The old thinking from the 1990s wrongly assumed that after China joined the World Trade Organization and opened itself more to the world it wouldn’t be that far away from becoming a Western-style, liberal democratic country just like ours.
That didn’t happen. China is still a single-party country led by the Communists and current leader Xi Jinping’s hold on power has been described as the greatest since Chairman Mao.
So let’s say Canada doesn’t succeed in cooling things down. Let’s say the relationship continues to go frosty. How bad could it all get?
Maybe Beijing will try to stop its wealthy from buying real estate in Vancouver. Maybe its state-owned enterprises will stop trying to buy up our companies and natural resources. Maybe Huawei will slow its investments in the Canadian telecom market. Maybe we’ll get the cold shoulder from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a Chinese project that we’ve signed up for against the urges of the U.S. that seeks to rival the IMF and the World Bank for dominance over world finance.
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