If China hadn’t targeted white Canadians, would Chinese-Canadian relations be business as usual?

2021/08/13 Leave a comment

Good and legitimate question, unfortunately almost rhetorical in nature:

Another day, another heartbreaking headline.

There have been so many about the “two Michaels” and Robert Schellenberg, Canadians locked away in China who appear to be political pawns in a game we cannot win.

I knew diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig when I worked as a correspondent in China. Since his arrest in late 2018, there has been a permanent twist in the pit of my stomach. I know my friend will likely spend a large part of his life in jail.

So please believe me when I say my intention in pointing out an uncomfortable truth that underlies the saga of the detained Canadians isn’t to diminish the tragedy of seeing any life treated as political leverage by Beijing.

But the truth is we should have seen this coming. And we chose not to.

Kovrig and Michael Spavor, a Canadian entrepreneur, were both arrested in China days after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was detained in Vancouver. She comes from a powerhouse Chinese family. Her arrest has been seen as an insult by Beijing and officials have made it clear they will not release the men unless Meng walks free.

On Jan. 14, 2019 — a month after the Meng arrest — a court in northeastern China summoned Schellenberg to a hasty one-day retrial. The Canadian was already serving a 15-year prison sentence, having been found guilty of joining a methamphetamine-smuggling operation. In an unusual move, authorities welcomed foreign journalists into the courtroom to watch the retrial, suggesting China wanted the world to watch as the court upgraded his sentence to death. On Monday, Schellenberg lost his appeal.

Three years ago, this harrowing combination of “hostage-taking” and “death-threat” diplomacy seemed to take Canada and the wider Western world by surprise. This was because until then, it had been widely ignorant of the many times China had taken foreigners of Asian descent as political prisoners.

But in fact, Schellenberg isn’t even the only Canadian to receive a death sentence on drug charges following Meng’s arrest.

I’m ashamed to admit that before researching this column, I had missed the news that three other Canadians were sentenced to death within two years of Meng’s arrest. Ye Jianhui, Xu Weihong and Fan Wei all face death.

They are Canadians, but they aren’t white.

Other forsaken Canadians behind bars in China have included those of Asian origin, such as Sun Qian, a Falun Gong practitioner who was arrested in Beijing in 2017 for her involvement with “heretical religious organizations,” and Huseyin Celil, a Uyghur Muslim, who was seized by local police in 2006 while visiting his wife’s family in Uzbekistan and sent to China at the request of Chinese authorities.

Little is known about Celil’s case, including what crime, if any, he was charged with; officials have only said he will remain in jail until 2036. A family representative told me it has been gutting for Celil’s loved ones to see the outpouring of global calls for the two Michaels’ release and clemency for Schellenberg when Celil has been all but forgotten.

China-focused experts in Australia and in Europe have previously told me that while they were familiar with Beijing’s human rights abuses, they found the treatment of the two Michaels and Schellenberg particularly shocking.

To be frank, I think the news rattled so many people because, until that point, most of Beijing’s political prisoners had been of Asian descent. Now, here were three white men sitting in jail cells, with no access to lawyers and no ability to speak with their families. To other white people, they were “relatable.”

The cases blew up the status quo. Suddenly, there was widespread international public pressure on democratic governments to do something.

But if it weren’t for these cases, I’m certain that most countries would’ve continued to largely ignore the cases of foreign political prisoners in China.

In recent decades, Canada and many other nations had routinely employed a kind of dual-track diplomatic approach with Beijing. The two sides would discuss trade and business matters more or less independently from any other issue.

On the one hand, Canadian leaders would publicly condemn China’s ongoing abuses and advocate for the rule of law. On the other hand, as the Asian country’s wealth grew, Canadian leaders would go on trade missions, attend economic summits and arrange bilateral state visits in hopes of striking trade or investment deals.

When trade was the focus, human rights and the rule of law usually wouldn’t come up at all.

Western societies have mishandled or simply ignored Beijing’s actions out of narrow self-interest — eager to tap into the country’s wealth, quick to turn away from the true face of the regime. Decades of wilful misinterpretation have, over time, become our complicity in the toxic diplomacy and human rights abuses China engages in today.

Now that urgent and concerted international action is needed to save the lives of Canadians in China, world leaders are certain to continue to do too little too late.

Source: If China hadn’t targeted white Canadians, would Chinese-Canadian relations be business as usual?

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Confessions of a ‘model minority’: How I’m learning to confront my own biases

2020/08/05 Leave a comment

Seeing more articles like this one by Joanna Chiu on the prejudices and racism of minorities for other minorities, a useful reminder that white/visible minority dichotomies are overly simplistic and do not capture the challenges in reducing racism, discrimination and bias:

Childhood for me was … busy.

My parents, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong, rarely took time off work and spent their weekends chauffeuring my brother and me to our lessons.

It was all they knew. In Asia’s cutthroat cities, many parents feel they have no choice but to spend a huge amount of their salaries to help their offspring stand out from the studious masses. We never went camping, or fishing, or whatever other Canadian families did for leisure.

Our Saturday mornings consisted of three hours of Cantonese school. If one of us got a perfect score on our vocabulary test, we would get McDonald’s for lunch as a treat.

After that, we’d head straight to two hours of piano lessons in a neighbouring Vancouver suburb. On Sunday mornings, we attended art class followed by tutoring in music theory, composition or music history. All those lessons were supposed to stimulate our growing brains.

I always felt connected to Hong Kong as my birthplace and embraced its stereotypical work ethic. I cried when my brother brought home a report card that contained mostly B’s and a C.

I didn’t see anything wrong with being a so-called model minority.

Sometimes strangers would say rude or mocking things to us, but racism was something to make peace with. Life would inevitably get better, after all, if we just kept working hard and didn’t complain.

Besides, I volunteered every week and started clubs at my school devoted to equality and human rights issues. That was part of the whole package of becoming an exemplary world citizen, I thought. It wouldn’t be long before there was an ethnic minority prime minister, if we all just kept working hard!

I was taught to brush off racism as a kind of flattery — that it stemmed from people being “jealous” of Asians’ high rate of university admission and higher-than-average salary level in North America.

Last year, I was working downtown and people would give me dirty looks or yell slurs at me on the street. Online, I was regularly getting a litany of abuse. My dad tried to comfort me by saying it was because I looked like “an executive” with my new job. It was a sign of success.

This wishful thinking made sense to me, but now I see why it’s illogical in the face of hate crimes happening around the world against people of Asian appearance.

In Vancouver, a man pushed a 92-year-old man with dementia to the ground outside a convenience store while yelling racist insults about COVID-19. In another incident, someone punched a woman of Asian descent near a bus stop downtown and walked away. Dakota Holmes, an Indigenous woman, was punched in the face and told to “go back to Asia” while she was walking her dog.

A recent Angus Reid Institute poll found that almost 30 per cent of Chinese Canadians surveyed said they had been physically attacked since the COVID-19 crisis began, while 43 per cent said they’ve been threatened or intimidated.

It’s a shock to the system for some of us — a reminder that racism can’t be outworked, outhustled, or out-run.

Rightly so, many people are speaking up to say that Asian communities shouldn’t stop at finally acknowledging that racism against Asians is a serious problem.

Around the world, people are also organizing under the “Asians for Black Lives” banner.

When police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, three other officers were present, including Tou Thao.

Thao’s participation in Floyd’s death has rightfully sparked calls for Asian communities to better address the ways in which anti-Blackness is embedded into many Asian cultures and societies.

Oftentimes, this doesn’t come in the form of overt acts of hate, but in our resounding silence on systemic issues affecting other minorities that cannot be solved by trying to play within the rules of white supremacy.

Steven Zhou argued in an op-ed piece in the Star last week that a sense of superiority based on work ethic is prevalent among Chinese Canadians, and can lead to prejudice.

In recent public discussions in Canada, we’ve mostly heard from Asian millennials referring to racism among our elders, and pledging to speak with our elders about their derision of people with darker skin.

Although our “aunties and uncles” are more likely to say racist things out loud, younger people surely have biases, too.

What can an Asian Canadian who has internalized the model minority myth do?

Personally, I feel like I’ve dug myself into a hole of work and volunteer commitments. My instinct is to sign up for more work on anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous topics. As co-chair of a group that promotes the contributions of women and people of colour on China studies, I put together a resources list for China expert communities to fight anti-Black racism, and have been going through all the readings.

Perhaps, part of the solution is to stop the endless activity. I’m lucky to have multiple sources of income during the pandemic, but exhaustion skews judgement. Instead of writing this essay in a few hours, as I normally would, I asked my editor for more time to reflect on my complicity in social injustices.

It’s been long overdue.

My biases are rooted in not only racism, but also classism and able-ism, where despite having a disability myself (ADHD), I’ve assumed that most people in Canada have similar access to education and can overcome their challenges to pursue conventional success.

When we speak of racism, it’s easy to think it’s a problem that other people have. The uncomfortable truth is that we all have unconscious biases that can grow into hate if we don’t confront them within ourselves.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/08/03/confessions-of-a-model-minority-how-im-learning-to-confront-my-own-biases.html

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

House-hunting as an Asian immigrant in Vancouver means navigating racism

2019/11/05 Leave a comment

Account how some of the general narratives about Chinese and Chinese Canadians play out at the individual level. Although stating that her car is a Porsche (no shame, she works hard, and a good reporter) perhaps a detail that reduces empathy:

When my mother graduated from high school in Hong Kong in the 1970s, she and her friends did not have the luxury of going straight to college or spending a “gap year” travelling the world.

At age 18, she worked as a secretary all day and attended class in the evenings to earn a degree in business administration, while also studying English and shorthand.

She made 500 HKD a month, which was roughly equivalent to $80 Canadian at the time. Adjusted for inflation, that would still be less than $500 Canadian a month. My dad was working long hours, meanwhile, as a salesman for commission.

In my parents’ first home as a married couple, they lived in a flimsy shack on the rooftop of a high-rise building, which they jokingly referred to as their penthouse. It was better than when they bunked with their parents and siblings, with both families stuffed into 200-square-feet studios.

They saved fastidiously. My mom socked away half her salary each month and invested the money. Since she was constantly upgrading her skills at night, she also jumped jobs to double and triple her salary. By the time I was born, she had a fairly comfortable government job and my dad had moved up the ranks to general sales manager.

Yet they gave it all up to start over again in their early 30s. After selling their apartment, my parents moved to Canada, in hopes of giving their children a more secure future in a democratic country.

I’m now the same age they were when they settled in Vancouver. Even though I haven’t been quite as disciplined, because I followed their example of jumping jobs and working multiple gigs at once, I’ve saved enough and I’m looking for a home of my own.

Favourable rent comes at a steep price when it’s time to move

Searching for a condo in Vancouver as an Asian immigrant is a fraught and emotional experience. Why? Because there is a class struggle centred around housing affordability happening in the Lower Mainland — and it’s led to outright racism, ageism, classism and xenophobia.

If you chat with any Asian person in Vancouver, they’re likely to say they’ve noticed an uptick in racism, of people who voice their assumptions that they are recent migrants with bucketloads of cash and are driving up the real estate prices for “locals” and “real Canadians.”

Earlier this year, a stranger confronted and raged at me that my Porsche had almost struck her. I was dumbfounded. I commute an hour to work on public transit every day. Other times, people have simply shouted: “Chink!” at me, as I walked down the street.

At an apartment pre-sale event in Burnaby, I saw a one-bedroom that cost less than $450,000, and I couldn’t help blurting out, “Wow, that’s pretty cheap!”

It was a very crowded exhibition hall and immediately, everyone around shot dagger eyes at me and one white lady made a furious sound that sounded like “Eeuarrrckk!” then hissed under her breath, “Go back to China, bitch.”

And that’s just what I get as a young person. My parents are both boomers and immigrants, and even though they are so law-abiding they wouldn’t jaywalk, let alone engage in seedy real-estate fraud, they represent the most popular scapegoats for soaring real-estate prices in this city.

At best, it’s an unhealthy “us” versus “them” dynamic — at worst, it’s bigotry.

“I would never sell to a ‘housewife’ from China,” someone wrote to me in response to my first house-hunting story. The insinuation was that these people are undeserving of homes in Vancouver.

It makes me sad to see valid frustration about rising unaffordability lead to ugly attitudes toward people who are eager to become Canadians. My first job as a teenager was working as an English tutor, where I was mostly employed by “astronaut families.” Usually, it is the father who stays and works in the home country, planning to make money and join his family later, while his wife and children move abroad. The astronaut mothers that I knew were devoted to their kids’ educations, hiring multiple tutors and music teachers in ardent hope of helping them build bright futures in a new land.

Source: House-hunting as an Asian immigrant in Vancouver means navigating racism

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

How Canadians are part of an underground network helping Hong Kong protesters in their struggle against Chinese control

2019/07/16 Leave a comment

Good long read:

Dark circles ring Abraham Wong’s eyes. The Vancouver realtor’s phone has been on 24 hours a day since early June, when a series of protests against Hong Kong’s controversial extradition bill intensified.

In a downtown Vancouver office Thursday, Wong’s phone continually buzzed with messages from protesters on the ground in Hong Kong. He is texting and talking to people as young as 14, answering questions about everything from how to immigrate to Canada to how overseas audiences perceive the police crackdowns on protesters.

The 32-year-old businessman, who has both Canadian and Hong Kong citizenship, said he is one of hundreds of Canadian-based supporters of the pro-democracy movement that has spilled onto the streets of the former British colony.

Protests have become part of life for Hong Kongers, ever since it was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” agreement, which requires Beijing to respect the autonomy of its rule-of-law legal system for 50 years.

Tens of thousands of people from Hong Kong immigrated to Canada in the years surrounding what is known as the 1997 “handover,” but many remain engaged in the city’s struggles.

Wong is the public face of the Canadian supporters, who are part of an informal, international network that has expanded in recent weeks to help Hong Kongers who are protesting the extradition bill.

The unnamed network provides free legal information, public outreach to raise awareness and media relations for protesters, including some who broke into and vandalized the Hong Kong legislature on July 1 and now fear they will be arrested by police.

“If protesters seek asylum in our countries, we are prepared to do whatever we can do to help them settle safely,” says Wong, who was born in Hong Kong and participated in pro-democracy protests before he immigrated to Canada in 2003.

“We would help them find accommodation, find jobs or enrol in school. We have volunteer translators ready to help.”

One by one, organizers such as Wong introduce trusted people into the network. Members now include people from Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Germany and Tokyo. Most have Hong Kong roots, since they are motivated partly out of concern for relatives and friends living in the city.

The groups are careful not to expose the identities of the protesters they are trying to help and use encrypted apps to communicate with people in Hong Kong, Asia’s most Canadian city.

An estimated 300,000 Canadian citizens call Hong Kong home, while more than 200,000 immigrants from Hong Kong live in Canada, according to the 2016 Census. Hong Kongers have a soft spot for Canada, ever since close to 2,000 Canadians bolstered British forces to fight the Japanese at the beginning of the Second World War. Many were captured and kept as prisoners of war until they were liberated in 1945; almost a quarter did not make it home again, according to Veterans Affairs Canada.

Canadians are once again stepping into the fray, this time armed only with cellphones and apps, aiding the fight for what some describe as the soul of Hong Kong.

They include the network of supporters back home, but also Canadians on the ground in Hong Kong, a city on the southern tip of mainland China. The downtown financial district is just a one-hour train ride away from the closest mainland city of Shenzhen.

At the heart of the latest uprisings is a fear of greater Chinese government control over Hong Kong and the erosion of civil liberties, spurred by the prospect of amendments to its Fugitive Offenders Ordinance. The amendments would have made it easier to send suspected criminals to mainland China to face trial in courts controlled by the Communist Party.

“Hong Kongers have seen their rights and core values come under attack: freedom, justice and democracy,” Wong wrote in a June 13 editorial for the Star about the extradition bill.

He feared that, by speaking out publicly against the bill, he could be arrested and sent to mainland China the next time he stepped foot in Hong Kong or even had a stopover at the airport.

The protests, which started in April when Hong Kongers first heard of the amendments, continued after the city government suspended the approval process on June 15 but did not formally axe the bill.

On July 1, the 22nd anniversary of the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty from British rule, a group of young protesters broke into the legislature building and destroyed furniture, defaced portraits and sprayed protest graffiti all over the walls of the legislature that read: “Hong Kong is not China, not yet” and “The government forced us to revolt.”

In Hong Kong four days later, pro-democracy lawmaker Claudia Mo described how she tried to stop a young man from storming the legislature, where she holds one of 70 seats as an independent with no party affiliation.

“He reminded me of my son, a rugby player,” Mo, a graduate of Ottawa’s Carleton University, said in a July 5 interview at a coffee shop while the legislature was closed for repairs. “He was vowing to storm in and I approached him, saying, ‘Hey look, think twice, the rioting charge could cost you 10 years behind bars. It’s just not worth it.’ He put his arm around my shoulders and seemed to appreciate the concern, but told me to get out of the way … they would die for this fight.”

The day before, pro-Beijing lawmaker Regina Ip, chairperson of the New People’s Party, and a backer of the extradition bill, said in an interview that she was interested in how the leaderless protesters were so well organized and noted that solidarity marches have happened around the world against the extradition bill.

She said she had no hard evidence that foreign governments had “interfered” in the Hong Kong protests, but noted interference and influence are two different things.

“Naturally, foreign influence is pervasive. Influence is not the same as direct interference,” Ip said in a July 4 interview at her office in Wanchai, in central Hong Kong.

“There are behind-the-scenes organizers no doubt, but it’s not for me to point fingers … The (Hong Kong) government should be proactive in investigating.”

Ip said politicians should focus on economic policies to fight poverty, which she said was the underlying reason for public resentment against the influence of mainland China.

Beijing’s state media has focused on the idea of foreign influence in the protests, where it’s not clear whether “foreigners” include the Hong Kong diaspora. In a June 9 editorial, the China Daily wrote that “some Hong Kong residents have been hoodwinked by the opposition camp and their foreign allies into supporting the anti-extradition campaign.”

An active Hong Kong protester, who did not give her name for fear she would be arrested, said her Canadian passport gave her the courage to engage in peaceful political resistance. She organized a volunteer first aid response team, which attends each protest to help people suffering from heatstroke, tear gas and altercations with police.

“My family was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution in mainland China (from 1966-1976), so they really valued the protection of a foreign passport. My mother travelled to Montreal twice to give birth to my brother and me.”

The protester, who was interviewed in a Hong Kong church July 5, is in communication with the informal network of supporters from Canada. She is aware that people like Ip accuse protesters of actively seeking foreign support for the protests, and although they do want foreign governments to acknowledge their fight for democratic rights, she said governments have no direct role in funding or organizing the pro-democracy movement.

In addition to withdrawing the extradition bill, some protesters are also calling for the right to directly vote in elections, the release of protesters who have been arrested and an independent investigation into the police, particularly in relation to the June 12 protests where police fired rubber bullets on the crowd.

As further evidence of why Beijing can’t be trusted and the people of Hong Kong need democracy to hold their local government accountable, activists like Wong cite the cases of detained Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor and the internment in “re-education” camps of over a million Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Protesters have openly appealed for support from people and governments around the world. Last month, a crowdfunding campaign by the anonymous “Freedom Hongkonger” group of protesters raised more than $800,000 to take out front-page ads in prominent newspapers urging readers in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Switzerland and Japan to pressure G20 leaders, who met in Japan in late June, to act against the extradition bill and support democracy in Hong Kong. Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the meetings in Osaka, while Hong Kong finance chief Paul Chan was part of the Chinese delegation.

The Vancouver Society in Support of Democratic Movement has organized two rallies outside the Chinese consulate on Granville St. in support of Hong Kong protests, and the group is also in touch with protesters in Hong Kong to offer its support.

“People in Canada are very connected to protesters in Hong Kong. We are having meetings to consider our next steps,” said Mabel Tung, the society’s chairperson, although she wouldn’t provide any details.

Joshua Wong, a prominent Hong Kong activist who has served time in prison for his leading role in the 2014 pro-democracy protests called the Umbrella Movement, said people around the world should care about what’s happening in Hong Kong, even if it’s out of self interest.

“The extradition bill could affect foreign citizens to be extradited to face trial. It’s not appropriate for any government to allow extradition of their people from Hong Kong to China,” Wong said in a July 5 telephone interview in Hong Kong.

“It’s a good move for Canada, and the U.S. and the U.K to speak out. I hope more countries will do the same.”

“We are asking for the government to listen to the voice of people,”

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland, speaking to reporters by teleconference Thursday from London, said the extradition bill issue is a “special concern for Canada because of the 300,000 Canadians living in Hong Kong. We have a duty of care towards them and we take that very seriously.”

Canada has issued two public statements expressing its concern that the bill could harm the rights and freedoms of people in Hong Kong, including one issued jointly with U.K. foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt on May 30 that highlighted possible effects “on business confidence and on Hong Kong’s international reputation.”

But whether Canada will give refugee status to pro-democracy activists from Hong Kong is unclear. Last year, Hong Kong protesters Ray Wong, 25, and Alan Li, 27, were granted refugee status in Germany.

When Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada was asked whether any Hong Kong protesters have sought asylum in Canada, a spokesperson said they could neither confirm or deny it “for reasons of privacy.”

Jean-Nicolas Beuze, the Canada representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said the UNHCR cannot play a role in advising Hong Kong protesters whether or not to seek asylum in Canada and Canadian authorities would have to assess any claims.

Back in Hong Kong, the protests continued after Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said Monday the extradition bill was “dead” because she did not formally withdraw it. Protesters are organizing another march on Sunday in Shatin, one of Hong Kong’s 18 districts, which is north of Kowloon.

Last Sunday, protesters poured into the streets of Kowloon, a district popular with tourists who come there from mainland China to shop. Chanting “Democracy for Hong Kong,” “Carrie Lam resign,” and “Love your country, come protest,” they moved through the streets in unison, using hand signals to motion to the back of the crowd when it was time to stop for a red light and when it was OK to cross an intersection. They stopped outside malls to wave at mainland Chinese tourists inside, encouraging them to come out and join them.

A woman from China’s Guangdong province, watching the procession with a look of wonder, asked what the protests were about. When she learned that Hong Kongers were opposing the extradition bill because they don’t trust China’s legal system, she only nodded.

Wearing black and hoisting yellow umbrellas to symbolize their hope for democracy, the crowd surged down the streets, singing with deliberate irony the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China called the “March of the Volunteers.”

“Arise, we who refuse to be slaves!

With our flesh and blood,

Let us build our new Great Wall!

The peoples of China are at their most critical time,

Everyone must roar in defiance.

Arise! Arise! Arise!”

Source: How Canadians are part of an underground network helping Hong Kong protesters in their struggle against Chinese control

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