Canadian Sinologist Recounts ‘Hectic Getaway’ From Shanghai After Questioning by Chinese Secret Police

 

Canadian Sinologist Recounts ‘Hectic Getaway’ From Shanghai After Questioning by Chinese Secret Police

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In December 2024 my absence was no longer self-imposed when I, along with 19 other individuals and two Canadian organizations, were banned from entering China. I was on the list because I had acted as an advisor for a Canada-based human-rights group, the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project (although I qualified to make the list twice due to my similar association with the Canada Tibet Committee).

After our banishment was posted on a government website, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled newspaper The Global Times reported that we were exiled for offences that included “spreading disinformation” about human-rights violations in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and in Tibet. (PRC official propaganda has recently started to refer to Tibet by its name in romanized Chinese, Xizang, meaning literally “western treasury.” It is politically motivated subterfuge to downplay that Tibet has been the ancestral land of Tibetans since long before the Han Chinese invaded the territory.)

The Chinese official statement reads:

“Canada’s actions are an attempt to use human-rights issues in Xinjiang and Xizang to enhance its international presence and strengthen its influence in global diplomacy and ideological discourse.”

So, unlike my sanctioning by Russia in 2022, China did not ban me because of what I have published in newspapers. It was a response to Canada’s China policy in general.

When I began placing opinion pieces in Canadian newspapers nearly 20 years ago, many Canadians were confident that China could become a responsible stakeholder in world affairs. Canada under Justin Trudeau came close to collaborating with China in international affairs, including transnational crime, even considering an extradition treaty. We also came close to integrating our economies through a free-trade deal.

But, as the commentary articles recount, as China became more powerful economically, it began posing a hostile geostrategic threat to the international rules-based order.

China’s current leadership sees Donald Trump as fulfilling Xi Jinping’s prediction that the United States is a power in decline — that the vacuum created by American nationalism will be filled by China — and that Xi’s “Community of the Common Destiny of Mankind” will become the future global order.

China thus assumes what Mr. Xi considers its rightful role as the dominant global civilization, with Chinese even displacing English as the world’s foremost common language. Under Xi’s vision, Canadians would realize that a political system based on China’s authoritarian model, and on its superior civilization informed by Confucianism, is Canada’s best option for political, economic and social development. Canada would become a subsidiary economy to China’s centre of global industrial production and infrastructure.