Reawakening Canada's china policy
It is an exciting time to be talking about Canada’s policy towards China. But for the first time the reason lies less in the dramatic changes occurring in China itself, which continue, but rather in the fresh thinking about China going on here in Canada. We are in one of those periods in which old alignments and assumptions are being questioned and new ones put onto the table. This rethink is being driven partly by global factors. China’s rise to greater diplomatic and economic pre-eminence, for example, is forcing Western nations to ask how they might respond to that rise in a useful fashion. American policy towards China, meanwhile, has reverted to more realist underpinnings since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, forcing other nations to take the lead on certain aspects of the China issue. At the same time, there are distinctive domestic reasons that have turned those necessary conditions into sufficient ones. The ferment is of course linked to the election of a new Conservative government in 2006, with explicit promises to change our approach to China. But this is not a partisan issue: members of parliament from all parties,1 as well as public opinion polls, have long shown a broad concern with the drift in our China policy. Rather, what is happening is a democratization of our China policy that reflects a more general democratization of our foreign policy (McCormick 2006). For the first time, the mandarins of Canada’s China policy – Sinologists, business interests, “old friends of China,” and steady-as-she-goes bureaucrats – are being challenged by citizen-barbarians at the gates. The zheng (official, appropriate, civilized) is being challenged by the ye (wild, barbaric, uncivilized). Let me explain why I think the ye best serves Canada’s interests as well as those of China’s people – why, in other words, the barbarians are the better diplomats – and why this moment is so critical not only for Canada’s relations with China but also for the future of our place in the world.