Canadians should be wary of Chinese influence operations in the West: Stephen Nagy and Jamie Tronnes for Inside Policy Talks | Macdonald-Laurier Institute
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Beijing is seeking to court Canadians with trade deals. But it is simultaneously punishing Canada for adopting anti-Chinese trade laws.

Here is an Invidious link for a video (34min) and the original YT link.

Beijing is seeking to court Canadians with trade deals. But it is simultaneously punishing Canada for adopting anti-Chinese trade laws, which – as the Chinese are quick to point out – were implemented by Canada in response to American pressure to crack down on unfair Chinese trade practices.

Now, we’re seeing growing numbers of Canadians twisting the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” They’re taking this to mean that the enemy of Canada is the United States, and by that logic, the People’s Republic of China must be Canada’s friend.

To offer his perspective on how Canadians should view these developments, Dr. Stephen Nagy joins Inside Policy Talks. Nagy is a professor at Tokyo’s International Christian University, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He’s studied and written extensively about China and its influence operations in the West.

On the podcast, he tells Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security (CNAPS), that the Chinese government has “invested very heavily” in a strategy of “elite capture” focused on political and business leaders, “giving them preferred access to the Chinese market.”

“This is to lock them into a kind of dependent relationship,” says Nagy. “And I think that this has made Canada have tremendous challenges in terms of confronting a country that really wants to change the global order in a way that is contrary to Canadian interests.”

Among Dr. Nagy’s analyses is, As US-Canada ties unravel, Beijing pulls the threads:

While current Canada-US tensions create immediate policy challenges, the documented pattern of Chinese influence operations reveals a systematic effort to exploit these frictions for long-term strategic advantage.

  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
    8·
    4 days ago

    I’m sorry but while Chinese authoritarianism is indeed scary, I’m deeply suspicious of any conservative think tank droning on about it while not applying the same standards to US authoritarianism.

    Like yes, I get it, the Chinese Dragon is a scary motherfucker that might one day threaten me. But the American Eagle is a bigger scarier motherfucker that has gone on meth and right now has me pinned down with its boot on my neck, twirling a knife and making jokes about taking my kidney off.

    A conservative think tank, i.e., a vendor of the same meth that got the US go hyper agressive, that is blathering about the scary dragon over there sounds an awfully lot like the “it’s ok, give the big guy your kidney, better him than the scary dragon”.

    Meanwhile, an actual observable fact is that China is a net positive for protecting humanity from the climate crisis by scaling up and developing solar at a rate that is what we should all be doing, while the US is going on full nihilistic climate vandal, and our Canadian political class remains committed to the same climate vandalism. Facts don’t care about our feelings: Chinese authoritarianism’s solar strategy is a net positive for human survival while the US freedumb climate vandalism is a clear net negative.

    So, why the fuck should I care what some conservatives have to say about China? Develop a critique for dismantling the Canadian petro-state and aggressively killing off trumpist style politics on the conservative wing of our spectrum and THEN I might be more receptive to whatever you have to say. Barring that, meh, they simply have no credibility.

    • Scotty@scribe.disroot.orgOP
      3·
      4 days ago

      This is really amazing. I have been here in the Lemmyverse only for quite a short period of time, but whenever someone posts something critical of China, they are whatabouted to death. You can be critical of the US, EU, UK, Australia, and anyone and anything else, but not China it seems.

      If you criticize China, they freak completely out. They attack the source and/or the OP with some sort of a Trumpean I-am-right-and-everyone-else-is-wrong attitude often blended with a second-hand intimidation. (I’ve been called a racist, a bot, they suggested I should go and f**ck myself and one elegantly said I should commit suicide.)

      I’m really tired of always the same kind of rant that contains no facts nor numbers but only empty counter-accusations from which you can often easily infer that the commenter didn’t even click the link.

      This is the Climate Action Tracker’s global map providing an assessment of countries’ progress in reaching the Paris goals (spoiler: China ranks among the worst countries).

      • acargitz@lemmy.ca
        6·
        4 days ago

        Nice narrative you got there.

        Only it doesn’t respond or correspond to what I said. I didn’t name call you. I didn’t “whatabout” anything. My post agrees that that dragon over there is a scary dragon, it just prioritizes the eagle right here as a higher priority. I also specifically explained why I approach the issue with suspicion. I actually named the key words here: suspicion and credibility. I attacked the credibility of the conservative perspective in being an insufficient position from which to criticize China. I gave you a specific positionality from which I accept red-flag waving about China: do it from a place of consistency and I’m with you.

        So I don’t know what the fuck you’re whining about.

        Ps. The tracker actually reinforces what I’m saying: China is highly insufficient, the US is critically insufficient, i.e., worse. And the second order derivative matters quite a lot. One is emerging as a leader in renewables, the other is strong arming everyone to accelerate fossil fuels.