From cold war to 'hot conflict': Michael Kovrig on confronting the Communist threat
In this episode of “NP Talks,” the National Post’s Jesse Kline sits down with Michael Kovrig for a wide-ranging discussion on the threat posed by the Communist Party of China. Watch the full video directly above.
Kovrig is a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group and a former Canadian diplomat, but he is best known to Canadians as one of the “two Michaels” who were detained by Chinese authorities in 2018, in response to the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the Vancouver airport on a U.S. extradition request.
“I was detained by state security officers when I was coming back from dinner and they abducted me and held me hostage for 1,019 days,” said Kovrig. “I spent about nearly six months in solitary confinement, being relentlessly interrogated, and then another two years in a detention centre, confined to a single cell.
“It was a gruelling ordeal, not just for me, but for my family. And frankly, it’s something I’ve spent the last few years, as has my family, recovering from. Now we’re all doing pretty well, but it hasn’t been an easy journey. An experience like that gives you a lot of trauma and lot of heavy things to carry.”
He explained that when China began the process of market liberalization, many hoped it would have a democratizing effect, but that has now been exposed as a “fantasy.” Kovrig said it was not totally surprising that the Chinese government used him and Michael Spavor as “chess pieces,” although he did not expect that it would kidnap a former diplomat such as himself.
“I think what that experience did, unfortunately, was really help me appreciate the very limited prospects for changing that regime and the way it thinks, and the urgency and importance of taking robust measures to protect Canada and Canadians from the things that that government does. The days of engagement and dreaming that we could change China by bringing that government into an international system, into a liberal trading order, that fantasy is gone,” he said.
Despite the threat posed by China’s Communist leaders, the country is a manufacturing powerhouse, one that countries like Canada are increasingly looking to do business with in the face of souring relations with the United States . Kovrig agrees that we cannot ignore China as a trading partner, but believes the Canadian government should be patient and focus first on increasing trade with friendlier nations.
“It’s better to prioritize stronger economic trade and investment and security relations with other countries — with Europe, with the Indo-Pacific countries, with ASEAN, Latin America, Africa. Ideally, Canada should focus and prioritize relations with Japan, South Korea, other like-minded democracies, members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, for example, and then come to China with a relatively strong hand,” he said.
“It’s almost like dating, right? If you go on the dating market and you look desperate and afraid, things are probably not going to go ideally for you, right? You want to project confidence and have a clear understanding of what you want and what your boundaries are, what you’re not willing to agree to, what you’re not willing to sacrifice just for a trade deal.”
Kovrig argued that when dealing with China, it’s not possible to separate its economic interests from its political ambitions — it’s all designed to further the Communist party’s geopolitical goals, which include monopolizing global production and hollowing out the industrial base of western economies. “For China, everything is geopolitical and everything can be potentially weaponized for leverage,” he warned.
“Co-operation on a lot of high-tech things is just not an option anymore because there’s such a track record that the Chinese government will siphon off any advanced technology that it doesn’t already have and then turn it to military purposes.
“That’s not in our interest since the reality is the U.S. military and the Canadian Forces are preparing for the possibility of a hot conflict with China in the next decade or two. We don’t want to be doing anything that strengthens the Chinese military or advances its technology.”
Worse, if China monopolizes manufacturing, we could find ourselves in a perilous situation in the event of war. “If China hollows out the industrial base of all the G7 countries and then there is a conflict over Taiwan , let’s say, or the South China Sea, tabletop wargame exercises have already indicated that the U.S. and its allies would run out of ammo and missiles and materials within days or weeks, and it would take years to rebuild,” he said.
“So that becomes a critical national security concern, particularly for deterrence. We want to deter conflict from happening. But if China looks at the correlation of forces and decides that the United States can’t stop it from taking Taiwan or from claiming all of the South China Sea, that makes conflict more likely.”
He said that China has already come to dominate strategic industries like ship-building and that its navy “now has more ships in the water than the U.S. navy does.” What’s it all for? “Dominance,” he said. “China wants to dominate East Asia and the western Pacific the way it perceives the United States as being dominant in North America. And then from there, it wants to reshape geopolitics.
“It wants to be the most powerful country in the international system, dominate its region and ultimately reshape global governance so that it’s more amenable to its own authoritarian preferences. Because a liberal international order, in terms of liberal values and liberal economics, is a hostile environment for a Communist authoritarian one-party state.”
But Canada and its allies can push back by working together to counter the economic and military threat posed by China. “We need to double down on alliances with like-minded partners to try to shore up as much of the multilateral liberal order as possible through trade agreements, maybe linking up, for example, more trade between Canada, Europe and the Indo-Pacific countries, more co-operation on standard-setting,” said Kovrig.
“And we need much more work on promoting a positive narrative for the rest of the world. Because to a great extent, this is a conflict that’s taking place in developing countries where China is trying to have much more influence and win those countries over to its side in what is really a political contest. And so, Canada needs to come to those partners with a compelling story backed up by substance of why it’s better to partner with Canada on things than with China.”
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