cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11900959
cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11900079
When [Canadian] Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Beijing in January and said Canada’s new “strategic partnership” with China set both countries up for a “new world order,” it marked a striking reversal. Less than a year earlier, on the election campaign trail, Carney had named China as Canada’s biggest security threat. And a year before the trip, the Hogue Commission’s report on foreign interference concluded that China is the most persistent and sophisticated foreign interference threat to Canada’s democratic institutions and elections.
The deal cut China’s tariff on Canadian canola seed to about 15 percent from 75.8 percent and eased duties on peas, and seafood. In return, Ottawa agreed to let in 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) a year at a 6.1 percent tariff, down from 100 percent. The partnership also covers clean energy, multilateral co-operation, people-to-people ties, and public security, including an agreement between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security, the police apparatus Beijing has used to monitor and intimidate its diaspora abroad.
The pivot comes as Carney rallies middle powers to band together against U.S. tariffs while moving closer to the world’s other superpower. Taiwan, which Beijing refuses to recognize as an independent country, and actively seeks to reunify Taiwan as part of China even by military force, shows how aggressive China can be. And as Chiense coast guard incursions into Taiwan-controlled waters have spiked in 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump has called a stalled $14-billion arms package for the island “a very good negotiating chip” with Beijing, recently adding he isn’t looking to fight a war thousands of miles away.
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Few Western journalists have watched China’s security apparatus as closely as Jürgen Kremb. A former Der Spiegel bureau chief in Beijing, Singapore, and Vienna who was expelled from China in 1998, he now teaches and conducts research at Soochow University in Taipei as a visiting scholar.
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The Hub spoke with Kremb about what Canada should learn from Taiwan as it grows its ties to China.
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Question: … Ottawa has now signed a strategic partnership with Beijing that includes a confidential RCMP agreement with China’s Ministry of Public Security. From where you sit in Taiwan, which has lived with this pressure far longer, does closer engagement with Beijing typically restrain its interference activities abroad, or does it give them more cover and access and embolden them?
Jürgen Kremb: It’s police and domestic security, and they work like the FBI. There are also members of their staff who work as agents, suppressing dissidents and different opinions. This ministry has about 2 million staff in China … and they open police stations in foreign countries, including Canada. The same in Europe and Australia [and other countries]. Of course that’s against the law of other countries, just as the U.S. or Canada cannot open a police station in Beijing.
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China now is the biggest threat to the security of a lot of countries, because they steal intellectual property, they intimidate their dissidents abroad, they intimidate people who are speaking out against China, they operate a lot of media. So we really have to take the threat seriously… And of course the primary target is Taiwan.
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Taiwan is the testing ground, [but it’s also being] executed against other democratic societies, the so-called West, but the so-called West also includes South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, etc.
Xi Jinping wants to rule the world–Western politicians simply cannot comprehend this. He wants to destroy the liberal concept of Western democracies because their very existence poses a threat to his dictatorship.
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Chinese cars are basically spies on four wheels. In Israel, in Sweden or Norway, and in Japan, Chinese cars are not allowed anymore into military installations because where there are cameras, they are actively spying on the surroundings and sending this data back to China.
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What happens if you work too closely with China? First, you seem to have access to a big, big market and make a lot of money. But one day it’s over, and your whole industry base collapses. So if Canada decides to go that way with closer relations to China, look twice and be very careful, and you could lose more than you gain.
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If you’re getting very close to China, in the end you might not be in the driver’s seat of your own country or of your key industry, because the Chinese sooner or later will overtake your products and influence your domestic policy.
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So communist, highlights Taiwans colonial past, yet doesn’t want to highlight what China was doing while all that was going on, yet you say you’re against all genocide, can’t be against genocide while leaning Chinese like a tankie, genocides were every bit communist tools as they were tools of Nazis and capitalists, ask Georgia (the country) or anywhere else affected by the USSR.
I know historically none of us have been in the right, no pragmatically ran nation will ever be perfect, nor will one ran by greedy power hoarders like Trump, Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, Erdogan, etc., but that’s the difference, I don’t care what ideology we live under, just as long as our needs are met and we aren’t treated like disposable trash, and these guys listed don’t care about anyone but themselves, they’re comfort, they’re power over others, we can and must do better.
Doing better starts by leaving your biases behind, you seem to be under the assumption that I’m just a typical American nationalist, I’m not, sure I prioritize where I live and exist because you have to, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the effects that colonialism caused, my family is Irish and Russin Jew, both sides of my family are refugees, and came to these shores as refugees, and while my idiot MAGA father has forgotten that, I sure haven’t.
Overall I don’t know where you are from, but quite obviously I’m gearing up to try and get my family through either a Nazi regime or a civil war, maybe cut me some slack if I’m not thinking about history from 80 years ago in another country, considering what we are all living through now. My issue is the Trump regime and until they are removed from power it’s all I really have room for, as their removal will alleviate so much pressure globally.
You made a bunch of vague whataboutisms. Do you have an actual point here? My point is that the issues with the US regime will not be ended by removing Trump, this isn’t a matter of 80 years ago but today. Genocides are not “communist tools,” and the majority of those that lived in the USSR and its member states regret its dissolution.
I’m a Statesian, just like you, the primary difference is that I am directing my critique against the system that is actually causing the problems of today, rather than the individual that happens to be in charge of a portion of it at this present moment in time. Changing out the individual will not change the system, and thus will not actually alleviate pressure worldwide. Only changing the system can do that.
We have to seek truth from facts, not simply rely on our gut feelings. That’s why I took issue with your conspiracy theory to begin with, you are agreeing with whatever your bias leads you to believe. I’m aware that I’m biased, which is why I do my best to seek truth from facts, rather than rely on my gut.