20091211/哈珀中国行

Harper in China

Published On Fri Dec 11 2009

When the Vancouver Opera Company stages Nixon in China next year, a key passage comes from an elated American president who proclaims: “When I shook hands with Chou En-lai,/ On this bare field outside Peking just now,/ The whole world was listening.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s visit to China did not capture the world’s attention, much less imagination. Nor did it produce the kinds of intellectual sparks that flew during Pierre Trudeau’s visit in 1973. Its immediate deliverables – Approved Destination Status and the lifting of a ban on Canadian pork products – fell far short of earlier prime ministerial visits or what usually transpires when heads of state come calling.

The real significance is that it happened at all and without serious disaster. It closed the chapter on “cool politics, warm economics” and reopened the engagement strategy of previous Canadian governments.

Harper’s policy reversal did not have the global significance of Nixon’s embrace of Red China, but a reversal it is.

Without apology and without explanation, and in everything but name, Canada is now back on the track that Paul Martin aspired to when he and President Hu Jintao proclaimed a “strategic partnership” in 2005.

Domestically, the images of smiling leaders from both sides and a confident PM at the Great Wall assuaged voters at home that Conservatives can “do China.”

Despite a deftly delivered rebuke, the welcome offered by the Chinese leadership revealed its long-term respect for a cordial relationship that has produced benefits for both sides as well as its intention to place mutual interests rather than common values as its foundation.

The big question is what comes next? The China trip was part of a full-court press on Asia that took the Prime Minister to Singapore, India, South Korea and China in less than a month and combined with a spate of interlacing ministerial visits. But as basketball fans know, a full-court press is a short-term tactic rather than a long-term strategy.

The fundamental strategic challenge ahead is economic and diplomatic. Canada has fallen off the Asian screen. Even as our trade with China and Asia increases, our market share continues to decline.

The Prime Minister gave some hints of what a new approach might look like. He directly acknowledged the trans-Pacific power shift that has been accentuated by the economic crisis. He spoke of energy, the environment, the Asia Pacific Gateway, Canadian openness to Chinese outward investment, and the need for diversifying markets. This may not yet amount to the “post-NAFTA narrative” that David Emerson has been advancing, but it is the first signs of systematic Conservative thinking about big picture geo-economics.

Harper’s biggest challenge may be in the domain of moral leadership. China does not fit easily within the Conservatives’ value-based foreign policy. Those who continue to see China as a godless totalitarian country with nuclear weapons will not be mollified by the rationale that geo-economics and geopolitics make working with China a strategic necessity and economic priority. An Angus-Reid poll last week revealed that more than 60 per cent of Canadians believe that human rights and minority rights are more important than the trading relationship with China.

The success of Conservative 2.0 China policy will depend on more than elite mobilization for what one Canadian journalist aptly described as “fully engaging with China, at every level, all the time.”

It will depend upon persuading Canadians that China is a legitimate partner that we need to live with and encourage rather than judge and condemn.

Trudeau offered a plausible case that engaging China would reduce its isolation and eventually ease its transition into the international community. Jean Chrétien could plausibly argue that economic opening would eventually produce political change. And Martin could claim that bringing China into a new global architecture would make China a more responsible leader in a newly forming world order.

Harper faces the dilemma of expanding relations with China at a time when China may have economic interests in Canada but no longer needs Canada’s help in the global political arena. The hard facts are that while there have been many advances in individual freedoms in China, economic openness has not produced the political liberalization or democratic convergence that many in the West expected.

It is an irony of operatic proportions that a man of impeccable anti-Communist pedigree and values fundamentalism is overhauling China policy at a moment when Canadian capacity, the international institutions we helped create and Western universals are in question because of Asia’s rise.

Getting ready for an era of shared values rather than universal ones is a hard message for our leaders to appreciate much less convey.

“Harper in China” may be the curtain raiser.

Paul Evans is director of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. He is finishing a book on Canada and Global China: After Engagement.

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/737389

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