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.
...
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.
...
The Hub spoke with Kremb about what Canada should learn from Taiwan as it grows its ties to China.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
You open by stating that Marxism has plenty of holes, but you can't seem to think of a single one to bring up. You defend your past as a colonizer and stating that colonial Hong Kong was "cool," and again hide behind your Irish ancestry as though victims of colonialism cannot contribute to it. It's all very desparate on your part.
The biggest issue you bring up here is that you think the age where people can be split into surgeons and industrial laborers and the age where people will be paid according to need are the same (and notably, equal pay is never a thing, because need is unequal). When you reference end-stage communism, you are referring to an era where labor is fully interchangeable, both because of polytechnical education and tools making every job as easy as possible. Until that era is achieved, distribution will be according to labor, meaning higher skilled labor is paid more.
You take such a simple confusion on your own part and then pretend you've cracked Marxism, but you never once elaborate on how economics has advanced since Marx. I fully accept the advancements of thinkers like Lenin, Cheng Enfu, Walter Rodney, etc, so it isn't like Marxism is static either.
The rest of your comment is a bunch of unsourced claims that came to you in a dream. Average working hours in China are typically around 47 hours per week. You also paint Xinjiang and Tibet as colonialism, without proving a colonial relationship, Tibet and Xinjiang are a part of China and are not pilfered of surplus value (in fact, many areas see more spending from the central government to uplift them).
You also reject reading a short pamphlet on the grounds of it being "religious," which is ridiculous. Roland Boer is a professor of Marxism in China that studies the Chinese system, there is no better way to quickly grasp how the Chinese system functions from a Chinese perspective than this. All it is is relaying how their system works, if simple facts are religion to you then it's no wonder that you cannot even comprehend basic facts about China and Marxism.
Here's a prediction of my own: worker wages will continue to rapidly rise. Wealth inequality will rise in the short run, but by the end of the century there will be a reverse in trend as developing industries advance beyond the point at which marketization is useful, and are increasingly folded into the public sector. This trend will continue until all of the economy is fully planned.