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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The USSR ended famine in the 1930s, after it collectivized and industrialized agriculture with combine-harvestors. Outside of wartime, there were no more famines. China went through a similar route, once they had industrialized agriculture,
You fail to mention that in both empires the famines ended because they changed the way the system worked introducing market incentives. The Chinese rejected the collectivisation model in favour of the Household Responsibility System. You dismiss the power of direct financial incentives in all of our dealings because it doesn't fit your theories but it is what works in the real world.
Regarding the tendency for markets to centralize, this is a fact.
The paper you sent that I have a quick read of (I am not and I am sure you have not read the whole thing!) is based on capitalist economies and the tenancy towards monopoly.
"Along these dimensions, our data (outside the U.S.) come from European countries (Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Denmark, and the U.K.), Canada, Australia, Singapore, and South Korea. "
You are again ignoring the role of financial incentives in centralisation. Your logic is along the lines of "chickens are animals, chickens lay eggs. Cows are also animals, therefore cows also lay eggs."
As for your adventures in Hong Kong, you deliberately referred to the colonial era as "cool," and the part where China regained its sovereignty as bad
So I am a colonist because I though Hong Kong was cool before China reneged on its promises and imposed it's authoritarian rule over the people. You just put labels on things that you like or don't like but don't even understand the meanings the rest of the world understands for these words.
Tibetans and Uyghurs are Chinese. They are not Han, but Han people living in Xinjiang and Tibet are not colonizers.
They are Chinese by force, these regions were annexed under military force. Since you are so slippery with your language, let's get a few definitions clear so you can understand that China is just as much of an empire as the west you despise for the same reason.
Imperialism: The policy or practice of a nation extending its power and influence over other countries or regions, often through military force, economic dominance, or political control.
Empire: A large political unit or sovereign state made up of several distinct territories or nations ruled by a single supreme authority (such as an emperor, monarch, or dominant government).
Colonization is the act or process by which a nation or foreign power sends people to settle in, take control of, and govern another country, territory, or region
Immigration is not colonialism
You said it was when I did it, get your story straight you absolute hypocrite.
Colonialism is a relationship between exploiter and exploited, and central China is not exploiting periphery China.
I have already discussed the forced labor which I will return to later. China also extracts resources from these regions. Xinjiang produces a massive share of the worlds polysilicon critical for solar panels, beryllium critical for semiconductors. 10% of the worlds aluminium comes from Xinjiang which is exploited by the Chinese automotive industry. Xinjiang also produces the majority of China's cotton, heavily utilising forced harvesting labor to supply global brands.
Then we get to the cultural and demographic eradication. Systemic birth suppression, under the Law on Promoting ethnic Unity and Progress we get forced sterilisation, forced abortions, mandatory IUD implantation. Birthrates in Hogan and Kashgar have plummeted by 60-84%. Forced separation of children when parents are sent to labor or "re-education camps" these state run camps strip the children of their language, religion and culture. Physical erasure of thousands of mosques, shrines, graveyards and monuments.
In Tibet we have more of the same with state owned enterprises engaging in large scale mining of gold, copper lithium and rare earth minerals. Displacement of nomadic peoples to build these mines. China has built or planned 200 mega scale hydroelectric dams on Tibet's rivers since 2000. These dams are built primarily to export power to Chinese industrial centers. We also have similar cultural eradication programmes to Xinjiang.
Both states serve as a testing ground for China's surveillance economy. Over 1400 Chinese tech firms have used Xinjiang's population to test predictive policing, biometric data collection, facial recognition and gait analysis tracking etc.
Sounds an awful lot like an exploitative imperial colonisation project to me. You are probably too busy licking boots to notice or do any research on the subject.
As for the claims of forced labor, these are false. I already provided evidence of this.
Now on to this one, how dare you insult both of our intelligences by dismissing a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights with a report from a think tank with opaque funding. Given their editorial slant it is quite obvious that they are funded by China. This is about as much use as saying well China disputes that China is using forced labor against it's subjugated people's. Would you believe a report written by the Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute?
China is just as bad as the other imperial nations, you are an imperial apologist. As for Ireland, I am under no illusion what Ireland is currently, we are a small nation and as such are not a rule maker but a rule taker. We do just fine and have managed to rise from poverty to prosperity by playing our own game within the system we have been placed in.