*Photo: Fred Dufour/The Canadian Press/AP, Pool Photo*

Written by: Steve Lalla

As Canada approached its September 20 federal election, the country’s dominant political parties resorted to anti-China rhetoric to earn votes. Similar unscrupulous attempts to appeal to voters’ basest motives have a long history in Canada, are seemingly welcomed by compliant media outlets, and may find fertile ground with sinophobic sentiments growing strong in Canada.

The political economy of genocide accusations
Earlier this year, Canada followed disgraced US President Trump and spuriously declared the Communist Party of China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang to be a “genocide.” The Trump administration’s unfounded accusation and Canada’s subsequent parroting of the claim—with nary a peep of dissent from parliament—did not take geopolitical analysts by surprise:

“The ‘democrats’ of the West supported the Islamists in Afghanistan, today they are instruments in the US hegemonic strategy of attempting to break up China,” wrote the late Samir Amin presciently in his 2019 book The Long Revolution of the Global South. “The interests of peoples have nothing to do with it. The US hegemonists have proven that point themselves, with their unconditional support for the worst regimes—the most criminal imaginable. Their rhetoric about ‘democracy’ and ‘rights of peoples’ has no credibility. The possible independence of Tibet and Xinjiang would inevitably end in unbelievable social regression and a strategic (perhaps even military) takeover of these countries by the United States. This is the actual aim of the strategy pursued by Washington and its… allies.”

The administration of disgraced President Trump made the “genocide” allegation on his last day in office, two weeks after Trump had incited the storming of DC’s Capitol by thousands of his right-wing and neo-fascist followers. Nevertheless, the genocide charge was taken at face value by Canadian politicians across the board. A month after the last-minute declaration, Canada also accused China of committing genocide against the Uighur population of Xinjiang—particularly ironic as Canada, like the US, is a nation founded on actual genocide.

Even US State Department lawyers concluded that China’s treatment of its Uighur population did not constitute genocide, as Foreign Policy detailed in an article (“State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China”) published just three days before Canadian parliament’s craven declaration. The equally timorous Biden administration also concurred with Trump and Pompeo’s belligerent assessment. “Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred... against the predominantly Muslim Uighurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” stated a report prepared by the Biden administration in March, 2021.

As The Canada Files revealed in February 2021, the Canadian subcomittee report on the alleged Uighur genocide was prepared by researchers funded by the CIA and the notorious US “regime”-change organization National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The subcommittee report, which laid the groundwork for the parliamentary vote, chose not to hear testimony from any of China’s numerous defenders, instead inviting individuals such as Adrian Zenz, senior fellow at the DC-based anti-communist think tank Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The Trump administration’s claims were echoed by Canada’s social democratic party, the NDP. "The actions meet the definition of genocide,” said NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Jack Harris in February, 2021. “There's undeniable evidence." When the vote in parliament occurred on February 22, 2021, the majority of parliamentarians weren’t present, but those that did show up, including MPs from the Liberals, Green Party, and the NDP—with the exception of Don Davies and Niki Ashton—unanimously endorsed a Conservative motion to label China’s treatment of its Uighur population as a “genocide.”

A handful of US allies followed in Canada’s footsteps and accepted the condemnation of China. While one might expect Muslim-dominated countries to rush to the defence of their Muslim brethren in Xinjiang, instead they have lined up to praise China’s human rights record. Numerous nations signed statements to the UN dismissing the US allegations, including Muslim-led Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates, among others. Imperialist mouthpieces such as CNN denounced the Muslim nations’ defense of China’s human rights record as “shattering any myths of Islamic solidarity,” when the opposite was the case: the position held by so many Muslim-led nations is notable as an issue on which they all agreed.

Canada: A hotbed of China-hating
Crowned by the tragic mass killing in Atlanta of March 16, 2021, a corresponding increase in sinophobic crimes inevitably swept Canada and the US with the ratcheting up of anti-China invective.

Canadians have been singled out as the worst offender in this category, even outdoing notoriously racist US citizens. “Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous US cities combined,” a major US news outlet wrote in May, 2021, for example.

A survey released in June 2021 by Canada’s Angus Reid Institute found that 58% of Asian Canadians had suffered discrimination over the past year alone. A two-year study by University of Toronto’s Weiguo Zhang concluded that discriminatory incidents in Canada’s Chinese community had more than tripled in 2021.

“People with high income or low income, people who speak English or don’t speak English, people who come earlier or new arrivals—there’s no difference,” said Zhang. “Nobody is protected by money, gender, disability or language abilities. It’s not because of status—it’s because of our appearance and racial background… Chinese people have experienced historical systemic discrimination.”

Hate codified into law
Canadian discrimination against immigrants from China is as old as the country itself. “Anti-Asian racism has been present in Canada for centuries. It is deeply rooted in the historical formation of Canada through the Chinese head tax, Japanese internment camps, the Electoral Franchise Act, which explicitly denied Chinese Canadians the right to vote, and more,” wrote Cary Wu and a group of 14 Asian-Canadian scholars in April, 2021. “It is embedded within the minds of Canadians… Between 1895 and 1950, there were more than 175 anti-Asian laws in Canada. They were created to assure white domination.”

September is a fitting month in which to recall the passage of Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act on September 1, 1923, “almost entirely banning the migration of Chinese into Canada… the only law in Canada that banned a specific nationality from entering the country.”

The law was preceded by the US Exclusion Act passed 40 years earlier, and by Canada’s 1885 Act to Restrict and Regulate Chinese Immigration, which placed a prohibitive head tax on any immigrant arriving from China and a burdensome tax on any land ownership by a Chinese immigrant. All of these laws remained in effect until after Canada signed the UN Charter of Human Rights in 1947, which contravened the discriminatory laws.

Since the earliest years of the Dominion of Canada, “a range of discriminatory laws and policies prohibited Chinese Canadians from owning property, serving the public, and entering certain professions,” according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

“That Canada should desire to restrict immigration from the Orient is regarded as natural,” stated Mackenzie King, who served as Canada’s prime minister as recently as 1948. “That Canada should remain a white man’s country is believed to be not only desirable for economic and social reasons but highly necessary on political and national grounds.” The country’s longest serving head of state, King was Canada’s prime minister for over 21 years.

Canada’s role in China’s century of humiliation
“The British drug lords waged two wars against China to push opium, in 1839 and in 1856,” recalled William Ging Wee Dere, Chinese-Canadian author of Being Chinese in Canada: The Struggle for Identity, Redress, and Belonging in March of this year. “Britain seized Hong Kong and forced China to sign unequal treaties, which led to a century of humiliation. A dozen European colonial and imperial powers occupied China. The European powers incited psychological and cultural phobia among their population with the concept of the ‘yellow peril’ to justify their racist exploitation of China and to instill fear and hatred against the Chinese… For 62 years in Canada’ history, 1885 to 1947, there was standing legislation against Chinese immigrants. I am saying this to show that anti-Chinese, anti-Asian racism is embedded in Canadian history, long before Huawei or the racist assaults we are facing today during the pandemic. The present demonization of China to justify the Cold War by Western powers, will lead to more anti-Chinese racism as the ‘yellow peril’ meets the ‘red menace.’”

British economist Angus Maddison estimated that China’s GDP was the greatest of all nations, almost without interruption, from the years 1500 until 1870. From the time of European expansion during the 17th and 18th centuries until 1949, China was subject to mounting exploitation by imperialist powers, primarily UK, France, Russia, Japan and US, and had dipped to the world’s fourth-largest GDP by 1950. In October 1949, the People’s Republic of China was founded and the territory was able to reassert its sovereignty. As a junior partner to British and then US imperialism in particular, Canada joined in these wars and campaigns of economic destabilization against the Asian giant, including “tacit support” for Japan’s invasion of China’s Manchuria region in 1931, which led to the 15-year Japanese occupation and the creation of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo.

“Whatever may be thought of the moral or ethical rights of the Japanese to be in and to exercise control over Manchuria, their presence there must be recognized as a stabilizing and regulating force,” stated Canadian diplomat Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside, who opened the first Canadian embassy in Japan in 1929. Although the term “genocide” was not in use yet, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria has been qualified as such by numerous writers since, with particular attention paid to the infamous Japanese biological warfare department Unit 731.

Among Unit 731’s documented crimes were vivisections of thousands of living men, women, and children, without anesthesia, frequently after they have been infected with a variety of diseases. In these experiments Chinese citizens were used as living experimental subjects and had limbs amputated and internal organs removed. Plague-infected fleas developed in Unit 731 were spread over Chinese cities. After Japan’s defeat in World War 2, Unit 731 scientists were granted immunity by the US in exchange for the data they gathered through the experiments. Historians estimate that up to half a million people, mostly Chinese, were killed by Unit 731 and related biological and chemical warfare programs.

Today, Canadians must consider facing the tragedies of the past, cutting the cord, and delinking from the US-led imperialist order. However, Canada’s political elite and its centers of cultural production do not appear to be embracing their responsibilities.

Canada’s 2021 elections: fanning the flames
In a bid to reinstate the country’s racist legislation of the past, Canada’s leading parties have fallen over each other making promises to ban foreigners from buying property as they campaign for the September 20 federal election. In an attempt to legitimize this deviation from the free market economic principles they otherwise emphatically espouse, the nation’s largest news outlets have hastened to portray these campaign pledges as bulwarks against the imagined threat of a resurgent China.

“Outrage over housing affordability is increasingly directed at foreign buyers, especially in Vancouver, whose real estate has become increasingly popular among non-resident buyers from China and Hong Kong,” wrote National Post last week. “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to introduce a two-year ban on foreign home buyers to tackle housing affordability in Canada if he’s re-elected.”

The Liberal “promise” immediately followed the Conservative Party’s pledge to effectuate a similar two-year ban on foreigners purchasing housing. “We'll tackle the housing crisis by... banning foreign investors from buying homes if they don't plan on living here,” Conservative leader Erin O’Toole added on Twitter. The NDP is not far behind, promising to enact a 20% foreign buyers’ tax on any sales of homes to non-Canadians and non-permanent residents.

Ottawa-based Global News reporter and author Sam Cooper recently published the book Wilful Blindness, in which he writes about the purchase of Canadian real estate for money-laundering purposes by criminal actors. Instead of providing a critique of capitalism, the economic system that encourages corruption, Cooper points the finger at Chinese criminals, supposedly in the service of China’s Communist Party, who have allegedly bought up Canadian housing units to infiltrate the nation’s superstructure with drugs and spies and destroy Canada from within.

“In Sam Cooper’s world, every Chinese person is either a Communist infiltrator, a murderous criminal, a triad drug dealer, an arms smuggler, a casino money launderer, a gambling addict, a human rights-abusing politician, a housing speculator, or a helpless victim to all of the above,” wrote Ng Weng Hoong in a recent review. “There is no mention of Canada’s long history with systemic racism and Sinophobia, and nothing about the anti-Asian hate currently sweeping across North America and Australia. Sinophobia is really a fabrication of the CCP’s propaganda. It is all but impossible to accuse the Global News star investigative reporter of balanced, thoughtful writing.”

Unsurprisingly, CBC was more generous in their assessment of the new book. A web page devoted to publicizing it referred to the publication as a “powerful narrative,” and asked “Could China and Iran have insight into Canada's deepest national security secrets and influence on investigations?”

Ironically, Cooper openly admits that his sources come almost exclusively from the DEA, RCMP, CSIS, and “the US national security community.”

CSIS only exists because the RCMP engaged in so much criminality that it lost a major part of its mandate, and CSIS has simply continued the RCMP’s terrible record. Meanwhile, when the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is expelled from Latin American nations, drug trafficking levels actually drop drastically—illustrated most recently by the example of Bolivia. It is impossible to estimate how many war crimes the US national security community has been incriminated in for the last 80 years or so, yet Cooper blindly accepts its accusations. According to Cooper, his sources in the RCMP, CSIS, and DEA told him that, just like the debunked narrative pushed against Lebanese political party Hezbollah, China’s “objective with fentanyl” is to weaponize the drug, flood enemy cities with it to increase addiction and healthcare costs, and use the profits for guns and bombs. If this is what CBC considers a “powerful narrative,” we should be exceedingly wary of hearing it soon from the mouths of Canadian politicians.

See Cooper’s admission in the image below.

Leading parties scrambled to pronounce themselves as enemies of China. The NDP platform, revealed on August 12, promised that Jagmeet Singh would “stand up to China” if elected. China is “actively threatening Canada,” the party stated in a recent survey conducted by the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute. The Conservative Party released its platform on August 16, asserting that “the communist leadership represents a clear and rising threat to Canadian interests—and our values.” Mentioning China 31 times in total, the Conservatives claim in their platform that China has abducted Canadian citizens, targeted the Canadian economy, and—quite absurdly when we consider Canada’s history of China-bashing—“intimidated members of the Chinese Canadian community.” To add fuel to the fire, the Conservatives declared that “for several years… [they] have been the only party willing to state” such hostile views about China. Not to be outdone, when the Liberal party unveiled its platform on September 1, it vowed to protect Canadians and “respond to illegal and unacceptable behaviour by authoritarian states, including China.”

Canadian politicians’ statements in the electoral campaign, and the collusion of Canada’s largest media conglomerates, reinforced and pandered to anti-China narratives. This discourse is reminiscent of Canada’s past political statements and legal actions to restrict the rights of Chinese immigrants—particularly regarding the ability to purchase land—that were finally repealed due to their violation of the UN Charter of Human Rights. Over 70 years later, the 2021 federal campaign was been marked by petty expressions of vitriol on behalf of voters and divisive rhetoric employed by the political elite. The electorate’s discovery of solidarity and internationalism could combat a legacy of Sinophobia and imperialism; Canada can learn from China instead of shutting it out.

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Steve Lalla is a Canadian leftist and writer. Follow him on Twitter here.

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