Burton: Time to wake up and take megalomaniacs seriously
Xi is confident that, under his leadership, China’s civilizational norms, as he interprets them, will displace the liberal West in a new China-dominated global order. He foresees this “community of the common destiny of mankind” being in place by 2050. Under his Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative, the world’s economy will be restructured to place China definitively at the centre of power; all the belts and roads will lead to Beijing. It is a delusional overblown ambition, but if Xi sees this promised future slipping away, China could lash out at the world in the same dangerous ways as Putin is doing now.
Canada has until now given Xi’s ambitions short shrift. Serious China expertise in our foreign ministry, CSIS, the RCMP, CSE and DND is thin on the ground. There has been no political will to get more Canadians fluent in Mandarin and thus more attuned to what is really going on with the Chinese Communist Party, domestically, internationally, and here in Canada.
In fact we even enable Xi’s regime by submitting to Chinese embassy threats to punish Canada economically through trade sanctions if we respond in any substantive way to China’s robust industrial espionage operations in Canada, or coercion of ethnic Chinese people in Canada to serve the interests of the Communist Party regime, or China’s very sophisticated influence operations targeting Canadians with influence on Canada’s foreign policy formulation.
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