Canada’s Defence Minister, Harjit Sajjan, who is of Indian descent, recently made an unexpectedly strong statement against the Chinese Communist Party. He told the media that Beijing’s unpredictability, refusal to play by the rules and meddling around the world are of grave concern to both Canada and NATO allies. He added: “When a country arrests two Canadians, it’s not a message to Canada, it’s a message to the rest of the world ‘this is how we’re going to conduct diplomacy’.”
This is the first time the pro-Beijing Liberal government of Canada has had such strong words for Beijing. Earlier in December, the media also revealed that the defense minister had called off a program to invite the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army to Canadian military camps for winter training.
Canada is said to have been secretly training the PLA for several years. The PLA fought with the U.S. and UN forces from the 1940s until the 1970s because the two armies represented completely incompatible values and had to defend completely different people. However, since when did the Western world forget that the Chinese Communist Party is still a dictatorship, that the U.S. and U.N. forces shed blood in Korea and Vietnam against the PLA, and that the PLA massacred unarmed college students with tanks and machine guns in Tiananmen Square in ’64, and that they cooperated with the PLA? Military exercises and training.
Canada’s current defense minister is of Indian origin. No matter how much the Liberal government of Canada is afraid of the Chinese Communist Party, this year’s Sino-Indian border conflict has clearly shown him the true face of the Chinese Communist Party. So far this year, there have been constant clashes between the PLA and Indian troops on the Sino-Indian border near Tibet. In June, an Indian patrol was ambushed by the PLA while patrolling a steep section of the mountainous region where they believed the Chinese PLA had retreated. The clash resulted in the deaths of more than 20 Indian soldiers and the death of Colonel Santosh Babu, commander of the 16th Indian battalion, who was pushed by PLA troops down a narrow ridge into a ravine and fell off a cliff.
This clash and the heavy casualties stirred up popular anger throughout India. Indians began to reject Chinese manufacturing and Chinese applications. If Canada’s defense minister allows the Chinese Communist Liberation Army to come to Canada to learn winter combat techniques, won’t that give the Chinese Communist Army more wings in the India-China conflict and cost Indian soldiers even more? And the U.S. military is also seriously disturbed that Canada is letting Chinese Communist troops into the U.S.-Canada border for training, which is a major threat to the security of both countries. So, the Indian-origin defense minister’s stopping the visible and blaming the Chinese Communist Party for training the Chinese Communist Army has multiple implications.
But his boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was not happy. It was Trudeau who originally initiated this year’s joint military exercises, but now he has been let off the hook by his own men. He demanded that any future cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party be cancelled with careful consideration. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Global Affairs also blamed the Department of National Defence for the unilateral cancellation of military cooperation with China, arguing that it would damage the long-term defense-security relationship between the two countries and put two Canadians in a more dangerous situation.
The Canadian government is still too naive to think that it has to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party in order to release the two Canadians. Why don’t they think about the fact that the U.S. has frequently sanctioned the Chinese Communist Party and recently blacklisted a number of Chinese companies, as well as not allowing Chinese officials who persecute human rights to enter the country. It is a good start that Canada’s defense minister is beginning to see the Chinese Communist Party for what it is. When will the Canadian Prime Minister and the heads of other departments stop being naive and timid?
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