Canada's disgraceful silence on Taiwan

By Terry Glavin

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen speaks during National Day celebrations in front of the Presidential Palace in Taipei on October 10, 2016. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on October 10 called for a resumption of talks with China and pledged that "anything" can be on the table for discussion. Relations with Beijing have deteriorated under Taiwan's first female president, whose China-sceptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took office in May after a landslide victory over the Kuomintang party (KMT). 

TAIPEI – The backwash from the last of three wicked typhoons wasn’t enough to dampen the mood during Taiwan’s National Day celebrations this week, although a lingering gloom hung in the air nevertheless. 

It had come from across the Taiwan Strait, as it so often does. 

From mainland China.
From her perch on a reviewing stand outside the century-old Japanese colonial governor’s complex, reconfigured in 1950 as the Republic of China’s President’s Office, 60-year-old Tsai Ing-wen was all smiles on Monday. 

More than 10,000 people had gathered in what everyone was happy was only some occasionally drizzling rain to hear what she’d say in her first key public speech since the inaugural address she’d delivered after being sworn in as Taiwan’s most defiantly democratic president last May.
There was a parade of lumbering military hardware and performances by folk ensembles. 

There were high school marching bands, pop stars, Taiwan’s medal winners from the Summer Olympics in Rio and the Taiwanese baseball team’s cheerleaders. 

Tsai stuck to the upbeat tone: “The new government will conduct cross-strait affairs in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of China,” as Taiwan is otherwise known. 

But there was also this: “We will not bow to pressure, and we will, of course, not revert to the old path of confrontation.”
Yes to negotiations, yes to the “status quo” of trade, yes to peace, but no to kowtowing. 

It was about as conciliatory a tone as Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party will allow her to take in any statements she makes about the People’s Republic regime in Beijing.
Tsai’s DPP was swept into power by the turbulence of the pro-democracy Sunflower Movement of 2014 – an anti-Beijing, anti-corruption revolt that was both a model and a replication of Hong Kong’s near-simultaneous Umbrella Revolution. 

The Taiwanese are not in the mood to turn back now, and Tsai’s speech was mostly well received among Taiwan’s 24 million people.
Nobody wants a fight with Beijing. 

Neither does anybody want to go on putting up with Beijing’s insistence that Taiwan is merely a temporarily wayward Chinese province that needs to mind its manners or be taught a lesson. 

Predictably, China’s Communist Party bigshots were furious about Tsai’s speech. 

A regime spokesman reiterated Beijing’s demands that Tsai submit to what the People’s Republic calls “the 1992 consensus” between the rival republics, a convoluted agree-to-disagree diplomatic fiction involving the term “One China” that was never even close to a consensus to begin with.
In Beijing’s view, the 1992 consensus was an acquiescence by Taiwan that the “status quo” meant a continuation of the Communist Party’s domination of the country until the full realization of Mao Zedong’s vision of retaking the island from the remnants of the 1912 Chinese republic that his communists had overthrown on the mainland. 

Taiwan’s now-defeated Kuomintang government was willing to go along with that, so long as the 1992 consensus came with the “status quo” of its continuing enrichment by collaboration with its former enemies, the communists-turned-capitalists on the mainland.
Tsai’s refusal to go along with capitulation by either of these cynical understandings is seen by Beijing as a provocation to invasion and war. 

Over the past few months, China has been putting the squeeze on Taiwan by shutting down all formal and informal Beijing-Taipei communications, blocking Taiwanese imports, cutting off the flow of tourists from the mainland and throwing its weight around on the “world stage” to further Taiwan’s isolation. 

Only 22 United Nations member states extend full diplomatic recognition to Taiwan.
Canada isn’t among them.
Tsai has little choice but to stand firm. 

Subservience to Beijing – either in the form of Leninist centralism or corporate gangsterism – was overwhelmingly rejected by Taiwanese voters when they elected the DPP in droves in January. 

The Beijing-friendly Kuomintang was left without either the presidency or a legislative majority for the first time in Taiwan’s history.
Tsai is the first woman to be elected Taiwan’s president. 

Her government is committed to gender equality, a stronger safety net, a robust middle class, an emphasis on small-to-medium-sized business, social justice, reconciliation with the island’s aboriginal people, massive investment in public infrastructure and social housing, more generous pensions, a national daycare program and a special focus on youth.
With the election of Justin Trudeau’s avowedly feminist, socially progressive and emphatically democratic ideals, you might think Canada would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Tsai’s DPP – the Taiwanese affiliate of Trudeau’s party through the Liberal International. 

The opposite is the case.
I was in Taipei as a guest of Taiwan’s foreign ministry, and while the Taiwanese officials I spoke with were too polite to say so out loud, they’ve noticed Canada’s quietude. 

When China strong-armed Taiwan away from the recent conference of the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United States and several European countries loudly objected. Canada did not, even though the ICAO conference was in Montreal.
Ottawa and Beijing have lately agreed to begin discussions on a free trade agreement, an extradition treaty and the resumption of Chinese state-owned enterprises buying up Canadian energy-sector companies. 

Trudeau has been lavishly flattered in an official visit to China, and he has returned the favour in Canada to Li Keqiang. 

Although not yet a year in government, Trudeau’s Liberals have struck 29 separate agreements with China, and have set out to double bilateral trade over the next 10 years.
But such single-minded devotion to business deals with the Beijing regime will inevitably invite the worst kind of influences and will exact a price to be paid in democratic values, warns Szu-chien Hsu, president of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, an institute that operates at arms-length from Taiwan’s government. 

Xi Jinping is no friend of democracy, Hsu told me. 

“It alarms us. We have to be very objective about what’s going on in China.”
Xi is adept at consolidating his own power and pursuing what the Communist Party regards as China’s national interests, “but not in accordance with universal values,” Hsu said. 

“Quite on the contrary. It’s not just peculiar to Taiwan. It’s happening everywhere, in Australia, Canada, and even in the United States.” 

Beijing’s anti-democratic reach is spreading quickly. 

“I think we have to be very alarmed about that.”
Hsu said he was heartened by the recent submission to the Liberal government, prepared on behalf of 35 international organizations by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, calling on Canada to put human rights, especially freedom of expression and press freedom, at the heart of Canada’s renewed relationship with the People’s Republic. 

The submission’s backers include Human Rights Watch, the National NewsMedia Council, PEN International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Index on Censorship. 

National and regional groups to sign on include journalists’ associations from Afghanistan, Palestine and the Pacific Islands.
“The relationship between prosperity and democracy – we would like to see a positive relationship between these two paths. If we don’t have a healthy path, one will destroy the other,” Hsu said. 

“This is very, very dangerous. It is self-destruction. It is the destruction of civilization. We are not opposing China. We have to defend democracy. It’s civilization for human beings. It’s even for China’s sake.”