When Chinese president Hu Jintao arrives in Canada today on a rare state visit in advance of the weekend’s G20 summit, he will witness something he rarely if ever sees in his homeland — protesters.
A posse of human rights advocates, from Amnesty International, to the Falun Dafa group, to free Tibet supporters, will follow his every appearance, and serenade him outside his hotel in downtown Ottawa.
China is emerging as an economic and political superpower, says Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada, and it’s time the country started behaving that way.
At a news conference Tuesday, Neve and representatives of three other advocacy groups recited a litany of Chinese transgressions, from religious and ethnic repression, to the jailing of dissidents and their lawyers, to the appalling conditions under which many Chinese work, and worse.
“How can the dictator get away with it, and the world pretend this is not happening? We have to raise awareness,” said Lucy Zhou of the Falun Dafa association.
Hu will hear pressing concerns of another sort behind the barricades of the G20 summit in Toronto later in the week as his fellow club members try to persuade him that China needs to play a more constructive role in rebuilding the global economy.
The key issue on the table for most of the leaders is not democracy or humans rights, but whether China’s export-driven currency policies can be changed sufficiently to address what many consider the key stumbling block to a sustained global recovery.
In essence, critics say China exports too much to others, particularly the United States, but also Europe and Canada, and buys too little. That creates an imbalance that if left unchecked will bankrupt the West as well as cause massive joblessness as production heads east.
China announced Sunday it was willing to introduce more flexibility in the yuan to allow it to appreciate.
But few were taking the Chinese entirely at their word. Both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Hu would be pressed for details at the summit.
There was also some praise for China from Harper, however, that signalled a new era of Sino-Canadian relations — at least under the current Conservative government — had begun.
“The Chinese have been very helpful in this crisis,” Harper said in an interview with Bloomberg news service distributed by his office. “China is increasingly assuming a broader view of its own interests in the world.”
Hu’s visit, the first to Canada since 2005, is the flip side of Harper’s ice-breaker to China last December, highlighted by a public rebuke of the prime minister for not having paid proper heed to China’s growing importance.
It is unlikely Harper will return the undiplomatic slap, especially when so much is desired from China by Canadian businesses who see the emerging market as a lifeline given the decline in the American economy.
But whether China is really moving toward a new collaborative relationship with the West remains to be seen, say analysts.
Peter Morici, a University of Maryland business professor and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission, has little faith that China will allow more than a minor appreciation of the yuan, in the range of about five per cent. In reality, he says, the currency is undervalued by about 50 per cent.
The only measure that will work, he argues, is if Washington slaps an equivalent tax on currency conversions.
“Don’t tell me that would set off a trade war, we are in a trade war right now,” he says. “The entire mid-West is crumbling. You don’t think we’re in a trade war when China is subsidizing its exports into Canada at the rate of 50 per cent and Ontario manufacturers can’t grow?”
Morici is among China’s harshest and most persistent critics and has seen his views gain acceptance in the U.S. Congress.
Last week, House Ways and Means chairman Sander Levin, a Michigan Democrat, put it bluntly. “If China does not act (at the G20) and the administration does not respond promptly thereafter, the Congress will act,” he said.
The anger may be understandable in a country that has suffered the loss of 8.5 million jobs in the past two years, but blaming China’s yuan is simplistic, says Peter Harder, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs in Ottawa, who is currently president of the Canada China Business Council.
Global imbalances must be addressed, he agrees, but it’s a two-way street. The U.S. must address its own self-created imbalances, including Washington’s ballooning debt.
Harder adds it is critical that China not be isolated at a time when the country is increasingly being seen as a key to a wide range of global issues, from economic growth to security to nuclear proliferation.
Many believe China has already come to the realization it needs to make its domestic-demand economy as vibrant as its export-based factories.
Allowing the press recently to report on strikes and labour unrest is sending a signal Beijing wants to grow wages to boost the domestic economy, says Wendy Dobson, director of the Institute for International Business at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto.
“It isn’t just appreciation of the yuan, China needs to rebalance its economy for its own long-term interests,” says Dobson. “It’s part of their last five-year plan and it’ll be part of the next one, to pull back investment-driven growth to a model that requires more household spending and more domestic consumption.”
Dobson says China needs time to change. But Amnesty International’s Neve cautions that the West also needs to keep applying the pressure for that to occur.