Canadian Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland said Ottawa was suspending activity with a Chinese-founded development bank while it investigates complaints by a Canadian who resigned from the lender that it is dominated by “[Chinese] Communist Party hacks” and his country should not be a member.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) on Wednesday confirmed in an e-mail that Bob Pickard resigned as its director-general of global communications, and rejected his criticism as unfounded.
The AIIB, seen by some as a Chinese rival to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, was founded in 2016 to finance railways and other infrastructure. It has 106 member governments including most Asian countries and Australia, Canada, Russia, France and the UK. Japan and the US are not members.
Photo: Reuters
“The government of Canada will immediately halt all government-led activity at the bank,” Freeland, who is also deputy prime minister, told reporters in Ottawa. “I have instructed the [Canadian] Department of Finance to lead an immediate review of the allegations raised and of Canada’s involvement in the AIIB.”
“As the world’s democracies work to de-risk our economies by limiting our strategic vulnerabilities to authoritarian regimes, we must likewise be clear about the means through which these regimes exercise their influence around the world,” Freeland said.
Pickard, who worked in communications for AIIB for 15 months, said on Twitter that resigning was his only course as a “patriotic Canadian.”
He said the bank was dominated by “Communist Party hacks” who were “like an in-house KGB or Gestapo or Stasi” — the secret police of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and communist-era East Germany respectively.
The Beijing-headquartered bank “has one of the most toxic cultures imaginable,” Pickard wrote. “I don’t believe that my country’s interests are served by its AIIB membership.”
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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