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'm not "quiet" about forced labor, I already disproved it. I linked a source comprehensively debunking it, and you responded with disproven statistics from a fascist and paid propagandist, Adrian Zenz.
As for collectivization causing famine, this is incorrect. Famine was common in Russia and China before collectivization. Both countries ended famine through collectivization and industrialization of agriculture, with their last major famines happening alongside collectivization and industrialization, never after this process was completed. Market mechanisms were introduced well after this process ended famine already.
As for 100% "award," I meant aware, just like I assume you mean "tendency" rather than "tenancy." Collectivized production is already highly efficient at large scales, the top entities in democratic China are state owned, and in authoritarian capitalist economies some of the most important industries are run publicly in order to keep society functioning.
As for colonialism, I quite obviously mean the extraction of surplus value and the erasure of autonomy. The fact that resources are extracted in Xinjiang and Tibet does not mean this is coming at the expense of Uyghur or Tibetan autonomy or surplus value. Again, I already proved that investment into those regions outweighs anything flowing out. You're also taking the chauvanist stance that erases the autonomy of these regions, just like you see China breaking off British colonialism as "going back on their promises to Hong Kong." It's naked support for colonialism and a failed attempt to attribute colonialism to China on your part.
The UN report should be read in full, along with the resources I already linked and China's response. The site I linked is not a "Chinese think tank," if you spent more than 3 seconds on that website you would know that they are westerners. You have this strange idea that in a court, only the accusation should be listened to, not the defense. You aren't even aware that your data comes straight from Adrian Zenz! Do your due dilligence, any claims of coming from a medical background come into question when you aren't even willing to investigate sources for claims you believe, and aren't willing to hear counter-evidence.
I want to repeat: you are a sham dentist if you cannot even entertain looking at counter-evidence, and are fully unaware of the origin of the sources you blindly believe. You outright stating that you will not listen to China for their defense means you would have sided with the baseless genocide of the Iraqi people over allegations of WMD. It's the same situation, and yet you let your chauvanism get in the way of your trained scientific background.
I want you to read that paragraph over and over again. Until you show yourself some respect and actually act like someone trained in science, you will only make a fool of yourself publicly in order to support your baseless ideology.