I was going to title this blog post “4 years is less than 60 years” alluding to the four years Red China’s leaders waited for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to visit is a lot shorter than the 60 years the Chinese people have been waiting for democracy. Put another way, the communist leadership in Beijing waited one year for every 15 years they have kept their people under communist rule.
You’ve probably seen the news by now: Harper was rebuked by his hosts in Red China in his first official visit to the world’s largest communist state. The rebuke came from the top as Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the prime minister should have come sooner. The opposition parties in Ottawa echoed Wen Jiabao’s condemnation. Bob Rae, the Liberal Party foreign affairs critic, said: “Mr. Harper’s provocative refusal to engage with China for four years comes with a price, which Canada is paying for, and which this incident reflects.” This is especially gauling considering that Rae recently introduced a motion to mark August 23rd as Black Ribbon Day to recognize the victims of Nazi and Soviet communist regimes; apparently the victims of Sino communism do not matter. While concentration camps and gulags are part of the popular lexicon, hardly anyone knows what the laogai is.
Whatever might be happening economically (it is a mixed economy at best) the country is still not free according to Freedom House — Red China recently included among the 21 countries and territories in FH’s report “The Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies 2009” — and it is a persistent violator of human rights. For evidence of the latter, see the 2009 Amnesty International Report, the Human Rights Watch November 2009 report, “An Alleyway in Hell: China’s Abusive ‘Black Jails’,” HRW’s World Report 2009 chapter on the country. Or read the House of Representative’s Foreign Affairs Committee hearings on China’s one-child policy and coercive abortion. Or the reports on religious freedom from Voice of the Martyrs or the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada or the persecution of Falun Gong from Friends of Falun Gong. I could go on about its recent crackdown on internet users, the 1950 invasion of Tibet, the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and a dozen more items, but suffice it to say, Red China is neither democratic or free, and many people live in fear; what other country has a prison camp system — the aforementioned laogai — with 909 prisons in it?
The Chinese leadership says it took too long for Stephen Harper to visit, but it hasn’t been nearly as long as those leaders have been oppressing their own people. Four years is less than 60.
