diplomacy with Chinese characteristics,” where the promise of profit through “strategic” relations with China is accompanied by silence on a variety of issues. This is an age where it has become customary and increasingly acceptable, it seems, for China to request that partners exclude potential critics like Little, who is just one among many journalists, writers and academics who have been sidelined for refusing to hold their silence.
It is interesting to note that rarely, if ever, have liberal governments answered Beijing in kind whenever top Chinese officials visited their country. When was the last time a Western country denied a visa to a Chinese reporter from, say, the CCP-run People’s Daily, for promoting Han chauvinism in a manner that borders on the xenophobic, or encouraged the use of force against Tibetans, Uighurs, Taiwanese, Falun Gong practitioners — or any of the claimants to disputed islets in the South China Sea? China takes, while the rest of the world gives, slowly bringing about the “Beijing consensus” that Stefan Halper warns against in his book of the same title.
Taiwan under President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has also jumped on the bandwagon, allowing in a number of CCP officials, mayors and thinkers who, under normal circumstances, should probably have been barred entry. In Taiwan and elsewhere, it has become permissible for governments to deny visits by figures such as the Dalai Lama or Uighur leader-in-exile Rebiya Kadeer, but whoever called for similar measures to be taken against Chinese officials is accused of “hating China” or irrationality.
There is nothing wrong with conducting business with China. Such a development is, in fact, natural and inevitable, given its economic growth and increasing importance on the international stage. However, this doesn’t mean that in the process of engagement we should lose the courage to stand up for what we believe in. Some countries, like Canada and Australia, have an abundance of natural resources that are coveted by China. Could this not be used as leverage in negotiations with China, allowing these countries to negotiate from a position of strength and principle, rather than as supplicants?
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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