Zeinab Merai, Sada al-Mashrek
“Today in Canada it’s impossible to pick up a newspaper without being bombarded or overwhelmed by the anti-China panic,” says Director of the Foreign Policy Institute Bianca Mugyenyi, who has moderated a February webinar titled ‘Canada across Roads with China: Work Together or Perish Together,’ which Sada al-Mashrek has joined.
Attracting over 700 participants, the session has featured intellectual Noam Chomsky, Parliamentary Leader of the Green Party Elizabeth May and other Canadian panellists, who have acknowledged the indigenous peoples’ lands, on which the discussion has been held and broadcast live on Zoom and Facebook. (Canada at a Crossroads on China “Work Together or Perish Together” featuring Noam Chomsky - YouTube)
Bianca Mugyenyi: “We don’t need fearmongering”
In the webinar supported by the University of Victoria’s Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives and organised by the Canada-China Focus – a joint project of the CFPI and the UVic’s Centre for Global Studies – author Mugyenyi says, “We all heard that endless claims that Huawei is a threat to Canada’s G5 network, and last year the House of Commons unanimously voted to condemn China… In recent months, Canadian vessels have run provocative manoeuvres with US warships through the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.”
Noting that Canadian hostility towards China is historic, Mugyenyi goes on to say, “We have a situation where the military arms companies, intelligence apparatus have effectively whipped up a scare about this supposed China threat… We don’t need fear mongering but international cooperation.”
John Price: “We have crossed the line”
“We came together out of concern that the upsurge of anti-Asian racism in Canada was at least in part the result of anti-China propaganda and that this was adversely shaping public discourse about Asian Canadians, as well as Canadian foreign policy on China,” says UVic’s Professor Emeritus of History John Price.
“To have criticism about China is not racist, but when images in the media project China as a militaristic horde bent on aggression, when China is blamed for everything – from COVID-19 to housing unaffordability, to money laundering, as well as the opioid crisis – and when Asian Canadians are being attacked in the streets or on the bus, making Vancouver, for example, the anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America, we have crossed the line,” believes author Price, who’s also an advisory-board member of the Canada-China Focus.
“Part of this stigmatisation arises because of pressure from Washington, but the Trudeau government seems determined to align us ever more closely with US foreign policy… Canada is part of the so-called Five Eyes – a network of settler colonial states – a racist state formation dominating the Anglosphere,” warns Price, who as well sat on the advisory board of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, on which Chomsky sat, too.
“As Edward Snowden has revealed, it is the biggest and most dangerous cyber-spying network in the history of the world, and Canada is now heavily involved in cyber-attacks itself. Peggy Mason of the Rideau Institute recently pointed out how the Five Eyes are interfering in unprecedented ways in Canada.
As a branch of the Five Eyes, CSIS has become incredibly aggressive… Despite protests that CSIS is actively engaged in racial profiling, the response of university presidents in Canada and faculty associations seems inadequate, to say the least,” warns social activist Price.
Noam Chomsky: “An asymmetrical conflict”
“The prevailing view of the US and much of the West is that China is a rising super power aiming to confront the US and perhaps has been widely predicted for many years, it’s even poised to surpass the US and to dominate world affairs…
A US-China war simply means game over. There are critical global issues on which the US and China must cooperate. They will either work together or collapse together, bringing the world down with them,” says renowned historian and political dissident Noam Chomsky, the main webinar panellist.
“The US-China conflict is real, but it’s important to recognise that it’s sharply asymmetrical,” argues social critic and political dissident Chomsky, citing a recent New York Times headline: ‘As the United States pulls back from the Middle East, China leans in, expanding its ties to Middle Eastern states with vast infrastructure investments and cooperation on technology and security.’
Chomsky argues that “unintentionally, the headline captures quite accurately what’s happening all over the world. The US is withdrawing military forces that have battered the Middle East region for decades.
In sharp contrast, China’s expanding its influence with the so-called soft power, investment, loans, technology, development programmes, and not just in the Middle East, of course. The most extensive Chinese project is the huge Belt and Road Initiative that’s taking shape within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation [that] includes Central Asia states: India, Pakistan, Russia and, now, Iran. It’s reaching to Turkey, probably on to Central Asia, Central Europe [and] may include Afghanistan if Afghanistan can survive its current catastrophe.”
“Apart from being an important transit point, Chinese aid and development might manage to shift the Afghan economy from heroine production for Europe, as it’s been under US control, to use of its rich mineral resources. That prospect, not unlikely, would again contrast sharply with the current US policy of strangling Afghanistan by even withholding its own funds, kept in New York banks while the Afghans starve,” says Chomsky, who’s written over a 100 books on linguistics, war, politics, mass media.
“The Belt and Road Initiative is offered in the Middle East, including Israel. There are accompanying programmes in Africa, now even Latin America, over strenuous US objections. A couple of days ago, China announced that it’s taking over the manufacturing facilities in São Paulo, Brasil that Ford had recently abandoned, and a huge investment will initiate large-scale electric vehicles production. It’s an area in which China’s far ahead. The US has no way to counter these efforts; bombs, missiles, special forces, raids in rural communities don’t just work to counter these efforts,” believes Chomsky, who adds that China’s pursuit of broad investments and cooperation in the Global South is “one central element of the China threat that’s eliciting such fear and anguish.”
“The asymmetry is revealed further by direct comparisons of the US and China in every major dimension. The US is far ahead and has natural advantages shared by no other power in the entire history. In the military dimension, the US stands alone in the world. It has 800 military bases worldwide, many of them with nuclear-tipped missiles threatening China directly off its eastern coast,” argues Chomsky, the author of Requiem for the American Dream.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. There’s more to follow.