Canadian Sinologist Recounts ‘Hectic Getaway’ From Shanghai After Questioning by Chinese Secret Police

In The Beaver and the Dragon, Charles Burton argues that Canada — caught between Beijing’s coercive rise and Washington’s unraveling order — now faces strategic challenges on all sides.

OTTAWA — Editor’s Note. As 2025 unfolds, the global balance of power is shifting at breakneck speed — leaving even seasoned analysts uneasy about whether great-power conflict could erupt by 2027, the year President Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be prepared for an invasion of Taiwan. A new race for critical mineral supply chains, semiconductor supremacy, and renewed nuclear weapons testing is accelerating.

Few observers are better positioned to interpret these stakes for Canada than sinologist Charles Burton. In The Beaver and the Dragon, Burton examines the widening fault lines between democratic and authoritarian blocs, arguing that Canada has been repeatedly outmaneuvered by Beijing while being squeezed by an increasingly unpredictable — and at times openly unfriendly — power in Washington.

The first excerpt, Hope for the Future, recounts Burton’s uneasy flight from China in 2018 following a surprising meeting with officers of the Ministry of State Security — an encounter he has discussed with me privately and only alluded to briefly in a 2019 Sinopsis paper. “In August 2018,” Burton wrote, “the author was invited to a meeting with Canada Desk officers of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Over several hours … it was most evident that the MSS officers attending had a very detailed and sophisticated grasp of the minutiae of Canada–China relations.” The excerpt sets the stage for his later reflections on Beijing’s blacklisting of Canadian citizens and organizations, his personal fear that a return to China could result in detention, and his warning that Xi Jinping’s ideological expansionism seeks to reshape the global order along authoritarian lines, while Washington retreats from decades of stabilizing soft-power engagement.

The second excerpt, Canada in Trade Wars with the Superpowers—originally published in the Toronto Star and re-contextualized in Burton’s book for Optimum International—captures the pivotal moment when Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” economic crusade collided with Xi Jinping’s ambitions, revealing how Western disunity had become one of China’s most potent strategic advantages, according to Burton. In the months that followed Burton’s column, China and Canada emerged as two of Washington’s most intractable trade counterparts—and, remarkably, even Beijing appears to have secured more favorable terms from President Trump than Ottawa has to date.

Excerpt 1 — Hope for the Future

My hectic getaway from Shanghai airport in 2018 was the last time I’ve set foot in China. Given the circumstances, it obviously made sense to delay any return until we could determine what concerns the regime has about me, and how they could be resolved without involving arrest or harassment.

In December 2024 my absence was no longer self-imposed when I, along with 19 other individuals and two Canadian organizations, were banned from entering China. I was on the list because I had acted as an advisor for a Canada-based human-rights group, the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project (although I qualified to make the list twice due to my similar association with the Canada Tibet Committee).

This came days after Canada had announced sanctions against eight Chinese government officials it said were involved in human-rights violations against ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as against practitioners of Falun Gong.

After our banishment was posted on a government website, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled newspaper The Global Times reported that we were exiled for offences that included “spreading disinformation” about human-rights violations in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and in Tibet. (PRC official propaganda has recently started to refer to Tibet by its name in romanized Chinese, Xizang, meaning literally “western treasury.” It is politically motivated subterfuge to downplay that Tibet has been the ancestral land of Tibetans since long before the Han Chinese invaded the territory.)

The Chinese official statement reads:

“Canada’s actions are an attempt to use human-rights issues in Xinjiang and Xizang to enhance its international presence and strengthen its influence in global diplomacy and ideological discourse.”

So, unlike my sanctioning by Russia in 2022, China did not ban me because of what I have published in newspapers. It was a response to Canada’s China policy in general.

When I began placing opinion pieces in Canadian newspapers nearly 20 years ago, many Canadians were confident that China could become a responsible stakeholder in world affairs. Canada under Justin Trudeau came close to collaborating with China in international affairs, including transnational crime, even considering an extradition treaty. We also came close to integrating our economies through a free-trade deal.

But, as the commentary articles recount, as China became more powerful economically, it began posing a hostile geostrategic threat to the international rules-based order.

China’s current leadership sees Donald Trump as fulfilling Xi Jinping’s prediction that the United States is a power in decline — that the vacuum created by American nationalism will be filled by China — and that Xi’s “Community of the Common Destiny of Mankind” will become the future global order.

China thus assumes what Mr. Xi considers its rightful role as the dominant global civilization, with Chinese even displacing English as the world’s foremost common language. Under Xi’s vision, Canadians would realize that a political system based on China’s authoritarian model, and on its superior civilization informed by Confucianism, is Canada’s best option for political, economic and social development. Canada would become a subsidiary economy to China’s centre of global industrial production and infrastructure.

But there are other, less oppressive possible futures. Some China watchers see Xi’s domestic and international ideology eventually being rejected by the Chinese people. They question the very sustainability of his Leninist model, which favours unquestioned state domination and purges non-regime actors like Alibaba founder Jack Ma or others who develop power bases that could challenge Beijing’s influence.

In China there is the expression wu ji bi fan — “when things go to extremes they must turn back.” The pendulum of history may turn back to the ideals of liberal democracy.

It is plausible that a demise of American world dominance would give way to a renewed global order where China plays a productive role in enabling sovereign states to engage in free and fair trade, but where the United Nations and other organizations that protect sovereign nations would be reinvigorated.

The work that I was doing in the 1980s and ’90s, before Xi came to power, was to try and provide the Chinese government with information about how it might transition to a governance system based on rule of law. In such a scenario, the kinds of political institutions defined in the UN charter — particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1998 but never ratified — could become relevant to China’s political development.

A politically renewed China could lead the way against the current trend where values and organizations like the UN and WTO are being debased. Even before Trump came along, they were already showing signs of fraying. The ideals of human rights and citizenship, and of equality of all humans on the planet, were deteriorating.

So, a hopeful scenario for the future could actually emerge from the assault on our institutions by the Trumpist United States. It would be a renaissance of democracy in which popular global forces unify to counterbalance the wealth and power of global elites with reinvigorated political and multilateral institutions based on the inherent equal rights of free citizens.

Despite all the setbacks and unfulfilled promises of my more than half a century of intense engagement with China, I remain optimistic that its best days are still ahead.

Excerpt 2 — With No Room for Error

Toronto Star, April 7, 2025

The ache of Donald Trump’s Liberation Day noir will go beyond disaster for thousands of Canadians who lose their jobs and see their savings debased by stagflation and battered markets. There will also be historic political implications for whoever forms Canada’s next government.

In the initial erratic phase of Trump’s on-again, off-again trade barriers, Canada was “spared” the heavier blows placed on many other countries. But Canadian households almost certainly face a painful future of reduced incomes, higher living costs and diminished retirement nest eggs.

Canada is entering its greatest existential upheaval since Confederation. Besides Trump duties that will make Canadian autos, steel and aluminum less affordable to U.S. customers, China has slapped exorbitant tariffs on Canadian canola, seafood and pork exports that will punish farming and commercial-fishing families.

The fitful week ended with China answering Trump’s aggression by announcing its own anti-U.S. tariffs, causing the kind of uncertainty that sends financial markets toward meltdown.

As Trump’s pathological behaviour puts global recession on the table and provides an opening for China to play its own agenda, trade-dependent nations like Canada will find it prohibitively difficult to sustain their economies by selling exports.

Canadians will demand Ottawa grab any measure it can to relieve the pain. This is where poise and critical judgment must be paramount.

Amidst the chaos, China has already indicated it is open to new trade talks with Canada. All we need to do is make concessions — like removing Canada’s 100-per-cent tariff on massively subsidized electric vehicles that China wants to dump here, idling our auto industry and vaporizing thousands of jobs. (China has spent $230 billion USD helping state-controlled industries develop its EV industry. It has double the production capacity its domestic market needs and plans to secure global domination.)

Strong-armed by Beijing and hectored by U.S. ideologues renegotiating CUSMA, Canadian officials will be disadvantaged — especially now that protections like the WTO or “legally binding treaties” are worthless. There will be no David-and-Goliath outcome, no principles of reciprocal fairness, no goodwill toward Canada.

Trump tactics like demanding that NATO nations hike military spending to 5 per cent of GDP not only benefit American defence contractors but present an impossible task for Canada as it struggles to support its workers and restructure its economy. That then becomes a rationale for further penalties like closing off U.S. markets, imposing secondary tariffs, and, of course, playing the Trump card for our resources and Arctic sovereignty.

Stalked by China, estranged from our erstwhile U.S. partner, and an ocean away from European allies, Canada must tread carefully and strategically as it reorganizes relationships and navigates the shoals of the new age.

Most economists outside of the acerbic MAGA cult know that Trump’s senseless tariffs will damage the U.S. economy, and while the president is erratic in most respects, one thing we can safely predict is that any spike in unemployment or crashing of markets will not be his fault.

Global economic carnage is being triggered by Trump’s greed to have it all, which itself is based on carefully concocted propaganda that America has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” by duplicitous allies that past U.S. administrations have been stupidly subsidizing. Canada evidently tops the list of freeloaders.

As the havoc of Liberation Day metastasizes, any harms to U.S. prosperity will be blamed on Canada and Europe, provoking Trump to deliriously unleash further punishments. Beijing, meanwhile, is biding its time.