What's the ultimate objective of Harper's softer stance on China?

Selling Canadian goods and services to the Chinese market. Along with every western country out there. He’s right, for two reasons.

First, although we don’t know exactly what produces change in authoritarian states, there’s good evidence that free trade and integration to the global economy helps. China is grappling with the question of how to marry it’s market economic system with a political system still largely dominated by the Communist party (although with input now from the private sector.) China optimists take the view that China will find it’s own logic for resolving those tensions by moving towards democratic political systems – but at their own pace, and in their own way. China pessimists think that the tensions will lead to a breakdown. Either way, if you’re keen on political liberation and human rights for China’s 1,000,000,000 citizens, free trade is the right step.

Second, those who would have Harper take a much tougher line on China’s human rights and non-democratic political system, have to answer two questions. Will it have an impact? The answer is almost certainly no. And, what’s the impact of alienating China just as it enters the global world? My fear is that if the West takes a tough line on these issues, all we’ll accomplish is building up Chinese nationalism, and their opposition to new roles in a responsible international order. That will make just about every international problem harder to solve, without having any discernible impact on China’s human rights. Where’s the gain in that?

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It’s not about “softer” but about being rational. John Baird just said it: Canadian foreign policy must represent our interests AND our values; we do both simultaneously. Recognizing China as a “strategic partner” is facing economic reality. That China is pivotal to key outcomes in world affairs merits more engagement, not less.

But diplomacy depends on consistency. China must see Canada as being loyal to our values. While not trying to export our beliefs to China, consistency insists we communicate support for the legitimacy of universal human rights defence in China. It is not interference. China signed the relevant international covenants. Havel’s “venerable tradition of international solidarity” applies.

Strategic partnership provides Canada with enough political capital to remind the Chinese in private their behaviour necessarily influences the political climate. But on HOW we communicate, to be taken seriously, we must avoid megaphone diplomacy aimed at voters back home.

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Baird’s visit to China, the first official visit of a cabinet minister overseas in Harper’s new majority government, symbolizes that China is now front and square in our national interest. The Prime Minister has said that “properity” is his number one priority and that is driving the new strategic partnership with the world’s second biggest and fastest growing economy. China is now our third most important trading partner after the US and Europe. As the US economy goes south, Harper understands that Canada must diversify its trade and investment linkages to secure Canada’s economic future. The Asia Pacific will loom large in this government’s attentions.

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In an old joke, a farmer whacks his supposedly obedient mule over the head with a two-by-four and explains, “First, you have to get his attention.”  Canada needs a strong relationship with China for many reasons, of which only the most obvious is China’s increasing role as a market for Canadian exports.   The interesting question is what got the government’s attention.

A major factor has been the lesson of recent developments in the United States.  Above all, the Americans’ current display of institutional incapacity in dealing with long-term budget deficits and the debt limit—with partisan brinkmanship carried right to the edge of economic catastrophe—has demonstrated the huge risks of having too many eggs in the American basket.  The era of American economic and political leadership in the world may be drawing to an end. Mr. Harper is moving some of Canada’s eggs to the China basket.

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Since the 1960′s successive Canadian governments have tried to diversify Canada’s economic relations away from its excessive reliance on the United States – without success.  The rise of China as an economic power and trading partner offers the latest opportunity in this ongoing effort.  But closer trade and economic relations with China cannot result from market forces alone.  The Chinese government is not a neutral observer to its country’s economic relations, and responds to both political as well as economic interests.

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John Baird’s “new era” in Canada-China relations is really just a belated discovery of the wisdom of an “older era.”  The Harper government has finally recognized that its unidimensional China policy – consisting of always taking a “principled” approach – came at a significant cost.  Internationally, Canada found itself increasingly sidelined in the Asia Pacific.  Domestically, a principled policy won few plaudits but attracted considerable criticism, including from Canadians of Chinese descent angered by Harper’s pointed refusal to travel to Beijing to celebrate the 2008 Olympics.  Baird’s new approach, while too effusive for some (China is now a Canadian ally? Seriously?), seems designed to put a little more “multidimensionality” back into the relationship.  His promise to pursue both values and interests at the same time is a pragmatic recognition that all international relations, but particularly those with a power like China, involve trade-offs that invariably mess with fine principles.

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With the dynamic centre of the global political shifting rapidly back to the Asia Pacific region, it is a relief to see the Government of Canada moving to position itself on the right side of history.

But make no mistake, this country is starting from way behind the curve. By my reckoning, we have been losing ground to the competition in (re)emerging Asia since Canada’s disastrous Year of Asia Pacific in 1997. At that time, our best laid plans for advancing Canadian interests across several broad fronts dissolved in a cloud of pepper spray at the APEC Summit in Vancouver, an event which was itself largely hijacked by growing fears over the spreading Asian financial crisis.

Meltdown.

PM Chretien tried to reverse direction with his Team Canada visits in the second half of the 90s, but our net position kept sliding.

In the case of China, that slide turned into a cascade with the election in 2006 of the Conservative government, who appeared ready to stop at nothing to secure China’s antipathy.

In that they succeeded.

Five years on, a more confident  – and less ideologically predisposed? – government seems to have turned the corner and is ready to get this critical bilateral relationship back on track.

Better late than never.

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The focus of the Harper Government has always been economic; the positive spin concerning the relative strength of our economy has got the Gov’t re-elected twice. The earlier so-called “hard-stance” towards China was based on two factors which overwelmed the economic….one was coming from opposition when pro-Taiwan, more religious themes tended to dominate party thinking; and second was the fact that the Government drew its early strength from its Alberta roots….thus heavily north-south (Interstate 15!) and not particularly overseas, and particularly, Asia-Pacific, focussed. The Harper Government in now a government in the fullest sense of the word, balancing geographic and public policy interests on every file, including on China.

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The idea of an “ultimate” objective is alien to most foreign policy discussions, and particularly so in the case of China, which is changing so fast.

At this stage, the most that can be said about Harper’s “softer” stance on China is that it strikes a more even balance between trade and human rights, and signals the heightened importance of China in Canadian foreign policy. Mr Baird has admirably conveyed these two messages in his recent visit to Beijing.

What is less clear is how Ottawa will develop the relationship. Is it principally about selling more to China? Balance notwithstanding, will there be a new approach to human rights? What about regional and global issues? Are there areas where Canada can have a “special relationship” with China? These are some of the important proximate questions.

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