Meeting with Dalai Lama adds balance to policy
By MIRO CERNETIG
Throughout the ’90s, Canada ignored Tibet. We left its Buddhist monks and 2.6 million Tibetans alone in their struggle on “the roof of the world,” fighting for cultural survival.
When it came to China, Canada’s previous prime minister was all business. In opposition, Jean Chrétien found it convenient to meet the Dalai Lama. Once in power, where he launched his Team Canada missions to win a slice of the Chinese market, the Dalai Lama became persona non grata at 24 Sussex Dr. His request for meetings with Chrétien went unanswered.
And that’s the way the Middle Kingdom’s rulers, overseeing an exploding market that Western powers coveted, wanted it.
Anyone who followed Canada-Chinese relations at that time knows the story arc. After a brief flurry of outrage after the 1989 massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, the world’s major economies quickly faced the reality that the repressive regime was also emerging as an economic giant. Most rationalized that the best way to improve human rights — and stop the arrests of Tibetan monks, not to mention pro-democracy Chinese — was to “engage” China.
Left unsaid, but known by all, is that policy of engagement meant — and still means — big bucks for Canadian business and the federal government. A booming China, running short on electrical power, offers up one of the few markets to sell our beleaguered Candu nuclear rectors. The unprecedented urban development has sparked a huge construction boom. Scores of multibillion-dollar highways and railways are now being laid, some straight into Tibet. China’s cities are expanding their rapid transit systems. And don’t forget that multibillion-dollar market for airplanes, to ferry around China’s increasingly mobile middle class. Canadian companies, particularly the Quebec-based firms such as Power Corp. and Bombardier, have been major bidders.
It comes at a price, though. Every $1 billion may create 12,000 Canadian jobs, as Chrétien often said. But to win those contracts from the Communist regime, the Chrétien government also deemed it best not to make too much of a fuss about human rights.
Yes, Chrétien did make a few, desultory speeches about China’s abysmal human rights record. Ottawa did launch some small-scale programs to teach the regime the theories of justice. But it was mostly lip service.
Chrétien’s attention to human rights was best encapsulated by former secretary of state for Asia, Raymond Chan. On a trip to Tibet in 2000, he was given a rare tour of the Drapchi prison in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Chan never was able to talk to any prisoners. Actually, it’s hard to know if he even tried, since Beijing blocked Canadian reporters from attending. Yet, Chan emerged from his prison tour, declaring, to the delight of the Chinese and the dismay of human rights activists, “it’s a model prison I guess. It’s well set up, clean, people seem happy.” Two years earlier, 10 inmates were believed to have been killed in a riot.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Paul Martin might have seemed to be adding a much delayed dose of balance to Canada’s China policy. Martin’s scheduling of a “spiritual meeting” in Ottawa with the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled leader, sent an important message to Beijing: As much as we are reliant on China’s growth, Western powers no longer need to push aside their inherent democratic values to win a place in the market.
The Chinese government was furious when the meeting was announced. In a statement, China’s embassy warned him that meeting “a splittist” such as the Dalai Lama would be like China’s leader recognizing a separatist-minded premier of Quebec. “We hope Canada, which has its own problem with Quebec, will understand our position,” the embassy declared in a statement.
To Martin’s credit, he quickly attacked this odious comparison.
Quebec’s churches may now be as empty as Tibetan monasteries. But here it is because Quebecers freely choose not to attend a house of worship, not because the People’s Army bulldozed them to the ground. Quebecers have also been given the democratic choice — twice since 1976 — to vote on separation from Canada. A Tibetan who campaigns for independence from the motherland would be sent to Drapchi prison for a long time. When then-Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard took his Team Quebec to Beijing, a political move to assert Quebec’s independence, China’s rulers rolled out the red carpet.
Martin did dither before agreeing to meet the Dalai Lama, knowing his shifting of protocol would roil China-Canada relations for years. But the simple truth is when that it comes to business, what will see Canada win its place in the Chinese market is our cutting-edge products and expertise, not selling out important principles.
And when it comes to Tibet, Martin may just have a product China’s rulers could really use: a 21st-century model for the relatively peaceful coexistence of “a nation within a nation,” one that has lasted since 1867.
