With the Beijing Olympics over, the world now seems likely to examine more carefully what China does at home and internationally. Its current record vexes some of us who believe that the core values of the Olympic Charter and Olympic movement are universal dignity and equality for all members of the human family. The rise of China in recent years has taken it in other directions, whether among its own people or in countries, such as Burma and Sudan, which are essentially now parts of its economic empire.
Many Canadians think our own national government should engage more effectively with vulnerable peoples. In the case of the cyclone that ravaged Burma in May, for example, the refusal of the country's military junta to accept external humanitarian help left even more Burmese in peril. Did governments around the world not have a responsibility to deliver relief to as many victims as feasible? What of Sudan, where another military regime under the influence of the party-state in Beijing has attempted for more than five years to destroy a large community of Africans in Darfur for blatantly racist reasons?
Genocide Convention
Does the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 apply to Darfur as well? It certainly appears to in criminalising acts anywhere intended to "destroy in whole or in part members of a racial, national, religious or ethnic group." Unfortunately, enforcement remains its fatal weakness. No actions were launched under its provisions for almost six decades. The World Court dealt it a further blow last year in an almost unanimous decision that instruments of the government of Serbia were not responsible for the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s.
Some jurists assert that the Convention is retroactive because it merely codifies pre-existing principles of international law. If so, it should apply to the Armenian Genocide of 1915, Stalin's Ukrainian Famine in the winter of 1932-33 and the Nazi Holocaust, which continued until Hitler's virtually final days in 1945. How many lives might have been saved if the details of all three became public knowledge sooner? The essential facts were probably known soon enough, but the real problem was the absence of sufficient political will internationally to end (STOP) these crimes. Thus the "never again" of 1945 became the "again and again" of Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Lest we forget, what follows is a brief roll call of some subsequent kindred events.
Bosnia-Kosovo
With about 60 other governments, Canada deployed soldiers to both parts of the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s under the NATO banner. The UN Security Council proved unable to act, primarily because Russia threatened continuously to use its permanent veto to protect the government of Serbia. Effective action came far too late. The ethnic cleansing that persisted in parts of Bosnia, including the brutal three-year siege of Sarajevo, will forever remind the world of the lack of political resolve among European governments and the Security Council during those years. Srebrenica, where 7,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered, must not be forgotten either.
Rwanda
The catastrophe in Rwanda is described carefully in Romeo Dallaire's book Shake Hands with the Devil. Suffice it to say here that -- beyond the heroic roles played by Dallaire, Major Brent Beardsley and the locally-engaged staff at the Canadian mission in Kigali -- the performance of Canada's politicians, diplomats and other officials was deeply disappointing.
From Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to throughout the Canadian government, no one can claim any credit for responsible leadership during the events of April-July, 1994. Dallaire points out in his book, for instance, that as the UN Force commander he was expected to take Canadian peacekeepers with him on his assignment, but he could obtain none from Ottawa. This, in turn, made it even more difficult to persuade other governments to provide soldiers. The indifference of our Foreign Affairs ministry's senior management to what was occurring remains a cause of dishonour to our country.
Linda Malvern's work, Conspiracy To Murder: The Rwandan Genocide, notes that just before the killing began one new machete for approximately every three Rwandan men was imported into Rwanda from China.
Sudan
Consider one of many incidents occurring in South Sudan. On February 26, 2002, the town of Nhialdiu was wiped out to make way for a Chinese oil well that now operates in nearby Leal. According to James Kynge's award-winning book of 2006, China Shakes the World, "Mortar shells landed at dawn, followed by helicopter gun ships directing fire at the huts where the people lived. Antonov aeroplanes dropped bombs and roughly 7,000 (Sudanese) government troops with pro-government militias then swept through the area with rifles and more than 20 tanks..." About 3000 of the town's 10,000 residents perished that day.
The genocide in Sudan's province of Darfur since April, 2003 has in all probability cost the lives of as many as 400,000 African Darfurians. The party-state in Beijing continues to assist Omar al-Bashir's regime in Khartoum, including financing and supplying arms in exchange for taking most of Sudan's oil production at much-reduced prices. China officially sold about $80 million in weapons, aircraft and spare parts to Sudan during 2005 alone. This included an A-5 Fantan bomber aircraft, helicopter gunships, K-8 military attack aircraft and light weapons, all of which have been found in Darfur, transferred there in violation of UN resolutions.
China's government has long used the threat of its permanent veto at the UN Security Council to block effective UN peace activities in Darfur. It has essentially traded its veto and many innocent lives for cheap oil. Bashir appointed Musa Hilal, the one-time leader of the murderous militia, the Janjaweed, to a position in his government. Hilal has been quoted as expressing gratitude for "the necessary weapons and ammunition to exterminate the African tribes in Darfur." Not long ago, the Sudanese military ambushed a well-marked UN peacekeeping convoy in Darfur, later claiming it was a mistake. Virtually every independent observer says it was a deliberate attack.
When the active support for the Darfur genocide by China's government caused serious questions about the upcoming Beijing Olympics, the party-state launched a propaganda campaign to re-position itself as a "friend of Darfur." No mention was made of China's trivial humanitarian assistance in Darfur or of the fact that numerous water sources in Darfur have been deliberately destroyed by Sudan's regular forces and by the Janjaweed. Water sources are targeted by Khartoum's bombers; the Janjaweed have often denied civilian access to water and have raped women and girls as young as eight seeking to collect it for desperate families. Darfurians themselves now seem well aware of Beijing's role in their torment and destruction.
There is mounting concern that the Khartoum-Beijing alliance will cause the UN peacekeeping force in Sudan to be as ineffective as were the peacekeepers in Rwanda and Bosnia. The actions of the government of China across Darfur can only be seen as actively promoting, or turning a blind eye to, the annihilation of an African people for economic advantage.
Burma
One of the bravest and most principled world leaders has now been under house arrest for most of 18 years. In the national uprising in 1988, Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi made her first speech as an opponent of Burma's military dictatorship. She and her National League for Democracy (NLD) won about two-thirds of the votes cast in the 1990 election. The generals allowed none of the elected representatives to take their seats and arrested her. The UN Special rapporteur on Burma has confirmed as a "state-instigated massacre" the attack on her peaceful procession in May, 2003, northwest of Mandalay, when about 100 people were killed, including the NLD photographers; Suu Kyi was herself wounded.
In what became more pro-democracy protests last September, junta troops fired automatic weapons at peaceful demonstrators and entered monasteries to beat and murder Buddhist monks who had protested. The junta had earlier received a $1.4 billion package of arms from Beijing, so it seems clear where the bullets and guns were made. At the UN Security Council, the representatives of China and Russia, who had earlier used their vetoes to remove Burma from the council's agenda, prevented the Security Council from considering sanctions. The two governments even managed to keep the Security Council from issuing a condemnation of the junta's use of deadly force.
The Nargis cyclone in the Irrawaddy delta struck in May. The junta first pretended by continuing to broadcast an opera on government television it had never happened. The regime's newspaper later suggested that foreign humanitarian aid was unnecessary because the victims could live on frogs. Its priority was attempting to bully citizens into making the dictatorship constitutional in a referendum on a junta-drafted constitution.
Beijing protects the generals in exchange for most of the country's natural gas. It also has gained the right to build a $2 billion oil pipeline from Burma's coast on the Bay of Bengal to China's Yunnan province. This will allow China to take delivery of Middle East oil without passing through the narrow Strait of Malacca, which could be shut down in the case of a serious conflict.
North Korea
The dictatorship of Kim Jong Il rivals that of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe for any "worst governance" gold medal. It is no coincidence that Beijing supports both regimes, although its attempt to ship $70 million in arms to Mugabe after he lost the first round of the recent presidential election was blocked when dock workers in South Africa refused to unload ships carrying the weapons and were supported by the South African courts. According to the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Brussels, China now does about $2 billion in annual bilateral trade and investment with North Korea. About 150 Chinese companies operate in that country.
The ICG asserts that China's priorities with the government in Pyongyang currently include:
In October, 2006, after North Korea had completed an underground test of nuclear weapons, the Economist magazine called on the U.S., China and Russia to make sacrifices to avoid a nuclear arms race in Asia and the Middle East. "The Chinese could, if they wished, starve North Korea's people and switch off the lights," the magazine noted in its lead editorial, but added that pressure of any kind was unlikely to persuade Kim to give up his bomb.
Iran
Systematic human rights abuses by the Iranian government currently include the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities and women (in a kind of gender apartheid, under Shari'a law the life of a woman is worth half that of a man) and the imprisonment, torture and execution of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience.
In recent months, the Government in Tehran has locked up all seven senior leaders of the country's 300,000-member Baha'i spiritual community. Not a word was heard about them for almost four weeks. It also fired missiles at the approximately 4,000 UN-protected residents, including about 60 Canadian citizens, living in Ashraf city in Iraq.
Canada initiated the successfully-adopted UN General Assembly resolution in late 2007, which drew attention to numerous human rights abuses in Iran, including confirmed instances of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (flogging and amputations) and execution of persons who were under the age of 18 at the time their offence was committed.
In trading with Iran, countries legitimise its government and help to maintain regime officials in positions of absolute power. Trade and investment revenues from abroad also provide Tehran with funds that are often are not used for the health, education and general welfare of Iranians but instead for funding terrorist groups abroad, including Hezbollah and Hamas, under the mantle of "expanding the Islamic Empire."
China-Iran trade has grown from $200 million in 1990 to $10 billion in 2005. It includes conventional arms and ballistic missiles for Iran despite Tehran's declared hostility to "godless communism" and Beijing's severe persecution of its Uyghur Muslims. A major attraction for Tehran is Beijing's permanent seat on the UN Security Council, which is useful for resisting Western pressure on nuclear and other issues.
There are good indications that China has helped with the production of Iran's Shahab-3 and quite probably also the Shahab-4 medium-range ballistic missiles. Both are capable of reaching any state in the Middle East, including Israel; the Shahab-4 could also hit significant portions of Europe. Two years ago, the U.S. government imposed penalties on eight Chinese companies for exporting material that can be used to improve Iran's ballistic missile capability. In the Middle East, China's policy of providing Iran with nuclear weapons technology is injecting a highly-destabilising element into an already volatile region.
China
The list of groups and individuals persecuted across China is long. New victims added during the Olympics included two woman in their 70s, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying, who were sentenced to a one-year term of "re-education through labour" for attempting to hold a legal protest for having been wrongfully evicted from their Beijing homes seven years ago.
There is not much doubt, however, that overall the Falun Gong community is the most inhumanly treated. David Matas, the Winnipeg-based international human rights lawyer, and I concluded our own independent investigation last year. We found to our deep and continuing concern that, since 2001, the government in China and its agencies have killed thousands of Falun Gong practitioners, without any form of prior trial, and then sold their vital organs for large sums of money, often to "organ tourists" from wealthy nations. We amassed a substantial body of evidence and became convinced beyond any doubt that this crime against humanity has occurred and is still happening (Our report can be accessed at www.organharvestinvestigation.org).
These macabre deaths would not be occurring if the Chinese people enjoyed the rule of law and if their government believed in the intrinsic importance of each one of them. In my judgement, it is the lethal combination of totalitarian governance and "anything is permitted" economics that allows this activity to persist.
The Chinese Medical Association agreed with the World Medical Association quite recently that "organ tourists" will not be able to obtain further organ transplants in China. Whether this promise was anything more than public relations intended to benefit the Beijing Olympiad remains to be seen.
Virtually all independent observers agree that human dignity across China deteriorated in the run-up to the Games. Because of extensive reporting by the world's independent media to their home countries before and during the Games, many across the world are now better informed about exploited Chinese workers and their families, the ongoing abuse of the Tibetan people, widespread official nepotism and corruption, the egregious treatment of human rights advocates (such as Gao Zhizheng), harassment of religions and democracy supporters, the 1,300 ballistic missiles on China's coast aimed at Taiwan, and continuous party-state attempts since Mao's days to "conquer" the natural environment.
Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
In most of these situations, indifference from the international community encourages abuses to continue. Human dignity on our shrunken planet, however, is becoming more indivisible by the day. The R2P concept is a Canadian one, adopted at the 2005 UN World Leaders Summit at UN headquarters. The formal outcome document released at the summit stated that nations have "the responsibility to protect" their populations "from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity." The international community's obligation is to "help states exercise this responsibility." R2P can be invoked by the international community through the UN Security Council "on a case-by-case basis" and "in co-operation with relevant regional organisations as appropriate" when national states are "manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."
No mention was made of natural disasters, but it seems clear that when a regime, such as Burma's, denied much-needed food and medicine to its people, it was engaging in a crime against humanity and should thus be subject to intervention by other governments under R2P. Unfortunately, international military force can be used only with the authorisation of the often immobilised UN Security Council.
A major challenge for R2P in the future is that the party-state in China strongly favours a 'walled world' in which sovereign authoritarian governments can do as they wish to their own populations with impunity. Chinese diplomats do their utmost to persuade governments in developing countries that following the China Model would free them from the often-painful social consequences of the stringent economic discipline in place since the financial crises in Asia, Latin America and Russia in 1997, and the rigorous loan requirements and structural adjustment policies which both the World Bank and the IMF enforce.
One-party regimes are thus able to push back nowadays with more confidence against independent media, civil society groups, human rights organisations and democracy itself. Plentiful 'untied' aid from Beijing for governments with natural resources gives options to leaders who previously had been compelled to rely on donor countries that insisted on progress on human dignity among their nationals. Canadians, Europeans and others, who favour some pooled sovereignty in institutions like the EU and NATO, are thus competing increasingly with the Great Wall approach of the Beijing government.
Policy Proposals
Here are five policy proposals in respect of Canada-China relations intended to assist the voiceless in China and those affected in Canada:
1) Zero tolerance for unfair trading practices.
There should in future be zero tolerance in Canada when unfair trade practices are used by the government of China or exporters there, including currency manipulation of the yuan, theft of intellectual property, the use of forced labour to manufacture exports and the continued refusal to honour commitments made by Beijing to the World Trade Organisation upon joining in 2001. Japan, India, South Korea and the other rule-of-law democracies in Asia and the Pacific must be our favoured trading partners in the region until the government of China begins to respect the rules of international commerce.
2) Canadian jobs and our own economy must be the priority.
According to a fairly recent survey of more than 1,000 Canadian businesses by the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, one-fifth of Canadian manufacturers responded to the rising loonie by shifting production to China. A Montreal business leader told me that approximately 50 companies from his province would not be manufacturing in China now without Export Development Corporation (EDC) financial help. This should stop. No taxpayer money should be going to relocate Canadian jobs to China or anywhere else. Goodyear Tire laid off about 850 employees when it closed its manufacturing facility near Montreal last year in favour of moving to China, yet tires made in China have since been recalled elsewhere as safety hazards.
3) Canadian values must be asserted continuously in dealings with Beijing.
All rule-of-law governments, including Canada's, must cease being naive about the party-state in Beijing. The regime continues to rely on repression and brutality to maintain itself in office, but what are Canadian diplomats in China doing effectively to show themselves to be the friends of the poor, persecuted and voiceless across China? What are they doing to advance the rule of law and human dignity? Fully realising the differences, Canada might seek a role in China not too different from the one we had in establishing popular democracy in South Africa in the late 1980s, which is viewed by some as our country's finest leadership role internationally in many years.
4) Canada and other rule-of-law governments should in concert seek to apply lessons of non-violent civic resistance elsewhere to China.
To be sure, these must be applied very carefully in light of the Tiananmen Square protest experience in 1989 and often elsewhere since. The non-violent civic resistance, which occurred in Russia, Ukraine, the Philippines, Chile, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, South Africa, Serbia, Peru, Georgia, Romania and other nations, could have implications for China.. Each situation was different in terms of boycotts, mass protests, strikes and civil disobedience. In all, however, authoritarian rulers were delegitimised and their sources of support, including their armed defenders, eventually abandoned them. All governments of Canada should make it clear that they stand with the oppressed hundreds of millions of nationals in China and in its client states elsewhere and seek a peaceable transition to the rule-of-law, respect for all, and democratic governance. Beijing's decision to "persuade" Robert Mugabe not to attend the opening of the Olympics perhaps illustrates a new sensitivity to international opinion about the world's voiceless people.
5) Let's stop listening excessively to self-interested China business lobbies.
It is now clear that economic liberalisation in China is not necessarily going to lead to the end of political Leninism in Beijing and its client countries. Torture and coerced confessions, party-state killing of Falun Gong practitioners and others extra-judicially, systematic abuse of the Tibetan and Uyghur minorities, nation-wide exploitation of Chinese workers and families, the lack of any kind of social programs for most Chinese -- all are incompatible with human dignity and the norms of the 21st century. There is no rule-of-law anywhere in China and its 'courts' are a sham. The party-state shows continuing contempt for the natural environment (except in Beijing before and during the Olympics). Many 'experts' on China abroad, including Canada, kowtow to the party-state because they think that their careers require support by the Party. It's time to draw conclusions about China from facts on the ground to support human dignity consistent with the best Canadian values.
Conclusion
Despite all, the new China is stirring in the direction of vast and profound change. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students have studied abroad and are now an increasingly important part of the political, economic and social fabric at home. Undoubtedly they return with new ideas and the experience of life in rule-of-law and democratic countries. It is hard to see them settling back into authoritarian rule for long. Chinese tourists are now venturing abroad as never before and are seeing for themselves life in different socio-political environments. Despite strenuous effort to clamp down on religion, tens of millions of Chinese are reclaiming their right to believe. Temples, churches and mosques are clandestinely mushrooming across China. These developments and others will lead demands for greater freedoms by word of mouth. Canada and all friends of the people of China need to recognise this phenomenon and position ourselves to support the new tide of expectations that a younger generation of Chinese will bring to bear on all these issues.