The Trudeau government’s long-awaited Indo-Pacific Strategy combines principle and pragmatism to counter a ‘disruptive’ Beijing.

A protester in Beijing on Sunday, November 27/AP

Lisa Van Dusen

November 27, 2022

(Updated on November 29, 2022)

In the streets, on university campuses, in public squares, at the world’s largest iPhone factory and in other venues across China, people have been courageously protesting Beijing’s latest human rights violations.

“In multiple videos seen by CNN, people could be heard shouting demands for China’s leader Xi Jinping and the Communist Party to ‘step down,’” the network reported on Sunday. “The crowd also chanted, ‘Don’t want Covid test, want freedom!’ and ‘Don’t want dictatorship, want democracy!’”

China’s zero-COVID policy has locked down some neighbourhoods for weeks on end and quarantined people in their homes in some areas for as long as 100 days. Some cities carry out daily virus tests on millions of residents. This is about much more than rational vaccine policy — or even COVID policy writ large —  and there are no bouncy castles in the streets of Shanghai. That 10 people died in a house fire in the Xinjiang regional capital of Urumqi on November 24th because of the world’s most oppressive COVID lockdown is a crisis of authoritarian brutality, not of public health policy.

“Across the country, and not just at universities, citizens appear to be reaching a breaking point,” The Washington Post‘s Lily Kuo reported on Sunday. “In the name of ‘zero COVID,’ they have lived through almost three years of unrelenting controls that have left many sealed in their homes, sent to quarantine centers or barred from traveling. Residents must submit to repeated coronavirus tests and surveillance of their movement and health status.”

The fact that the protests erupted at all despite the confines — visible and invisible — of China’s stifling surveillance state infrastructure is a testament to the courage of citizens who understand the new costs of public outrage. It also attests to the leveraging of the protests by the government as an intelligence-gathering weapon — a tactic used across recent anti-democracy regimes since the Arab Spring to build their enemies lists and arrest anyone inclined to dissent with the help of the cheap, ubiquitous surveillance and hacking that has fuelled the 21st-century spread of state-sponsored democracy degradation. Indeed, as the security crackdown began on Monday, the BBC reported that people who attended weekend protests had been tracked and contacted by police. Civil disobedience has yet to adjust to the worst human rights-violating weapons of post-internet state thuggery, an adaptation gap that informs the urgency with which democracy, as the most powerful obstacle to that thuggery, is being so fervently undermined worldwide.

Which makes the events registered in the words and pictures from China in recent days the most remarkable outburst of defiance since Xi Jinping became president of the People’s Republic in 2013 and the world waited to find out what his ascension would mean for China’s future.

As it turned out, it meant very different things for Xi Jinping on the one hand and the people of China on the other. Among other signals of China’s new relationship with its own citizens and with the international community, Xi embarked on a campaign of power consolidation domestically in the guise of anti-corruption purges and internationally via a strategic corruption scheme in the form of an infrastructure megaproject.

The results in human outcomes have been predictable: Increasingly Orwellian and genocidal surveillance-state policies domestically, the security capture of Hong Kong and a systematic rollback of human rights internationally that would not be possible absent a war on democracy in which China is the principal geopolitical belligerent, with Russia its sidekick.

That global rights rollback — accompanied by Chinese investment from Egypt to Myanmar to Venezuela to Zimbabwe and Chinese political interference from Australia to Canada to the United States — has included relentless attacks on the integrity of democracy, the normalization of surveillance as a weapon of intimidation, censorship and violation and the systemic corruption of international trade diplomacy and supply chain infrastructure to secure commodity supplies as a means of maintaining domestic stability and influencing economic outcomes around the world.

After years of Beijing’s coercive diplomacy, wolf-warrior diplomacy, hostage diplomacy and, most recently, hot-mic diplomacy, the spirit of the new Canadian strategy might be summed up as pragmatic diplomacy: ‘We will defy China when we need to and we will cooperate with China when we must.’

In a perfect split-screen on Sunday, as the world watched people across China expressing their outrage over lives made increasingly onerous, a gaggle of cabinet ministers led by Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly unveiled Canada’s long-awaited Indo-Pacific Strategy in Vancouver.

As Joly, Trade Minister Mary Ng, International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and Fisheries Minister and Joyce Murray outlined their respective policy tranches of the pointed 26-page document (Defence Minister Anita Anand did live-hit Q&A duty on CBCNN), Beijing was helpfully providing the corroborating narrative for a strategy that amounts to an echo of “Enough!” from beyond China’s borders.

After years of Beijing’s coercive diplomacy, wolf-warrior diplomacy, hostage diplomacy and, most recently, hot-mic diplomacy, the spirit of the new Canadian strategy, articulated to CBC by Anand, might be summed up as pragmatic diplomacy: “We will defy China when we need to and we will cooperate with China when we must.”

“China is an increasingly disruptive global power,” per the strategy, which follows recent, similar assessments from NATO, US President Joe Biden and the Pentagon after more than two decades of all-but silence from the intelligence community on the threat to democracy represented by China’s rise.

“China is making large-scale investments to establish its economic influence, diplomatic impact, offensive military capabilities and advanced technologies,” the strategy states. “China is looking to shape the international order into a more permissive environment for interests and values that increasingly depart from ours.”

That clash of values — so long obfuscated by economic expediency and political opportunism and more recently belied by a growing web of democracy degradation interests including an assortment of western political parties, chaos actors and Big Tech players — has now been dramatically delineated by the people of China themselves, risking their lives to demand freedom and democracy.

Like the undaunted protesters of Iran who have filled the streets since the mid-September death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, the people who’ve taken to the streets in Shanghai, Urumqi, Beijing and beyond are fighting for more than their own rights. They represent humanity pushing back against a global trend of states empowered by unprecedented technology waging hybrid war on their own people.

Their fate may be our future.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.