It was just a matter of time before someone got really hurt when we decided to arrest Meng Wanzhou, a top official of Huawei, a major Chinese telecom company, that is competing globally with U.S.-based telecommunications corporations.
The trigger for the arrest was not for any transgression that she or Huawei had committed in the U.S. or Canada. Rather, the company had broken U.S. laws by violating sanctions on Iran while having business interests in America. China doesn’t agree with the U.S. approach to Iran.
Anyway, one of our citizens, Robert Schellenberg, initially sentenced in 2016 to 15 years imprisonment for trying to smuggle 500 pounds of methamphetamines from China to Australia, has now been given a death sentence.
To Canadians, this is a repugnant retributive action by an international bully. The timing of the sentence is clearly politically motivated as it coincides with the controversy over Meng Wanzhou’s arrest.
Canada, now positioned as a weak vassal state of the U.S. empire, is to be given a lesson in power politics. Other nations should also take note in case they are tempted to mess with China’s business affairs.
The question arises however on why pick on Schellenberg at this time. Is there not a secondary message being delivered, namely – “while we are on the subject of Canadians’ and the Chinese government’s struggles with illegal drugs”? For surely, there is an element of internal as well as external politics that needs to be considered as China holds a prominent and embarrassing position as one of the world’s leading suppliers of fentanyl and acetic anhydride, the precursor chemical needed to manufacture cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and crystal methamphetamine.
China’s experience with opioids has been tragic and humiliating. For more than 4,000 years, China was the world’s most advanced civilization, far ahead of most of the world in arts and sciences. They built a Great Wall to isolate themselves from lesser nations. They had little to no interest in communicating with the outside world – except for trading along the 4,000-mile Silk Road to Europe.
Then came disaster. In the mid-1800s, Britain found a huge market in China for India-produced and British-owned opium. It led to widespread addiction and economic disruption. The Chinese government wanted no part of it. This led to two Opium Wars, both of which China lost.
China was then forced to open its doors to one-sided trading treaties with Britain, France, Germany, the U.S., Russia and Japan. The Qing Dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644, collapsed in 1912. Civil war, the Second World War and Chairman Mao’s great famine followed. China was in a state of devastation until the 1970s when U.S. President Richard Nixon visited China and initiated the ending of diplomatic and trading isolation from western nations.
From China’s viewpoint, its advanced civilization’s collapse started with the drug trade of the 1800s and today, Chinese students are taught that the Opium Wars meant that “if you are backward, you will take a beating.”
China is fighting back and is now big enough to win. I wonder if our prime minister has read Trump: The Art of the Deal?
Alan Murdock is a local pediatrician.
