Whither China

To improve and maintain an efficient and fair relationship with China:

The Canada should continue the dialogue begun with Harper's trip to China and now continuing with Hu Jintao's state visit to Canada.

DFAIT should recruit and send personnel to China who are fluent in Mandarin and who have sufficient political, cultural, and historical knowledge of China to improve Canada's various ties to the country and understand its inner-workings  

Along with other states, Canada should continue to pressure Beijing to re-evaluate the Yuan according to international market conditions; push for the rule of law in China; enourage China to improve its public diplomacy

Continue permitting Chinese-Canadian dissidents and their supporters to criticize China's human rights violations.

Canada should exploit the cultural influence its historic, unofficial ambassadors such as Norman Bethune and Da Shan have in China.

Edited at 12:07 PM

Only a moderator can make that correction now.

Liang Jiajie wrote:

Along with other states, Canada should continue to pressure Beijing to re-evaluate the Yuan according to international market conditions; push for the rule of law in China; enourage China to improve its public diplomacy

China seems to be shifting toward using a basket of reference currencies. This is more or less what Keynes wanted as a step toward financial disarmament. The CCP isn't buying so much US debt anymore, and this is causing concern for the imperialist financial regime here in the west.

They keep harping on about China's unprecedented trade surplus as a percentage of GDP, but it's mostly hype. Japan and the US were the previous record holders, but those economies(1920's USA and 1980s Japan) were much larger as percentages of global GDP. The CPC will continue using visible hand intervention in managing the currency. I don't think they can be convinced that free market voodoo is what they should be doing in terms of the float.

Were the H whas it?

*Eliminate dual citizenships

*Prohibit politicians from accepting travel or other gifts from foreign governments, like Vancouver civic politicians did in 2007

*No foreign ownership of real estate or mines and minerals

*No foreign-owned financial institutions including REITs

*No foreign-funded scholarships

*No reciprocity for Chinese educational institutions: when the University of Calgary gave the Dalai Lama an honorary degree, the PRC stopped recognizing the University's degrees; so why should we recognize PRC-issued degrees here?

*Duties on goods from China and other low-wage/cheap currency countries

*Prohibit Canadian companies from outsourcing production to low-wage countries like China

*Blacklist imports from China and other countries that are made with slave labour

*No food or drug imports from China until they clean up their regulatory systems (lead, melamine, pesticide residues)

*Raise the issues of human rights re. Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongols, dissidents, religious groups and Falun Gong LOUDLY, for the PRC's maximum embarassment

*Extirpate Triads and other crime groups (jail, deport, don't allow in)

*Carefully screen immigrants and visitors for ties to the CPC and organized crime; make immigrants renounce their Chinese citizenships

*End the Investor/Entrepreneur immigration program (this has brought much of the organized crime and PRC/CPC-conected business problem here)

*Charge Canadian nationals with treason for things like industrial espionage and accepting bribes; deport foreign nationals charged with the same

There is no "engaging" a dictatorship like China, or Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, any more than we had to "engage" South Africa during the Apartheid years, or Pinochet-era Chile. The PRC is the worst of both worlds, with Maoist chauvanism and brutality, and free-market greed and sleaze. There is nothing to "respect" here.

There are some very good products made in the PRC, with well-paid/treated labour. If you win the lottery, you could look into one of these, for example.

http://www.seahorseyachts.com/

But Canada can, and should, ban FOOD imports, at least until the PRC cleans up its corrupt and inept food safety and inspection system. China did this to Canada, during the BSE scare, with beef, but our government is too crooked and timid to do the same. And goods made with slave labour should be banned, PERIOD. Also, there should be import duties on Chinese goods, otherwise we are going to lose what's left of our manufacturing jobs. Governments in Canada, the U.S. and Europe are simply allowing this to happen when they can do something about it.

Wasn't pre-Mao Tibet basically a theocratic feudal setup with the majority of peasants treated little better than slaves?

[url=http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/108/china-offers-alternative-develo... Beijing Consensus[/url] China is turning neoliberal capitalism(Washington consensus) on its head

Liang Jiajie wrote:

In fact, there's a widespread and deeply entrenched culture of copying in China. The article also left out a significant fact: China has privatized its healthcare system, a neoliberal's dream.

Yes they are shameless copiers who have no respect for exclusive private property laws whatsoever. And I think China will achieve [url=http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/aug2009/gb20090821_005732.... health care[/url] before the USA ever does.

Businessweek'09 wrote:

In March, China's State Council announced an allocation of $123 billion toward health-care reform. Under the plan, by next year 90% of China's citizens will be covered by a [u]universal health-care system[/u] and health-care facilities will be upgraded, including construction of 30,000 hospitals, clinics, and care centers across the country.

Canada should sever its relations with China, for many, many reasons: human rights, slave labor, anti-union policies, arms trade, among others. China is a criminal totalitarian state, every penny one spends buying Chinese products goes to supporting this unholy mess, the PDRC. They will never come to terms with the rest of the World when it comes down to all of the above. Things will only get worse as they grow stronger and "richer" (well, only some of the Chinese, the well-connected ones). We have a choice, to avoid anything Chinese made, as much as possible. There will never be a "green" China, or a free one for that matter.

I will say this for China... They are the only nation that has managed to get the biggest company in the world -  WalMart -  to accept a union.

How real a union it is I don't know, but it is nice to see them sacrifice their so-called principles in order to make a buck

(especially since they walked from Germany rather than do so).

Joey Ramone wrote:

The "union" representing Walmart workers in China is one of the Party controlled official "unions" not an independent workers' union.  http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/is-union-reform-possible-in-china/ The officially sanctioned "unions" in China are more like company unions, who see their main mandate as "maintaining order and discipline", not defending workers against the employer. I suspect that Walmart would welcome the same kind of "unions" here if they could arrange it.

Yes, I figured as much (sounds like out progressive new Bill 80 here in Saskatchewan). It is still interesting  to see them talking out of both sides of their mouth, considering the principled stand they take everywhere else.

@ Fidel

Well it looks great to have the workers standing up to foreign capitalists, not so great to have the People's Republic seen beating their own people over the head (especially when they have in recent history not wanted the outside world to know when they are dealing with an epidemic). Not trying to demonize China, but it is hardly a workers' paradise.

[url=http://www.ituc-csi.org/colombia-another-trade-union.html?lang=en]Colombia: Another Trade Union Leader Assassinated[/url]

Neither is Colombia a worker's paradise. But that doesn't stop our phony minority stoogeocracy in Ottawa from trading freely with a death squad government though. And in this very hemisphere, too.

The point is that if our stoogeocracy turns a blind eye to Colombia and what is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists and social activists, then what chances are there that the stoogeocracy will do anything more than puff up their chests and condemn China once in a while for the sake of paying lip service to human rights issues? I think the odds are slim next to nil that they will actually do something to confront the CCP running a country of over a billion people on the other side of the world. Nada next to nil. Members of the CCP slide into Ottawa and meet with our stooges behind closed doors all the time and under the public's radar. Same with Colombia's colonial administrators, the Hondurans, Salvadoran's etc, all countries where US-backed right wing death squads have murdered thousands of their citizens in recent years. Our stooges just don't care. They are colonial administrators and hirelings of multinational corporations in Ottawa and nothing more.

for Ryan1812

The Japanese and Chinese real estate bubbles have a similar cause: too much cheap money circulating in the economy.  When too many real estate speculators have access to low interest, no-consequence loans from state-directed banks, they can use the money to play in the real estate markets (and in the stock markets).  They then use their real estate assets as collateral for other loans for whatever purpose, so subsequent loans are often based on the value of real estate.

When the real estate bubble burst in Japan in 1990, real estate collateral wasn't enough to write off those non-performance loans, so many banks went into insolvency.  You can be sure that Beijing is aware of this lesson and wants to avoid a similar fate.  

Like Japan did in the past, Chinese banks enjoy unusually high savings rates that can finance national economic stimulus packages, like the one we saw in China recently -- the central government can quite easily direct banks to provide no-consequence loans at below-market interest rates. But Beijing estimates that 25% of the stimulus money went into speculation.

This access to cheap money was good for the Japanese economy when its export sector was in development mode and its industrial sector was sprouting, but it eventually led to dependency, waste and inefficiency, like Tokyo-style real estate speculation.  I thnk the lesson here is that, unless China wants to be detached from the international economy, it will have to move towards a free market economy.   

Edited at 1:14 PM

The Plaza Accord only aggravated Japan's loose fiscal and monetary policies of which the real estate bubble was a sympton.  Japan had been easily lending money and providing industry with resources at below-market prices for decades before the 80s bubble.  Hudson is right to emphasize that Japan's economic success was dependent on its export sector, but that's how the Japanese development model works, and China, South Korea, and Signapore worked it to their advantage.  Unfortunately for the long-term, what ultimately makes this model work is the toleration of foreign markets to accept inexpensive goods that undercut their domestic producers.  The U.S. tolerated this in return for wide influence in the formulation of Japan's foreign policy.  It was only a matter of time until the U.S. and Europe asked Japan to open its domestic markets to foreign competition.  It should be noted that the U.S. also used the same strategy to kick-start the European economy after the Second World War.

I also disagree with Hudson's characterization of Japan's developmental model as warfare against Japanese workers.  One of the mode's tenets is to sustain employment despite profitibility which is why the Ministry of Finance continued to provide funds to companies that would have otherwise went bankrupt.  So it's not at all clear that Japan abandoned its workers.

And I wouldn't describe Japan's banks as "model."  By the time of the Plaza Accord, Japanese banks were barely profitable and were loaning money to a select few clients, effectively turning the relationshp between borrower and creditor into a symbiotic one to the point where conglomerates acquired banks. This says nothing of the collusion between Ministry of Finance officials and the banks they regulated, or the substitution of personal relationships for critical screening when evaluating potential borrowers.  

Japan's export sector had become dependent on import restrictions, government subsidies, and on lenient foreign governments.  This is what China has to avoid now. 

I'd say China needs to move towards a more rational market economy.  There's no absolutely free market economy because market economies are either regulated or manipulated by national governments, or they're a combination of both.  In the case of the American market, there obviously wasn't enough regulation or it was the wrong kind of regulation.  In China, prices and lending rates are kept artificially low by Beijing's policies.  Like the U.S. learned and then the rest of the world learned not long ago, prices can't be kept irrationally low for too long, as it breeds reckless behaviour and poorly underwritten credit.

Liang Jiajie wrote:

I'd say China needs to move towards a more rational market economy.  There's no absolutely free market economy because market economies are either regulated or manipulated by national governments, or they're a combination of both.  In the case of the American market, there obviously wasn't enough regulation or it was the wrong kind of regulation.  In China, prices and lending rates are kept artificially low by Beijing's policies.  Like the U.S. learned and then the rest of the world learned not long ago, prices can't be kept irrationally low for too long, as it breeds reckless behaviour and poorly underwritten credit.

 

Shedding the appellation "free" is a good start, Jiajie.  I believe we will never be able to use it again while globalization reigns.  But, hopefully, in some future, really "rational" period, when it comes home to Homo sapiens just what's been created by "Voltaire's Bastards" (with apologies to John Ralston Saul), and sovereignty is restored in the name of "rationality", we may be able to again use it to describe human decision-making.   Hopefully that will happen in time for Earth to recover.  :)

[url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5182114/Jackie-Chan... Chan says Chinese people need to be 'controlled'[/url] 2009

In a free society if people can do what they want, then what about corporations? Should corporations and rich and powerful people do what they want, like working toward legalizing financial fraud and corrupting governments?

Push back and see if your theory is corrrect?

What if free market theory is baloney, and instead what's happened since WW II has essentially been globalizing economic warfare? What if certain countries today are only feigning integration with western economies as a way of maneuvering from a position of vulnerability to one of equal footing with the enemy?  What if certain people trained in economic theory sometimes become [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man]economic hit men[/url] in preparing countries to be invaded by marauding capital? If countries open their borders to capital, does it make them as vulnerable to plunder and pillage by foreign invaders as what Poland and Czechoslovakia were in the late 1930's-40's?

Ryan1812 wrote:

The brevity of your response belies the clarity of your reasoning. Am I to assume counter-globalization would be your vaccine for the corporatist virus we are so plauged by and what China is subject to?

You can google up a nice piece on globalization's faltering future by our nationalist consort to the former GG (Saul) in Harper's mag...about two years ago.  The bastards are about to fail of their own accord.(and jeez, it was March 2004...where does the time go, eh?

And for chrissake, there's nothing "free" about the bloody market.  It's been bought and paid for by us, whenever the state intervened and saved "free" market asses. It's actually expensive as hell. We just have to start wielding that fact and demanding compensation along national lines and maybe even reclaiming our sovereignty in the process. And demanding a place for Canadian public investments in Canadian infrastructural growth...before the private funds snap up all the opportunities.   There is a place for the state to act, you know, even though that would be last on the mind of Jimmy the budgeter Flaherty.  But it will require "the left" to actually talk about government involvement in the "paid for" market.

As a "communist party" its legitimacy was lost some time ago.  Hopefully it will be able to re-institute some social welfare programs to keep the beggars fed and houses, even if there is no chance for medical treatment.