China hates Canada and I couldn't be more proud!

Yesterday, Chinese president Hu Jin Tao refused to meet with Canadian Prime Minister, Steven Harper. Apparently, the Chinese government is very upset with Canada over ongoing Canadian criticism of China's poor human rights record. The Chinese government asked to meet with Canadian officials on the sidelines of the APEC economic meetings in Vietnam but have rescinded that offer. However, myself and most other Canadians don't have a problem with that in the least. In fact, we're happy with this development.

First let's recap why China hates Canada:

1. Canadians like the Dalai Lama, the peaceful head of the Tibetan government in exile. We even made him an honourary Canadian. Obviously, Beijing doesn't approve of the Dalai Lama getting valuable media and air time in our country.

2. Canada is the new (if temporary home) of Lai Chang Xing. China believes the Canadian government is harbouring a fugitive. While I agree he's a common criminal thug I don't know if harbouring is an accurate description. Canada wants to extradite him back to China, however, Canada has a law that states we will not extradite anyone to another country to face execution. It's a human rights thing. But Lai Chang Xing is a very interesting character indeed. If you've never heard of him, he's the former peasant worker turned billionaire smuggler in the coastal Chinese province of Fujian. Yes, in most normal countries a peasant with a grade school education would never become a billionaire.

So what happened? He basically built a smuggling empire with the help of China's People's Liberation Army and political figures including, he claims, meeting with former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. He's willing to write a book about his experiences smuggling everything from arms, to cigarettes, even tankers of oil into China and implicating all kinds of top level officials. Now do you see why China's angry at Canada? Lai isn't the only millionaire/billionaire to have fled China to the greener pastures and bluer skies of western countries. Stories abound of state enterprise/bank executives and government officials fleeing China with suitcases full of cash. Some have been caught in the US and extradited back to China already. All of this makes the Chinese government look bad and they don't like it.

3. Earlier this year, a Canadian lawyer and former cabinet minister conducted a two month report alleging mass harvesting of human organs from F@lun Gong practitioners after they have been executed. Canada isn't the only country who has found proof of organ harvesting in China, the British Transplantation Society did as well. As expected, China denies these claims but the proof is out there for all of us to see.

4. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently remarked, "this government ... is very frank about Canada's economic priorities and about our values and about our interests. And we're going to be very frank about those things, and we will not accept any conditions on having discussions."
Harper was commenting on the fact that the Canadian government wouldn't stop or tone down its ongoing criticisms of human rights abuses in China.

Don't worry, Canada does have leverage on China for future economic relations: Canada is a growing natural resources powerhouse with plenty of sustainable forests for lumber, all kinds of minerals in our mines (nickel, uranium, gold, steel etc), heavy agricultural production such as wheat, up to 20% of the world's freshwater water supply and oil reserves that may soon surpass Saudi Arabia's.

While good political relations with China is important to any country in the 21st century, is it really as important as most think? Money talks. If there is money to be made, private enterprise will put aside petty nationalistic differences to make it. Isn't that what is happening with Sino-Japanese economic relations? On the one hand, China's government is roaring mad about Japanese text books whitewashing everything related to World War II Japanese aggression yet on the other hand business relations between the two are at an all time high.

Taiwan is another prime example. Substitute dodgy nationalistic textbooks for independence aspirations and you basically have the same situation with Taiwan whereby the Chinese government doesn't like what the Taiwanese government is doing but business is thriving on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

I think the Canadian government knows this and have decided to make a stand. I stand by my prime minister for doing the right thing and more world leaders should be saying and DOING the same thing. Hopefully then China would get the message.

***Update***

In true Chinese "let's do/decide things at the last minute" business fashion, Hu Jintao will now meet with Stephen Harper at the APEC meeting this weekend. So to recap, China asks for a meeting with Canada, refuses, then says they really do want to meet with them again. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told reporters yesterday, "The meeting has not happened yet. How do you know it won't happen?" Stupidity at work.