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<html> <head> <meta name="Generator" content="Corel WordPerfect 8"> <title></title> </head> <body text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#551a8b" alink="#ff0000" bgcolor="#c0c0c0"> 2004/23 CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY NOTES FOR AN ADDRESS BY THE HONOURABLE BILL GRAHAM, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, AT THE MUNK CENTRE CANADA-CHINA CONFERENCE TORONTO, Ontario April 23, 2004 Foresight is a rare and wonderful thing in any sphere of life, but nowhere more so than in global affairs. As in the daily news, within Foreign Affairs Canada and certainly in my own average day, a focus on the immediate and the urgent tends to crowd out a broader and longer-term perspective on global developments and Canada's interests with respect to them. This means that as we focus our attention on very real priorities, such as the daily management of our relationship with the United States, our transatlantic ties and hot spots such as the Middle East, we sometimes fail to give sufficient attention to the significance of fundamental shifts in the global order that are sure to have a profound impact in the coming years and decades. This is one reason why I'm so pleased to be here at this conference focused on the Canada-China relationship, which is certainly one of the most important, if not always the most high-profile, of our international priorities. At this time, the government is in the midst of an International Policy Review. Its outcomes are not yet determined, but I am confident of one thing: it will include a much more explicit recognition of the place that our relationship with China (and other emerging powers such as India and Brazil) will have for this country in the years to come and the consequences that that will have for our priorities and our resources. Why China is high on the government's agenda hardly needs explaining to this audience. Its phenomenal growth rates are having ever greater effects on the global economy. Its more active international engagement is evident in its entry into the WTO, and by recent actions such as addressing the North Korean nuclear crisis. The social and environmental dimensions of China's growth command global attention, as do its views on the future of Hong Kong, Taiwan and indeed Asia as a whole. The prosperity and security of countries around the world are increasingly bound up with the directions in which it develops over the next years and decades. For all of these reasons, expanding our relationship with China is going to be fundamentally important for Canada. The same is being said by many countries around the world, of course. But we in Canada are hardly starting from zero here; in fact, this relationship has been flourishing for several decades now, to the mutual benefit of both our countries. When the late Mitchell Sharp helped engineer the formal recognition of the People's Republic of China in 1970, Canada was among the first to see the People's Republic's emergence on the international stage as a priority. As our contact with China has grown since then, our relationship has become more sophisticated on every level. Today we have a solid diplomatic relationship, growing networks of institutional partnerships, and countless personal ties spanning politics, education, culture and commerce. These ties draw as well, of course, on the Chinese-Canadian diaspora, which began when Chinese immigrants first arrived here over 150 years ago. As we know, that early immigration was not always conducted in a way that was to Canada's credit. Chinese immigrants working on the railway performed an incredible service to Canada, but were hardly welcomed. Many were returned to China; and for a long time the infamous Head Tax marked a dark spot in our history. The Canadian opera Iron Road tells that story in moving terms, and evokes the suffering of many of those early Chinese immigrants to Canada. But what started out in conditions of injustice has today become an extraordinarily important community in Canada. About one million Canadians--or 1 in 30--today are of Chinese origin, and Chinese is the third most widely spoken language in our country. Toronto itself is home to some 400,000 residents of Chinese origin, and I can say that some 5,000 of those inhabit my own constituency. If "all politics is local," for me an understanding of China and our relationship with it is a part of my local political life. So from those early difficult days we have now evolved to a situation where China, including Hong Kong, is Canada's largest source of immigrants, whose vitality has so greatly enriched our country. Among them, of course, is our Hong Kong-born Governor General, who came here as a refugee in the middle of World War II, and who has made such a remarkable contribution to our cultural and national life. That diaspora then is a dynamic source of relations with China, and serves as a constant attraction for a steady stream of visitors from China who come not just from Beijing and the central government, but also now from every corner of China, as we deepen our relationship through mechanisms such as the twinning of Toronto with Chongqing, and the twinning of Montreal with Shanghai and other cities. Sometimes such visits may be conductive to developing as much misunderstanding as understanding. I experienced this personally after the election of 1988, when I went to Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick to recover from losing the election. I was asked by a friend of mine, the owner of a restaurant, if I would help her clean some fish, because a large Chinese delegation had arrived unforeseen. So I went out to clean the fish, and while I was doing it some of the Chinese delegation, who were on the island to purchase a local fish plant, came out of the restaurant and saw me. They had been in Toronto two days earlier, and one of their group, who in fact was a resident of my riding, pointed to me and said, "There's our Liberal candidate from the election two days ago." When I confirmed through an interpreter that yes indeed, I had been, nothing thereafter would persuade those Chinese visitors that Canadian democracy didn't work in such a way that if you ran in an election and lost, you were immediately banished to some faraway place and had to clean fish for a living; and that there were therefore serious risks to participating in the Canadian democratic process. Since that time I think I've had a chance to reverse that impression; but it was certainly a distinct conviction that that particular group left the country with. The presence in Canada of such regular missions only adds to the long list of reasons why our relationship with China is such an important one. I'd like to give you an overview today about how we see Canada's present relationship with China, where we want to see it go and some of the challenges we'll have to address along the way. The survey should properly begin on the economic front, with the fact of China's astonishing growth, averaging 9.4 percent per year since 1979. China's economic reforms have made it now the sixth largest economy in the world, one of the world's major trading nations and a magnet for foreign direct investment. For Canada, China is our fourth largest export destination and our third largest import source. Two-way trade is worth $20 billion per year. The rapid development of the Chinese economy is very good news for Canada, in that it provides extensive opportunities for Canadian exporters and investors, diversifying us away from our traditional dependence on the North American market. Of course there are some real challenges to tackle here: as Canada's trade with China grows, so too does our trade deficit. This past fall, our countries' leaders agreed to work toward doubling trade from Canada to China by 2010. To achieve this goal, Canada will have to use its existing advantages in technology and knowledge to create opportunities for increasing trade and investment flows from our country. Important facets of our economic engagement with China will certainly take place on the multilateral level as well. Because China matters so much for the world economy, we all gain from such multilateral engagement with China on economic issues. For many years we worked closely with the United States and other major world leaders to bring China into the rules-based global trading system. Now China plays an important role in the WTO, even as it is bound by WTO rules on market access, transparency and judicial review of administrative actions. I like to believe that I made some modest contribution to that process as a law professor at the University of Toronto, when I lectured to Chinese students who were mid-level bureaucrats spending time in Canada as interns in a program established by CIDA. Subsequently I joined colleagues at a campus outside Beijing run by the Ministry of Foreign Trade, where I lectured on the way in which world trading rules worked, and the way in which international human rights norms are adapted into domestic legal systems. On other multilateral fronts, we increasingly engage China on issues going well beyond economic ones, not just through global institutions like the UN, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank and the G20, but through regional ones as well. Canada's participation in the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] Regional Forum, for instance, gives us a venue to promote Canadian values, foster transparency and advance shared concerns for global security. When Foreign Minister Li and I met after the ASEAN Ministerial in Cambodia last June, we launched a productive dialogue on these topics, and our officials are exploring ways to expand our cooperation. These developments underline the fact that China has been taking a more active and generally constructive role internationally in virtue of its realization that a stable global environment is crucial to achieving its goal of continued economic growth. At the same time, it is modernizing its military capabilities, including its capacity to project military power well beyond its borders. In light of our own global security interests, Canada would prefer that China were more transparent in its military programs and in its strategic intentions. We would like to see China reassure its neighbours and the rest of the international community that it will use its growing military power responsibly, in support of international peace and security, and not as a coercive instrument in territorial and other sovereignty disputes. Our concerns about regional stability and security are heightened by continued tensions in the Taiwan Strait, as well as in the South China Sea. To its credit, China is now at the heart of efforts to address the challenge to the international proliferation regime posed by North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Active Chinese diplomacy, which facilitated the Six Party Talks in Beijing, offers the best chance of defusing this crisis. China's recent diplomacy on the North Korean issue is only one facet of its increasing integration into the multilateral system. It has been resolving old border disputes with neighbours, improving relations with India, and, as I mentioned, took the major step of joining the WTO in 2001. China's incremental embrace of multilateralism reflects its increasing appreciation of the role of international institutions and cooperative approaches in fostering the global stability it seeks. This development represents an opportunity for Canada to work with China to strengthen international institutions, which are essential underpinnings of global order and a vital component of Canadian security. And China's role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council makes it an important interlocutor as we consider the significant reform process that the Secretary- General has set in motion. Let me turn now to another major dimension of our relationship with China, namely our efforts to promote in that country, as we aim to around the world, the values of human rights, democracy and good governance. Despite considerable progress in these areas over the past five decades, it has to be said that much remains to be done. Since 1996, Canada has pursued a policy of engagement with China on human rights and governance issues, in the belief that engagement is more effective than isolation in bringing about the improvements we seek. Accordingly, we raise human rights consistently at all levels as a major bilateral issue, with some notable results on both the policy level and in individual cases. Our annual Human Rights dialogue with China, as well as our Plurilateral Human Rights Symposium, offer opportunities for all parties to compare perspectives, even when they disagree. We are also devoting substantial resources to encouraging Chinese reforms. Through CIDA, Canadian programming in human rights, democratic development and good governance is helping China's legal, judicial and legislative institutions to develop in ways fostering the rule of law. CIDA-supported projects involve Canadian and Chinese partners in areas such as the Supreme People's Court, the Ministry of Justice and legal aid offices, academic institutions and civil society organizations. Our development assistance is modest when weighed against China's size, but is targeted to meet real needs in critical sectors such as women's rights and judicial reform. I can attest to this personally, as I was in Beijing some years ago visiting the Judges' College and had the opportunity to talk to some judges about how they were learning from Canadian lawyers, in a course paid for by CIDA, about the way in which international law is to be incorporated into China's domestic legal system. This is extremely important training, as China is now a signatory to the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other international instruments, and therefore has increasing need of expertise in this area. Developing a legal system that is appropriate for the incorporation of international norms respecting its human rights and international trade obligations is an extremely important part of China's evolution toward a modern and more democratic state. This process is taking effect, and it is being influenced by Canadians who teach and practise law in China, and Canadians who work with their Chinese counterparts to reinforce these standards. When I lectured in China, these issues were followed with avid attention by the young middle-level bureaucrats, who subsequently have, I know, acceded to much more important positions within their society. Their time spent with Canadian colleagues, and time spent in Canada itself, had a significant influence on their evolving ability to accomplish change in China. And our role in this case, as in similar cases, has contributed importantly to our ability to make our views heard on issues of concern. Some in Canada have questioned why we continue to give such assistance in light of China's robust economic growth and its technological achievements that include something as advanced as putting a person into space. I can assure you that CIDA programs are evolving as China itself evolves. Its aim is not to give charity, but to influence China's transformation in ways compatible with Canadian values and interests, and with what we believe to be the best interests of the Chinese people. The political and civil reforms we are supporting in China may not all succeed (or at least not in the short term), but there is no question that without outside support, they are less likely to succeed. As long as China is still interested in receiving support from Canada in certain areas of importance to us, such as governance, the environment and poverty reduction, it is clearly in our own interest to make this support available. It is equally clear that our own interest dictates close cooperation with China on the environment and on public health issues, two areas in which national borders have truly dissolved and common problems join countries half a world away. Canada and China already share a desire to see sustainable development that protects the global commons. We both recognize that without significant investments and technological changes, China's goal of quadrupling its GDP by 2020 could ravage its environment, diminish the quality of life for Chinese and have a global impact. For instance, those famous images of Chinese city streets choked with bicycles are now largely things of the past. Last year there were an estimated four million new cars on the road in China, a 20-percent increase from one year earlier. If growth continues at that rate, just imagine the effects that all those millions of new cars will have on global warming. On the other hand, if China does succeed in developing its economy sustainably, it will set a standard for other developing countries attracted to its economic model. Accordingly, Canada has been helping China attain this goal through workshops given by Environment Canada, through the Canada-China Joint Committee on Environmental Cooperation, and through a Climate Change Cooperation project between our two countries. Similar reasons of long-term self-interest inform our cooperation with China on public health issues. As you know, SARS, avian flu and HIV/AIDS threaten the health of our populations and damage our economies. Last year's SARS outbreak proved the importance of transparency, surveillance, detection, information sharing and cooperation as the only ways to control and prevent outbreaks in our increasingly globalized world. China has applied this lesson with laudable results, as new SARS cases have been reported this year. Because it is so clearly in Canada's interest to see China capable of dealing with public health problems in a transparent and timely way, CIDA has contributed $5 million to a project to improve Chinese capacity in dealing with SARS. When China reported avian flu outbreaks this year, an official from Health Canada was sent to work with the WHO in giving assistance. And in light of the terrible impacts that a large-scale spread of HIV/AIDS would have within and beyond China's borders, CIDA is contributing to the UN AIDS program in China. But that is not the only type of contribution we are making to this and similar issues. Often they are at an individual level as well. My own doctor in Toronto, for example, goes with a group of physicians to western China every year. He works there in a local hospital, where he and other volunteer physicians from Toronto are training local health workers to deal with HIV/AIDS in rural communities. He himself is a person who comes from a classic background: born to missionary parents in China, escaped during the war and now returning to bring his expertise and help the Chinese deal with these extraordinarily difficult issues. The principal work will have to come from the Chinese themselves, of course, but it is clearly in Canada's interests to do what we can to support their efforts. Alongside all these spheres of cooperation I've just listed, it must be acknowledged that our relations with China do have their points of tension and disagreement. As I mentioned earlier, Canada does have serious concerns with respect to human rights and governance in China. We are not satisfied with its positions on freedom of expression, assembly and religion, and on minority rights, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. We are also concerned about repression of the media and blockage of Internet sites. We continue dialogue with China about these matters, with CIDA programs ready to assist Chinese efforts toward reform. The maturity and potential of our relationship are shown, I believe, in the frank admission of our differences, and in ongoing efforts to address them both through development programs and sustained dialogue. In that spirit, I would note that the development of democracy in Hong Kong attracts Canadian interest for a number of reasons. Hong Kong's status as a Special Administrative Region has its foundations in an international treaty, and our foreign policy encourages the global development of democracy and good governance. As the sovereign power, China retains a unique role in the process of Hong Kong's continuing democratization. However, Canada maintains that the political evolution of Hong Kong will benefit from the emergence of consensus amongst its own people. Taiwan remains another sensitive issue in our relations with China. As recent events have shown, the possibility and scope for misunderstanding and escalation of tension remain high. We call on Beijing and Taipei to resume dialogue without preconditions, so that solutions can be found that fulfill the legitimate aspirations of people on both sides of the Strait. In keeping with the "One China" policy, which has underpinned Canada's approach for more than three decades, we believe that resolving the Taiwan question peacefully, in a manner acceptable to both sides, will further advance China's standing as an important and responsible pillar of the international system. Another potential area of disagreement in our relations, as you know, concerns the current visit to Canada of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In the view of Canadians, this Nobel Peace Prize recipient is a spiritual figure of great moral wisdom and influence, which is why the Prime Minister has met with him today. While China regards these matters differently, we are confident that our relationship is mature enough to accommodate a frank expression of our respective views and continued dialogue about them. Let me close tonight by noting once again the tremendous pace of change in China and the enormous challenge that poses for Canada to plan our engagement with China accordingly. There is a growing thirst among young Chinese for knowledge of the outside world, and they are learning foreign languages and travelling outside their country in numbers previously unthinkable. The loosening of Chinese controls over the media and the proliferation of cultural and media vehicles are producing a new openness that offers opportunities for Canada to project our own interests, values and culture into that country. Yet as opening and reform have created a market for new ideas within China, the competition for visibility and influence is growing just as rapidly. For this reason, Canada has recently developed a plan to connect with key people in business, academia, the media and government whose decisions affect Canadian interests. We are also working to promote a highly visible and favourable image of Canada's people, places and products to the millions of Chinese citizens now embracing the wider world. It is only sensible to keep these efforts in perspective, of course, when it comes to our ambitions for exerting influence. Size does matter, and with rising educational levels and incomes, Canada's relative influence on China's 1.3 billion people will inevitably diminish. But through active bilateral and multilateral engagement we can continue to promote China's positive development. We also have the tremendous resource of a large Chinese diaspora in Canada with the language skills, knowledge and connections to foster ties with China. We draw as well on the mutual understanding produced through the presence of at least 30,000 Chinese students studying at universities across Canada; through three decades' worth of educational exchanges involving Canadian and Chinese scholars; and through the existence of 32 Canadian Studies programs across China. Furthermore, over 20 years of development work in China have given Canadians a tremendous knowledge base and network in key sectors of the Chinese economy and society, and these resources can now be used to launch initiatives of broader Canadian interest. As we consider these and other facets of our future relations with China in our ongoing International Policy Review, we will also be considering how to engage Canadian citizens accordingly. We need to persuade more Canadians of the huge stake our country has in further developing our relations with China, both to advance our own direct interests and for the sake of a prosperous and secure global order. We also need to make our citizens aware of China's strong commitment to increased engagement with Canada. Last December the leaders of our two nations announced the formation of a high-level working group between our countries, something that China maintains with only a few countries in the world. This forum now permits an ambitious focus on political and economic issues of mutual priority, starting with areas such as energy resources and cooperation in multilateral contexts. It is exactly the kind of connection that, along with the outcomes of our International Policy Review, will take our thinking about Canada-China relations well into the next decade and beyond. We all know that the emergence of an increasingly modern, confident and powerful China will be one of the most important geopolitical developments of the 21st century. As it becomes a dominant pole of global political and economic power, China will become ever more central to the prosperity and security of Canadians. What sort of China evolves is therefore of the utmost significance to our country. It is in our interest to encourage China to make its society more open, to encourage its responsible global citizenship, to modernize its institutions and to develop sustainably. We cannot force these changes to happen as we would like, or as fast as we would like, but here Canada would do well to remember a Chinese proverb: "Patience is power; with time and patience the mulberry becomes silk." I assure you that the government is well aware of these realities, and is doing its utmost to guide the Canada-China relationship wisely into the future. The insights that come out of conferences such as this one will be invaluable in helping us to carry out that task, and I look forward to hearing your views. Thank you. </body> </html>

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