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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You open by stating that Marxism has plenty of holes, but you can't seem to think of a single one to bring up
Yes I did, you attempt to answer one of them, poorly, in your next paragraph and don't even acknowledge the one about why anyone would clean the sewers if they had no financial need or motivation to. The rest of the paragraph is trying to paint me somehow and without explanation as a coloniser. This is all the more ridiculous when put beside your denials of China's own actual colonialism.
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
No I don't, you are the one jumping around through the phases of communism. I am separating them into the now horribly unequal current China and the fantasy land of the future. I am arguing that the fantasy future is unworkable in reality and sold as an opiate to the masses because it keeps the workers from revolting.
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
How far away are we from a time where brain surgery is interchangable and as easy as cleaning a toilet? If this was actually implemented the doctor's would all just leave the country and go where their labor gets the compensation it deserves. Humans will always have differing levels of competence and why should the most competent subsidise the least or the lazy? Really though, how will you stop these people leaving the state?
but you never once elaborate on how economics has advanced since Marx.
There has been 150 years since Marx passed, do you really feel as though economics has not advanced in this time as had every other scientific discipline. There are entire university degrees covering all of these advancements. If communism is so great, how come no country has even gotten close to a full communist system? It has been almost 200 years since the publication of "The Communist Manifesto".
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
Working hours in China increased from 48.2 hours per week in August 2026 to 48.3 in September 2026. This was also in the link you sent me, it looks as though the average working hours is increasing in China if you compare these current figures with your 9 year average figure of 47 hours.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/average-weekly-hours
This is still a long average working week compared to the EU average of 35.9 hours per week. This is also just the average and does not include the massive and increasing amount of gig workers in China. The 996 culture was only outlawed in 2021 and still persists off the books. You're a great man for using government headline figures and ignoring the lived reality.
You also paint Xinjiang and Tibet as colonialism, without proving a colonial relationship
You appear to be suffering from a case of delusional selective colonialism. Do you actually need a history lesson here? China invaded Tibet in October 1950, defeating the much smaller Tibetan army and forced the signing of the 17 point agreement under duress in May of 1951 formally annexing Tibet into China. Tibet had an uprising in 1959 with a strong crackdown by the Chinese resulting in somewhere between 15,000-85,000 deaths depending on the source. Since then China has suppressed the population and their culture and language, operated forced labor (is it not called surplus value when they are not paying them?) and destroyed thousand of Buddhist monasteries. This entire country was annexed for geopolitical reasons, do I need to explain these to you too?
Xinjiang was also annexed around the same time and the local muslim Uyghur population have been forced into "re-education centres" with an unknown prison population likely 1 to 1.5 million detained since 2017. Does the forced labor in these prisons not count as surplus value stoled either? How is this any better than any other countries colonisation?
In both of these countries capitals the Han Chinese population is increasing rapidly through migration. You accuse me of being a coloniser for living in Hong Kong for a few years. I didn't annex the place though did I? Your hypocrisy is ridiculous, you call me desperate and then go and make a fool of yourself, this is too easy buddy, you make yourself look stupid and don't even realise it.
in fact, many areas see more spending from the central government to uplift them).
We also got the lie in Ireland about how much England gave us in infrastructure and development while they raped our country. You imperial types are all the same.
you cannot even comprehend basic facts about China and Marxism.
My whole point is that China is not Marxist, not even close. You are a religious fanatics who clings to the fantasy that it will be someday with nothing more than "trust me bro" to back it up. There are many countries around the world, mostly in the EU, that are far more socialist and equal in terms of wealth distribution and do not require an authoritarian state to accomplish this. You then launch into a pointless prediction, your dreams have nothing of value to add to this conversation, lets stick to reality please. Dreams are all you have because reality paints a far bleaker picture.