People ride bicycles at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the 1970s.-/AFP/Getty Images
Charles Burton is a scholar on China, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing, and a senior fellow at Sinopsis.cz, a China-focused think tank based in Prague. He is the author of The Beaver and the Dragon: How China Out-Manoeuvred Canada’s Diplomacy, Security and Sovereignty, from which the following essay has been adapted.
When I first travelled there in the 1970s to study its ancient philosophy, China was poor and weak and isolated. It played no significant role in global affairs. The policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Mao Zedong’s thinking, and the ideology of proletarian revolution were not of much interest to Canadians or to Canada’s domestic or foreign affairs.
That has of course changed dramatically. As China became less secluded in the late 20th century, Canada and other countries reached out to pursue diplomatic ties, intellectual partnerships, tourism opportunities and billions of dollars’ worth of commerce.
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Over the past 50 years there has been much navigating of societal and cultural differences, with the tenor of Canada-China relations ranging from hopeful optimism to deep-freeze hostility.
In my own career I became intimately familiar with China personally and professionally, learning its language, knowing its people, absorbing its philosophy, observing its politics.
As a sinologist and a writer, I have in the past two decades published more than 200 newspaper articles that observe high-profile milestones and flashpoints, but also the nuances, complexities and tensions of China’s relations with the west.
My own interest in China, however, goes back much further.
Mr. Burton, pictured here attending the wedding banquet of his classmate in Shanghai in 1981. The scholar has spent 50 years absorbing China's language and observing its politics.Picasa/Supplied
In 1969, when I was a Grade 9 student, a bookshop opened on Rideau Street, halfway between my school and our family home. I often stopped in to break up my long walk home, especially in the depths of an Ottawa winter.
Progressive Books was unlike any store I’d ever seen. Images of Chairman Mao were prominent. All the books were from China, but printed in English and other languages. And they were cheap! I still have my Constitution of the People’s Republic of China in a red plastic cover with golden letters, which cost 15 cents.
I bought magazines like China Reconstructs, China Pictorial, Chinese Literature, the weekly Peking Review, and the Selected Works of Mao Tsetung. Reading them cover to cover, these materials were a world of different ideas. Previously I knew little about Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, but now I was reading that Soviet hegemonism was a threat to world peace, the “new tsars” had betrayed the world revolution, and Canada’s leaders were the “running dogs” of U.S.-led western imperialism. (I got the message: Soviet Russians and American monopolistic capitalists, equally bad.)
There never seemed to be any other customers in the store. Presumably Communist authorities funded it and sent the reading materials from China. At the time there was no People’s Republic of China (PRC) embassy in Ottawa, as Canada still recognized Chiang Kai-shek’s régime, exiled in Taiwan, as China’s legitimate government.
The staff looked gaunt and wore threadbare clothes, but were friendly. They told me they were members of the Communist Party, and asked if I would organize a Marxist cell of students at my school, to foment a transformation in Canada to support Chairman Mao’s intended world revolution. I didn’t believe this was all that feasible, and besides I was already busy as president of the Latin Club and singing in the choir down at the Cathedral.
Beijing was a very different – and weaker – player on the world stage in the 1970s.PIERRE GUILLAUD/AFP/Getty Images
Eventually Progressive Books went out of business, and I got on with completing high school. But my fascination with China persisted.
As a University of Toronto undergrad, I was captivated by a politics course called “Modern China in Revolution.” My professor noticed my interest and inspired me to go on to Cambridge University, and its Oriental Studies program.
Arriving in Britain shortly after the death of Mao, I began learning to speak and read Chinese at Cambridge. As my command of Mandarin continued to grow, I decided I would be better off continuing my studies in China. I applied to the Canada-China Scholars’ Exchange Program, and was accepted to study ancient Chinese philosophy at Fudan University.
I arrived in China at a good moment, historically speaking. After 10 years of fear and distrust during the Cultural Revolution, my cohort at Fudan was the first to be selected based on competitive entrance exams. These would be the most formative and fascinating years of my life.
Life in Building Four dorm meant being in close company with earnest students 24/7, sharing the same space, eating the same food. None of my roommates had ever had contact with any non-Chinese before meeting me, but I was welcomed without reservation to assimilate into their society. In Chinese culture, this means an unbreakable friendship for life and an iron obligation to loyalty. Some of my dorm mates became senior officials in the Communist régime while others emigrated to the U.S., but to this day the bond of our shared past overcomes all.
After completing my Fudan studies in 1980, I returned to the University of Toronto to do a PhD, writing my thesis on post-Mao ideology. In 1987 I joined the Association of University and Colleges of Canada to administer a program that funded exchanges between 20 Canadian and 20 Chinese universities for collaborative research and technology transfer.
In 1989 I became a professor of political science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont. This was precisely when China was beset by unprecedented student protests demanding democratic reforms from the Communist government. As the standoff intensified between the protesting students and the regime in Beijing, foreign correspondents covered the growing drama and a global audience was intrigued to see thousands of students demanding open, accountable governance from an authoritarian regime.
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The dream about a new era for China ended in early June when columns of tanks brutally crushed throngs of pro-democracy protesters in the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre. One of the backers of the protests, Wang Zhaojun, had been my roommate at Fudan University. After the crackdown he fled China, crossed the Pacific and for a time lived with me as a Tiananmen exile in a quiet Canadian neighbourhood.
During my career at Brock, on two occasions the university gave me leaves of absence so I could serve diplomatic postings at Canada’s embassy in China. When Canada opened its first Beijing embassy back in 1971, the Department of External Affairs created the position of “post sinologist” to supplement its modest levels of expertise on China. Being fluent in Mandarin, I was appointed in 1991 to that role; my duties included reading all communications to and from the embassy, and alerting the ambassador to anything warranting follow-up or attention.
In 1993 my embassy posting ended and I returned to Brock, but over the next five years I travelled frequently to China to help direct a massive collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Royal Society of Canada.
Mr. Burton at Tiananmen Square as a young diplomat in 1991. Fluent in Mandarin, his duties included reading embassy communications and flagging noteworthy correspondences.Supplied
While the CCP is not given to taking outside advice on how to run a country, there are occasions when foreign experts are invited to help develop advice for reports that have at least the potential to inform China’s policy-making process.
During the 1980s, the Democracy Project was an ambitious attempt to promote gradual political reform by collaborating with an authoritarian administration inherently suspicious of external influences. The initiative, which Beijing tolerated more than embraced, was meant to help China explore the nature of democratic institutions in numerous nations. It seemed the Chinese officials involved wanted to know everything about how democracy functioned, ostensibly with a view to considering their own political reforms.
The project went to exhaustive lengths to explore the very essence of Canadian governance and political functions. China’s delegates followed municipal election candidates canvassing door to door, were able to question historians and political scientists, and they met with political parties, speakers of provincial legislatures, NGO leaders and university presidents. They quizzed ombudspeople, judges, and lawyers to explore how legislative agendas are set, or who determines topics of debate in Parliament. They visited the Canadian Communist Party headquarters in Toronto.
Former heads of the CRTC and the Canada Council spoke about cultural policy, while prominent journalists like Knowlton Nash and Geoffrey Stevens discussed the role of news media. Specialists in tax policy, pensions and unemployment insurance explained how those structures work.
The Chinese asked interesting questions that often reflected the experiential chasms between two cultures, such as “After the quiet revolution in Quebec, what happened to the priests?” One day, after passing a Zellers store with a prominent sign reading “The lowest price is the law,” they wanted to know how this Canadian “lowest price law” was implemented and enforced.
After years of research, the Chinese group drafted extensive reports and recommendations for consideration by the CPP. The plan was for president Jiang Zemin – whose legacy was to have been democratic reform for China – to cap it off with a landmark speech in December, 1998.
Alas, no such speech was ever given, and no democratizations launched. CCP leaders apparently felt they already had enough to deal with, managing public blowback at home over unpopular economic reforms, and they weren’t about to start dangling the prospect of democracy in front of the people.
Through six years, the Democracy Project involved millions of dollars in travel, accommodation and organizational costs; scores of meetings with prominent Canadians and senior officials; and thousands of hours of logistical support from the federal civil service.
In the end, the only tangible impact seems to have been giving Beijing better ways to collect taxes. And even that acknowledgment only came to light when premier Li Peng, speaking in 1996 with prime minister Jean Chrétien during a visit to China, briefly thanked Canada for providing advice on new taxation mechanisms.
Silently exiting the stage, the Democracy Project was finished.
President Xi Jinping contends that China will achieve universal prosperity by 2035 and will be the planet’s undisputed power by 2050.GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images
Xi Jinping’s emergence as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2013 was a signal moment in redefining the régime’s place within its own narrative of Chinese history, and affirming what Beijing sees as an ancient mandate ordaining China as the supreme global power.
After becoming leader, Mr. Xi set about becoming dictator. He consolidated party authority into one-man rule by removing term limits on his appointment and purging the very leadership group that had selected him in the first place. Having assumed the trifecta of Party General Secretary, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and President “for life,” Mr. Xi has made himself into an emperor-like figure whose power exceeds all his predecessors, including Mao.
This reframing of China’s nationalism, and his control over it, is critical to Mr. Xi’s ultimate thesis for global dominance: a Han master race presiding over the “Community of the Common Destiny of Mankind.”
Mr. Xi contends that China will achieve universal prosperity by 2035 and will be the planet’s undisputed power by 2050, thus rectifying perceived past humiliations of being subordinated by Japan and the west, and realizing Mr. Xi’s vision of a China-led “community of the common destiny of mankind.”
When Mr. Xi’s regime looks at resource-rich Canada, it sees a remote region “under Heaven” rather than a sovereign nation with some inalienable right to control its own territory and domestic affairs.
For China, the message to Canadians is clear: America is the past and China is the future, so we must get on the right track. Canada had better realize the rewards are great for complying with China’s political agenda, including its claim over Taiwan and military expansion in the East and South China Seas. Resistance is futile, and even the slightest opposition will have disastrous consequences for Canada’s economy.
In the 2020s, public opinion in the west toward China has been very negative, not just in Canada but in countries such as the U.S., Britain, Australia, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. By 2023 Canadian opinion reached an all-time low, fuelled by developments such as Beijing’s interference with ethnic communities in Canada, its attempts to manipulate Canada’s elections, and of course the baseless detentions of innocent Canadians Michael Kovrig, Michael Spavor, and Kevin and Julia Garratt. Only now, with Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Anand’s visit to China, does it feel like it may be possible to repair the relationship between our two countries.
Chinese leadership thinks the country will fill the global vacuum created by American nationalism.Susan Walsh/The Associated Press
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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
But there are other, less oppressive possible futures.
Some China watchers see Mr. Xi’s domestic and international ideology eventually being rejected by the Chinese people. They question the very sustainability of his Leninist model, which favours unquestioned state domination and purges non-regime actors like Alibaba founder Jack Ma or others who develop power bases that could challenge Beijing’s influence.
In China there is the expression wu ji bi fan, meaning that “when things go to extremes they must turn back.” The pendulum of history may turn back to the ideals of liberal democracy.
It is plausible that a demise of American world dominance would give way to the creation of a renewed global order where China plays a productive role in enabling sovereign states to engage in free and fair trade, but where the United Nations and other organizations that protect sovereign nations would be reinvigorated.
The work that I was doing in the 1980s and ’90s, before Mr. Xi came to power, was to try and provide the Chinese government with information about how it might transition to a governance system based on rule of law. In such a scenario, the kinds of political institutions defined in the UN charter – particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1998 and but never ratified – could become relevant to China’s political development.
A politically renewed China could lead the way against the current trend where values and organizations like the UN and WTO are being debased. Even before Mr. Trump came along, they were already showing signs of fraying. The ideals of human rights and citizenship, and of equality of all the humans on the planet, were deteriorating.
So a hopeful scenario for the future could actually emerge from the assault on our institutions by the Trumpist United States. It would be a renaissance of democracy in which popular global forces unify to counterbalance the wealth and power of global elites with reinvigorated political and multilateral institutions that are based in the inherent equal rights of free citizens.
Despite all the setbacks and unfulfilled promises of my more than half a century of intense engagement with China, I remain optimistic that the country’s best days are still ahead.