"Blinded by Beijing"
Gregory Levey, The National Post - July 15, 2005

According to a recent poll by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center, 58 percent of Canadians have a favourable view of China, while an almost identical number - 59 percent - have a positive impression of the United States. Having just completed a trip to China, where I studied at Beijing's China University of Politics and Law, I find these figures disconcerting. The idea that the two nations are equally worthy of respect reflects a dangerous ignorance of what is occurring in China.

While I was in Beijing, six protestors were murdered by government-hired thugs a relatively short distance from my home. The six killed, and the 50 others injured with them, were part of a group of farmers who'd been demonstrating against government plans to seize their land without compensation for the construction of a state-owned power plant. At dawn on June 11, hundreds of men, brandishing shotguns, clubs, and pipes with sharp hooks arrived at the site of the demonstration and rampaged through the protestors.

A few days later, 1,000 villagers blocked the entrance to a site just outside Beijing that will be used for the Olympics, protesting the confiscation of their land for the event, and asking to be justly compensated for the loss of livelihoods and homes. One of the signs read, "Support the Olympics. Reasonably settle with farmers who have lost their land." The villagers have reported, however, that police have been arriving every few days to order them to leave, and even to threaten their children.

Although segments of the population are increasingly economically free, they are still far from free in other ways. To cite just a few examples, as of June 30, all Chinese Web sites were required to register with the government or be removed from the internet. In fact, freedom of expression in all forms continues to be seriously limited, and censorship is omnipresent. Roughly 3,000 people are sentenced for nonviolent political and religious crimes each year. And while the official number of people executed annually is a state secret, international monitoring bodies have put the number at roughly 10,000 - more than all of the rest of the world combined.

Incitement against the West, particularly the United States, continues to saturate the state-run media. While in China, for example, I watched a program that used the discredited Newsweek article about abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo as a jumping-off point for a panel discussion. This was weeks after the article was retracted by the magazine, but neither the moderator nor any of the participants made any mention of the retraction. Instead, it was used as political ammunition against the United States, part of an accelerating campaign against the West on a variety of fronts.

Some of the world's trouble spots might well be less troublesome if not for Chinese foreign policy. For instance, North Korea, whose day-to-day existence depends on Chinese food and energy donations, would likely end its nuclear brinksmanship if Beijing threatened to cut support. China also cultivates economic relationship with Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe and other rogue nations.

Why is China seen as benign by so many observers - including, apparently, most Canadians - despite all this? Perhaps it's because so many in the West see China more as a source of profit than repression. Recently, the country showed off its bulging coffers with an unsolicited bid from a state-owned oil company for Unocal, the U.S. oil and gas giant. In our own country, the Albertan oil industry is salivating at the prospects of a bidding war for Canadian oil, without paying much heed to the moral and geopolitical repercussions of co-operating with the Chinese government.

It is time for Canadians and Europeans to join many in the United States in insisting that the Chinese pursue the growth of liberty and international security as forcefully as they are pursuing the growth of their economy.