Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and China’s President Xi Jinping entered into a much heralded “new strategic partnership” that Carney stated would help form a New World Order. Carney’s vision is to align Canada with “like minded partners,” building a new coalition of countries that share Canadians’ values – such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. With this in mind, let’s look at three international news stories coming out of China in the past month.
The imprisonment of Jimmy Lai
Jimmy Lai, a media magnate who is a fierce champion of democracy and individual rights, founded the Asian newspaper Apple Daily, which was forced to close in 2021 when the CCP seized Hong Kong and imposed national security law that silenced dissent. In December 2020, Lai was arrested, and five years later, just before Christmas, the Hong Kong’s High Court found Lai guilty of colluding with foreign forces and publishing seditious articles to undermine national security. On Feb. 9, along with a number of editors, publishers, and editorial writers critical of Beijing, 78-year-old Lai was given a 20-year sentence.
Niagara residents will recognize the Lai family as a mainstay in the Niagara-on-the-Lake hospitality industry. Lai owns Vintage Hotels (Prince of Wales, Pillar and Post, and Queen’s Landing) and his sister Si Wai Lai manages Lai’s Oban Inn. Local news media, NOTLLocal.com, interviewed his niece Erica Lepp, who conveyed the family is “crushed”: “We’re devastated. Obviously we were hoping for a better outcome – something that would give us hope that we would see him again. At his age, that is the same as a life sentence, it’s just in different words.”
Lai’s son, Sebastien, commented on the “draconian” prison term, “It signifies the total destruction of the Hong Kong legal system and the end of justice,” and in a CBC interview he said that the CCP has imprisoned his father’s body “but they haven’t imprisoned his spirit.” Lai admires his father’s stoic character in the face of CCP oppression. Canadians are provided a glimpse of Lai’s stoicism in this interview given on his final day of freedom in 2020 just before being arrested: Joe Tay posted the interview on X, “To all freedom defenders out there, those who think freedom, free speech, free press matter and worth everything to defend it.”
There has been universal condemnation for the treatment of Lai with the United Nations calling for his immediate release. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated the sentence “shows the world that Beijing will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong.” U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Lai, who is a British citizen, is being imprisoned for exercising his right to freedom of expression after a “politically motivated prosecution.” Amnesty International said the sentence marked “another grim milestone” for Hong Kong and “shows a complete disregard for human dignity.”
The Carney government’s milquetoast statement on the Lai sentencing came via a post on X by foreign affairs minister Anita Anand who claimed, “Canada is disappointed.” This embarrassingly weak response was quickly framed for what it was by Michael Higgins in the National Post: “Jimmy Lai shows the cost of Carney’s devil’s bargain with China — What values is the prime minister willing to sacrifice?” The Asian-Pacific newspaper The Diplomat posited that the sentence is “the high cost of Western appeasement,” stating “Jimmy Lai and countless others in China are paying the price for a West too eager to compromise principles for profit.”
CCP’s plans to invade Taiwan
Just like the city of Hong Kong, sovereign Taiwan faces an impending invasion by the CCP and the throttling of democratic and individual rights. The CCP has long sought to “reunite” Taiwan under Beijing’s regime since the communists were triumphant in China in 1949. The CCP claims the island with its foreign declaration “One China Policy” – a policy Canada adopted in the 1970’s when former prime minister Pierre Trudeau was befriending Chairman Mao. During his January trip to Beijing, Carney signed a Canada-Sino agreement that once again asserted Canada’s support of the One China Policy.
Shortly after Carney’s departure from China, Xi conducted a purge of the country’s military and had two leaders, vice chairman Zhang Youxia and joint staff department chief Liu Zhenli, removed from their posts and charged with corruption. Reports in international media suggest that Zhang and other senior military commanders opposed launching a military invasion of Taiwan and were warning the CCP leadership that such a war would result in catastrophic casualties and untold equipment losses. Xi did not want to hear this counsel and has been insistent on the reunification of Taiwan by 2027. His silencing of Zhang successfully tightened Xi’s grip of the military and has kept the CCP’s focus on an inevitable invasion.
Given Carney’s mantra of “elbows up” against the American administration, Canadians should not miss the irony in how the Canadian government is kowtowing to the CCP and its aggression in claiming Taiwan as its own. On three separate occasions recently, the Liberals have heeled to CCP authoritarianism respecting Taiwan. First, prior to Carney’s arrival in Beijing to meet Xi, two Liberal MPs were called back from Taiwan, issuing the statement: “It’s important that we avoid confusion with Canada’s foreign policy, given the overlap with the Prime Minister’s engagement in Beijing…” Second, China’s ambassador to Canada stated in an Ottawa media interview that, in re-setting relations with the CCP, the Carney government should re-write Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy to accommodate Beijing foreign policy goals – and there has been no comment on the ambassador’s assertion that Canada’s policy is “outdated, controversial, and incompatible” with the new strategic partnership. Third, the government is seemingly delaying signing and may nix a Canada-Taiwan trade deal that has been prepared for final signatures since last spring.
Forced organ harvesting
Inconceivably in today’s world, state-sponsored forced organ harvesting is an expanding industry in China. An international, independent review (that included Canada), The China Tribunal, concluded that detainees in Chinese prison camps are being killed for their organs and the CCP is managing a transplant trade worth $1 billion a year. In late 2024, China’s National Health Commission announced it would build six new transplant hospitals in the Uyghur region by 2030, tripling the region’s capacity to perform transplants of “hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys and pancreases.” The China Tribunal heard evidence that CCP political prisoners are known to be victims, “Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale…” these acts “of unmatched wickedness – on a death for death basis.”
Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting and more than a dozen countries (Canada is one) have posted an online petition Stop Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in the People’s Republic of China. More than half a million people have signed the petition and it is hoped there will be in excess of one million signatures by June.
In related news on this horror playing out in China, Peabody Award-winning – Canada Media Fund filmmaker Raymond Zhang recently released a disturbing documentary “State Organs.” This film is a testimony of Dr. George Zheng who was ordered to harvest organs by force. One account in the film is of “a 17-year-old young soldier—bound so tightly that the ropes cut into his flesh—and ordered to pin the boy down and extract his kidneys and eyes.” Zhang stated, “When I first met Dr. George Zheng, I was utterly shocked. The degree of the cruelty of the organ harvesting is beyond imagination.” (If you have the stomach, this American Thought Leaders interview released last week, Inside Beijing’s Darkest State Crime—And Those Fighting to Expose It, is a must-watch.
At an International Religious Summit earlier this month, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom Sam Brownback made the following condemnation of the CCP and its practice of organ harvesting, “These kinds of barbaric and evil practices—they reveal the character, the underlying character of the adversary. They are not an isolated sort of aberration. They are a revelation of the dark evil that lies at the heart of the Chinese communist regime, and their massive repression of every community of faith is another indicator.”
Jimmy Lai’s 20-year sentence. Taiwan’s imminent invasion. Forced organ harvesting. This is China today under Xi’s CCP regime.
Chris George is an advocate, government relations advisor, and writer/copy editor. As president of a public relations firm established in 1994, Chris provides discreet counsel, tactical advice and management skills to CEOs/Presidents, Boards of Directors and senior executive teams in executing public and government relations campaigns and managing issues. Prior to this PR/GR career, Chris spent seven years on Parliament Hill on staffs of Cabinet Ministers and MPs. He has served in senior campaign positions for electoral and advocacy campaigns at every level of government. Today, Chris resides in Almonte, Ontario where he and his wife manage www.cgacommunications.com. Contact Chris at chrisg.george@gmail.com.
