The imperialist campaign to foment a new ‘Cold War’ against the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which began in earnest with U.S. President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” in 2011 and which accelerated sharply under the Trump Administration in recent years, continues to unfold. The Trudeau government, with the support and encouragement of all other parties in parliament, is playing an increasingly active role in this dangerous and highly de-stabilizing offensive against China. Those who stand for peace, disarmament, mutual respect and cooperation in international relations must speak out now in opposition to these ominous developments.
The main objective of this rancorous all-sided campaign of demonization is to blunt China’s economic and technological advance, tarnish its international prestige, and diminish its influence in order to preserve U.S. global hegemony over the world’s peoples and resources. Most alarming of all, it aims to create a pretext to justify a sharp escalation in arms spending and preparations for war which, by definition, would include the first-use of nuclear weapons. These war preparations to encircle China include the expansion of existing U.S. bases, and the construction of new bases in the Pacific ‘archipelago’, plans to install new intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the region, and the increasingly provocative naval presence by the U.S. and its allies, including Canada, in the South China Sea and the Straits of Taiwan.
This global ‘game of chicken’ is fraught with danger. After suffering more than one hundred year of humiliation and oppression at the hands of Western colonial powers and Japanese imperialism, China and its peoples have stated repeatedly that they will not surrender to foreign interference, intimidation and dictates of any kind. Instead, they have called for a global ‘reset’ and a return to harmonious economic, political and diplomatic relations on the basis of equality, non-interference and mutual respect in line with the UN Charter and international law.
To its shame, Canada has played an increasingly vociferous role in this imperialist offensive. In December 2018, Canadian authorities detained Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, in Vancouver, where she has remained under house arrest ever since, while fighting a specious extradition order based on “fraud” charges for her company’s violation of U.S. unilateral sanctions against Iran. This past October, a parliamentary committee accused China of “genocide” for its treatment of the Uyghurs and other national minorities in Xinjiang. Canadian ambassador Bob Rae repeated these groundless allegations on the floor of the UN General Assembly, stating that “there’s no question that… what the Chinese are doing fits into the definition of genocide in the genocide convention.” Yet, even as he was levelling these accusations, he admitted that “an investigation needs to be conducted to gather the required evidence” (sic)!
Last month, Canada signed a joint statement along with the U.S., Britain and Australia – four of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance (New Zealand, to its credit, refused to endorse) – condemning China for the arrest of 55 right-wing politicians in Hong Kong for subversion under the region’s new national security law. The championing of these U.S. and British-sponsored seditious activists who promoted street violence and the storming of the Hong Kong parliament in July 2019 in much the same anti-democratic manner that resulted in the ultra-right assault on the U.S. Congress this past January, is ironic in the extreme.
And most recently, 13 MPs from all five sitting parties – including not only a number of Tory and Liberal members but also Denis Trudel and Stephane Bergeron from the BQ, NDP MPs Heather McPherson and Jenny Kwan, and both Green MPs Elizabeth May and Paul Manly – signed an open letter demanding that the International Olympic Committee move the 2022 Winter Olympics from China to avoid having athletes “tainted” by participating in the global sports competition which “would be comparable to the 1936 Berlin games under the Nazi regime”. This pathetic move is doomed to failure, but it is setting the stage for an imperialistsponsored effort to boycott the 2022 Olympics, much like the Western-backed boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. It is yet another initiative to deliver a blow to China’s international image and to further stoke this hybrid war.
Imperialism’s economic, political and military offensive against China is framed and justified by a vicious ideological campaign tinged with racism and anti-communism. This cyber-information warfare configures the PRC as an ‘aggressive adversary’ or ‘enemy’ that threatens national security, the independence of other countries, and world peace as a whole. This “big lie” – repeated over and over ad nauseam – turns reality completely on its head. It is U.S./NATO imperialism which has waged wars of aggression and occupation, imposed punitive and illegal sanctions, constructed a web of over 800 foreign military bases around the globe, and fomented destabilization and ‘regime change’ against countless countries around the world over many decades. China, on the other hand, has not engaged in a foreign war for more than 40 years (its brief military incursion into northern Vietnam in 1979 being the last such instance).
Its groundless accusation that China is guilty of ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang, feigning concern for the Muslim population, is particularly galling in its hypocrisy. It is precisely U.S. imperialism which has murdered – either through direct military action or punitive economic sanctions – millions of
innocent Muslims in Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Libya and the Occupied Territories of Palestine over the past two decades alone. It is U.S. and its allies which were responsible for the slaughter of millions on the Korean peninsula, in Vietnam and throughout South-East Asia. It is U.S. imperialism that supported fascist coups and massacres in Indonesia, in Central America, Chile, and the over 30,000 who have perished in Venezuela due to economic strangulation since 2017. And of course, it is the U.S. and Canadian states that stole the lands and impoverished and decimated indigenous populations on its own territories for centuries, and continue to do so. This is the true face of ‘genocide’ – then and now.
The Communist Party of Canada therefore condemns the coordinated campaign to whip up a new Cold War against China, and the active participation of the Canadian state in promoting this nefarious and dangerous operation. Specifically, we urge all of our members and friends to support the campaign demanding the immediate release and repatriation of Meng Wanzhou, to oppose efforts to sabotage the 2022 Winter Olympics, and demanding that the Trudeau government end all hostile actions and political attacks on the PRC. Only such a turn in
Canadian foreign policy will help to restore friendly and principled relations between Canada and the PRC, and serve the cause of world peace.