When [Canadian] Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Beijing in January and said Canada’s new “strategic partnership” with China set both countries up for a “new world order,” it marked a striking reversal. Less than a year earlier, on the election campaign trail, Carney had named China as Canada’s biggest security threat. And a year before the trip, the Hogue Commission’s report on foreign interference concluded that China is the most persistent and sophisticated foreign interference threat to Canada’s democratic institutions and elections.
The deal cut China’s tariff on Canadian canola seed to about 15 percent from 75.8 percent and eased duties on peas, and seafood. In return, Ottawa agreed to let in 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) a year at a 6.1 percent tariff, down from 100 percent. The partnership also covers clean energy, multilateral co-operation, people-to-people ties, and public security, including an agreement between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security, the police apparatus Beijing has used to monitor and intimidate its diaspora abroad.
The pivot comes as Carney rallies middle powers to band together against U.S. tariffs while moving closer to the world’s other superpower. Taiwan, which Beijing refuses to recognize as an independent country, and actively seeks to reunify Taiwan as part of China even by military force, shows how aggressive China can be. And as Chiense coast guard incursions into Taiwan-controlled waters have spiked in 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump has called a stalled $14-billion arms package for the island “a very good negotiating chip” with Beijing, recently adding he isn’t looking to fight a war thousands of miles away.
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Few Western journalists have watched China’s security apparatus as closely as Jürgen Kremb. A former Der Spiegel bureau chief in Beijing, Singapore, and Vienna who was expelled from China in 1998, he now teaches and conducts research at Soochow University in Taipei as a visiting scholar.
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The Hub spoke with Kremb about what Canada should learn from Taiwan as it grows its ties to China.
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Question: ... Ottawa has now signed a strategic partnership with Beijing that includes a confidential RCMP agreement with China’s Ministry of Public Security. From where you sit in Taiwan, which has lived with this pressure far longer, does closer engagement with Beijing typically restrain its interference activities abroad, or does it give them more cover and access and embolden them?
Jürgen Kremb: It’s police and domestic security, and they work like the FBI. There are also members of their staff who work as agents, suppressing dissidents and different opinions. This ministry has about 2 million staff in China … and they open police stations in foreign countries, including Canada. The same in Europe and Australia [and other countries]. Of course that’s against the law of other countries, just as the U.S. or Canada cannot open a police station in Beijing.
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China now is the biggest threat to the security of a lot of countries, because they steal intellectual property, they intimidate their dissidents abroad, they intimidate people who are speaking out against China, they operate a lot of media. So we really have to take the threat seriously… And of course the primary target is Taiwan.
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Taiwan is the testing ground, [but it’s also being] executed against other democratic societies, the so-called West, but the so-called West also includes South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, etc.
Xi Jinping wants to rule the world–Western politicians simply cannot comprehend this. He wants to destroy the liberal concept of Western democracies because their very existence poses a threat to his dictatorship.
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Chinese cars are basically spies on four wheels. In Israel, in Sweden or Norway, and in Japan, Chinese cars are not allowed anymore into military installations because where there are cameras, they are actively spying on the surroundings and sending this data back to China.
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What happens if you work too closely with China? First, you seem to have access to a big, big market and make a lot of money. But one day it’s over, and your whole industry base collapses. So if Canada decides to go that way with closer relations to China, look twice and be very careful, and you could lose more than you gain.
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If you’re getting very close to China, in the end you might not be in the driver’s seat of your own country or of your key industry, because the Chinese sooner or later will overtake your products and influence your domestic policy.
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I never claimed to be an authority on Marxism, although I am flattered you think I am one. Marxism is an outdated economic philosophy that sounds lovely but has more plot holes than a Fast and Furious movie. I know enough about it to be sure that it would not work due to its ridiculous assumptions about society and human nature. Then there is you who holds Marxism up as a universal truth right up there with the Laws of Thermodynamics or the Theory of Relativity.
I was never a "coloniser" of Hong Kong, just an immigrant living in what was a fantastic international city with my wife whose parents are from there, along with her family that still live there. What an idiotic attempt to disparage me and then try and use that to disparage my own views on socialism as an Irish person.
The critical importance of them being the same class is that they both share a collective interest as a class, that interest being collectivization of production and distribution
This is another one of your fallacies, this is where theory and reality clash and you can't handle it. The doctor on $150,000+ is not nearly as incentivised as the farmer/worker on $5000. The doctor is at the top end of society and would like to stay that way. If communism was fully implemented tomorrow the next day you will quickly find all the doctors have emigrated unless you build a wall to keep them in. We all know the Chinese government is not above targeting the families of dissident emigrants, what a great system of government, imagine how much worse this will have to get?
This does not mean variance within a class is sufficient to be a class of themselves.
In your flawed opinion....
The types of workers that most occupy the CPC do tend to be more educated, and therefore make more money, it's true, but this is not a bad thing
You sound an awful lot like a capitalist here!
The working poor are not "fed some bullshit
Yes they are, as the factory owners steal their surplus labor.
Who cares if some few capitalists get wealthier if the whole of society prospers?
Again, spoken like a true capitalist!
Your arguments about "human nature" are, frankly, childish and absurd. Again, you make a mockery of yourself, thinking Marx never accounted for incentives.
If my arguments are childish and absurd they should be easy to argue against. You don't even try, resorting to ad hominem attacks, that's low buddy. Marx did account for incentives, badly, especially in light of everything we have learned in the last 150 years regarding human psychology.
You discredit the "comical idea of equal pay" instead of realising that this is a simplified explanation of the end stage of communism. Once the productive forces are so advanced that pay is no longer required we are at a situation where regardless of your job you get the same as everyone else. As someone who worked hard to get a well paid job, I would be out of my country if they tried pull that bullshit on me. This is the competitive nature of humans, why does some lazy asshole deserve the same as me when I work my hole off?
is a hypothesis of an era where production and distribution is so advanced that anyone, regardless of background, is sufficiently trained to perform any act of labor in society and thus all labor be interchangeable.
So when all the brain surgeons leave, Larry the farmer out in the field can interchangeably perform the brain surgery. Do you even read what you are writing? The plot holes are everywhere. Modern society is so much more specialised now than in the days of Marx.
You then continue to embarrass yourself by claiming China has been an imperial power for its entire history, ignoring the century of humiliation when it was a colony
Again your lack of historical knowledge is showing, China was never fully colonised by the Europeans during the century of humiliation. The Japanese did colonise parts of China for a few years last century. This also does not invalidate the fact that China was an imperial power. Losing a war does not erase the past or future, China has been blobbing out across the map since it began in the heartland. Xinjiang and Tibet are two of China's more recent colonial expansions where they are actively committing cultural genocide and locking up the local Uyghur population in "re-education" centres. As you point fingers at western colonialism, pay attention to the 3 fingers pointing back at yourself you hypocrite. "Annexing territory is not imperialism" sure buddy, the Chinese people just needed lebensraum right?
You occupy a stance that despices Marxism and Marxists
I do not despise Marxism, as I said before it is a noble idea and a good starting point, but absolutely unworkable in real life. I do despise fanatical modern Marxists in a similar way to religious fanatics because it takes over their whole world view and ego. When the plot holes are pointed out they tend to defend the indefensible because their whole world will crash down if they can no longer be a Marxist.
Regarding trade unions, the All China Federation of Trade Unions is extremely effective at supporting worker rights
Which is why Chinese workers work in such shitty conditions with long hours and no work life balance? It is because the ruling party can accept no challenge to their absolute authoritarian control.
Discussion of June 4th is not censored,
the ones that are persecuted are the ones that uplift the color revolution as a good thing
You have just contradicted yourself. Ceremonies rembering those that died in the heavy handed crackdown are a threat to the government.
It isn't a lengthy period of sacrifice for an eventual 180 pivot to communism, it's a gradual process of constant improvement that results in higher degrees of socialization:
This is the lie that is sold to placate the poor working class. Your great grandchildrens lives will be better if you just sacrifice for the good of the country. Wealth inequality in China has only been increasing rapidly in the last 30 years, this doesn't sound like constant improvement to me? You say "workers wages have skyrocketed" this is true with the caveat that when you start from such a low starting point the initial gains are easy and look impressive in percentage terms, let's see what happens now that the Chinese economy is slowing down and aging rapidly with increased global protectionism. My bet is the current trend in China of the wealthy getting wealthier will continue. I am not going to read your religious pamphlet and do not expect to convince you either because you have drank the kool aid of fundamentalism.