Facing China: Canada between fear and hope
| Author | Jeremy Paltiel |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702018792908 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
2018, Vol. 73(3) 343–363
Facing China: Canada
! The Author(s) 2018
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between fear and hope
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702018792908
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Jeremy Paltiel
Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Abstract
This paper examines the challenges Canada faces in forging a diplomacy appropriate for
the changing power configuration in global politics. The reshaping of the international
order—with China pushing for a more hierarchical view of international relations, and
the administration of Donald Trump repositioning the USA in global politics—provides
Canada with the impetus to rediscover the traditional role that middle powers played as
reliable middle managers for the global project. Today, such ‘‘middle management’’ is
deprived of a reliable role. Since China has yet to articulate a coherent normative vision
of a new global order, and the USA is retreating to a purely transactional view of trade
and diplomacy, Canada and other middle powers have few choices other than to try to
adapt to the changes in the hopes of sustaining the normative mesh that has upheld the
post-war order.
Keywords
Canadian foreign policy, China, middle power, global order, liberal internationalism,
trade and diplomacy, Asia Pacific
After nine years of ideologically-tinged ambivalent relations between Canada and
China, Justin Trudeau has embarked on a vigorous effort to restore Sino–Canadian
relations to a positive new trajectory. This has been met with skeptical and bor-
derline hostile responses from opinion leaders who not only object to China’s
human rights record, but question whether it is even possible to build a relationship
with the Chinese regime on a reciprocal basis at all.1 This paper reviews these
1.
The effort to engage China has been consistently and forcefully objected to in the editorial
and opinion pages of Canada’s leading national newspaper The Globe and Mail. The
principal academic voice of opposition to closer relations has been Prof. Charles Burton, who has
frequently been featured on its opinion pages: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/does-
trudeau-really-believe-trade-with-china-is-free/article37166201/;
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Corresponding author:
Jeremy Paltiel, Carleton University, Political Science, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6,
Canada.
Email: jeremy.paltiel@carleton.ca
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International Journal 73(3)
arguments in the context of the existing challenges of the bilateral relationship and
what this means for Canada to build a middle power diplomacy appropriate for the
power configuration of the twenty-first (Pacific) century. The disjuncture between
our ambition and the orientation and capacity of our foreign policy and security
institutions keeps our engagement at best fragile, and highly contingent. Deepening
our institutional engagement runs into problems of capacity on one hand, and the
absence of an appropriate normative framework on the other.
Since the opening of diplomatic relations with China nearly fifty years ago, the
circumstances of our relationship have shifted dramatically. This paper reviews the
premise which guided our relationship, and follows its decomposition in the current
era. The premise from the beginning was that we were helping to bring China into
the global community, and that this process would have a benign impact on China
and enhance Canada’s own status in the world. Moreover, despite misgivings from
some quarters at the outset, it was assumed that this would complement our middle
power diplomacy anchored in our relationship to our senior ally to the south.
Three developments radically altered the premise: first, China’s spectacular
growth and expansion of its power in multiple dimensions reversed our positioning
in the scales of global influence; second, economic success has reinforced, rather
than attenuated the centrality of the Communist Party in its political system, bely-
ing assumptions about the corrosive effects of market economics on its authoritar-
ian regime; and third, the rise of nativist and protectionist populism under Donald
Trump (partially in reaction to relative loss of US power attendant on globalization
and the rise of China) has shifted the grounds beneath our alliance.
This paper will show that Canada built its relations with China without con-
comitant hard power capacity in the Western Pacific, and largely as an auxiliary
add-on to our transatlantic relations. Whatever leverage we had in the relationship
was largely determined by an accumulated legacy of good will premised on our self-
perception of agents of China’s transformation. However, when that transform-
ation failed to materialize on our terms, and instead China emerged as a powerful
influence of its own even on our own domestic markets, that hope became tinged
with fear. Growing Chinese power became associated with illiberal government,
environmental depredation, and cold materialism. Furthermore, as the USA wav-
ered in its commitment to global leadership of a liberal order, Canada lost a bul-
wark against which to spread benign influence worldwide, even as it sought to
engage China in pursuit of a globalist agenda of multilateralism and global custo-
dianship. Canada’s relationship with China founders on a weak normative and
institutional lattice on which to sustain a relationship that is materially rewarding
and politically complementary to our middle power ambitions.
Canada’s relationship with China was born of hope and wavers on fear. In
between, exaggerated optimism and a misty view of unbounded opportunity suc-
cumbed to unrealized dreams and a mix of borrowed and self-generated anxieties.
opinion/editorials/globe-editorial-the-breakdown-of-canada-china-talks-is-a-blessing-in-disguise/arti-
cle37191818/ (both accessed 3 January 2018).
Paltiel
345
Much of our relationship with China has been characterized by phantom projec-
tion joined with absent-minded attention to our self-interest.
Canada built a ‘‘special’’ relationship with China on an understanding that we
were destined and uniquely qualified to bring China into international soci-
ety—both because we were so securely anchored into the structure of global gov-
ernance that we helped elaborate during the post-war era, and second, because we
perceived ourselves as unencumbered by constraints of colonial and imperialist
baggage.2 We projected a special relationship on the conviction of a benevolent
mission with a carefree view of a relationship conveniently beyond our core inter-
ests and primary partnerships.
Canada was never comfortable in excluding China from international society
and particularly from the United Nations (UN).3 Canada acceded to pressure from
the USA only in the darkest days of the Cold War largely because it saw this as
essential to consolidating the Atlantic Alliance. With the alliance secure and the
threat of nuclear weapons growing, when China emerged as a nuclear power,
Canada actively sought to bring it back into the community of nations.4 In opening
relations in the midst of China’s self-imposed isolation occasioned by the Cultural
Revolution, we played a vanguard role among Western nations, basking in the
afterglow of the euphoria generated by the Kissinger–Zhou Enlai/Nixon–Mao
match-up, and unfettered by the strategic complications of abandoning Taiwan
and side-lining Japan. We stretched the boundaries of the Western alliance without
sacrificing anything in return. We had modest expectations of improved trade, and
benign hope for a more inclusive global structure.
Following the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of reform and
opening changed our calculus of the stakes and outcome. We enthusiastically
launched a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) development
program aimed at providing the software of a modern market economy and build-
ing linkages with China through educational institutions that we hoped would help
to transform Chinese society in our image. Such hopes at the state-to-state level
were shattered by the events at Tiananmen in 1989, but our focus on the human
dimension of interaction kept our doors open and persuaded us to resume our aid
program soon after. For the last quarter of the twentieth century, Canada
expended a significant effort into bringing China into international society. Once
Deng Xiaoping opened China’s door and began the process of market reform,
Canada took a lead in assisting China’s efforts to ‘‘link rails to the world,’’ not
just through bilateral and multilateral engagement but through a targeted policy of
international assistance. Informally, the initial floating of an aid program was
2.
For an insistent critique of the benign view of Canada’s relations with China, see Bruce Gilley,
‘‘Reawakening Canada’s China policy,’’ Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 14, no 2 (2008): 121–130.
3.
See Paul M. Evans and B. Michael Frolic, eds., Reluctant Adversaries: Canada and the People’s
Republic of China, 1949–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
4.
This began with the initiative of Paul Martin Sr., Canada’s foreign minister, to bring the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) into the UN in 1966. For the background, see Der Yuan Wu,
‘‘Institutional development and adaptability: Canada, Taiwan and the construction of ‘One
China’’’ (PhD dissertation, Carleton University, 2001), esp. 116–128.
346
International Journal 73(3)
communicated as a return, a kind of kickback on...
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