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NEWS |
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| ELECTORNIC EDITION |
| 2008-05-05 |
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GLOBAL CHINESE PRESS |
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PM takes heat over Olympic decision
Miro Cernetig 2008-05-05 11:34 Vancouver Sun | It's generally gone unnoticed in Vancouver's mainstream English-language press. But for years, Stephen Harper has been trying hard to court our Chinese community, seeing it as an important vote to help him win a majority government in the next election.
He's dispatched Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism, to the West Coast to provide words of comfort about the sexual abuse of Chinese women during the Japanese invasion of China, when many Chinese were forced to work as "comfort women."
Before that, the Conservative government outmanoeuvred the Liberals by becoming first to apologize for the head tax, the racist attempt to keep Chinese out of Canada. A few months ago, Harper even showed up on the West Coast to support the Chinese community's fundraising efforts to send assistance to those suffering in the deadly snow storms that paralysed southern China this winter.
But despite all the overtures, the prime minister's suddenly in, as they say in China, a spot of mafan. Trouble.
It's the Olympics. Canada's leader doesn't want to go to Beijing for the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, a tone-deaf decision he said he made long ago. Unfortunately, he reiterated it just as the protests around the Olympic torch relay hit the international media.
The prime minister's decision hasn't gone over well with the Chinese government, which has all but frozen out high-end access for Canadian officials. And it's been even more of a diplomatic clunker within Canada's Chinese immigrant community, where many also see the Conservatives as hostile toward their birth country.
It's not hard to see why if you look at what's happening in Vancouver. Aside from Harper's perceived Olympic snub, many recently arrived Chinese-Canadians are angry about public statements from the government that Chinese spies operate in Canada. (Yes, it's true. But it's also not new and we're primarily talking low-level industrial espionage, which other countries also practise here.)
Probably most damaging, though, is the bizarrely undiplomatic gaffe of Conservative MP Rob Anders, who says today's China is our modern-day Nazi Germany. He even linked Beijing's Olympics to the infamous 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Adolf Hitler's coming-out party on the world scene.
It's hard to believe a responsible MP still looks at China in the manner Time magazine's Henry Luce did 50 years ago, but apparently Anders does and the PMO isn't gagging him. Count on Beijing's leaders taking note of this incendiary statement, which they suspect is part of Ottawa's moralistic attitude to China: "I absolutely 100 per cent think it compares to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. You've got Falun Gong practitioners, which are not allowed to participate in the Olympics. Adolf Hitler had issues with Jews being able to participate in the Olympics in 1936."
Not surprisingly, recent Chinese immigrants, who, like many new citizens, retain an emotional tie to their homeland, are incensed. Consider some of the backlash from commentators, rarely heard by non-Chinese Canadians:
"Harper's high-profile criticism of the Beijing Olympics means he has abandoned the best opportunity to resolve Canada's relations withChina . . ." wrote Li Mu, a commentator for the Global Chinese Press, a Chinese-language paper well read by Mainland Chinese immigrants.
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