Strange Journey

Mai Kailan shyly loosens her cardigan, revealing the bruises running across her back and along both arms. Their purple garishness makes them look more painful than they are now, eleven days after the pummelling she received at the hands of Public Security Bureau officials who arrested her in Beijing and then put her on a plane out of her native land, seemingly forever, with her Canadian passport, acquired a decade ago, as her only security. The gentle grandmother is a follower of Falun Gong who had looked for trouble by bringing solace to the beleaguered sect in the Chinese capital. Betrayed by an informer within hours of her arrival from Vancouver in 2003, Mai Kailan had spent two terrifying days and nights in a Beijing lockup somewhere near the Drum Tower before she was sent packing. Although officials in China now claim the sect and its leadership have been “resolutely smashed,” the smashing continues.

So let’s suppose that this is the year 2009. The country with the richest supply of natural resources has forged a special relationship with the most populous country in the world—which also happens to have the fastest-growing economy. China’s vast state-owned Minmetals Corporation has had a majority share in Noranda Incorporated. now for close to four years. In 2004, Noranda was Canada’s largest mining company with 15,000 employees and operations in seventeen countries. Now Min-Nor Metals Incorporated is in thirty-four countries, and its employees number over 280,000. In Canada, it offers annual reports in three languages and French isn’t the second one. At its Canadian head office in Vancouver, a banner festooned across the entrance welcomes in the Year of the Pig with the bold statement, in both English and Chinese: Canadian-Chinese Friendship is As Close As Lips and Teeth.

A lot of territory had to be covered before the deal was complete. Minority shareholders in Falconbridge Inc., the Canadian nickel producer, that is 60-percent owned by Noranda, overcame their fears of a fall in shareholder value. The acute shortage of natural resources in China, and the surfeit in Canada, answered most questions.

Apart from a bit of predictable caterwauling from human-rights activists, there was never really a problem. Human-rights causes aren’t what they used to be. The prime minister was all for the sale, and most Canadians were dazzled at the prospect of a new era dawning—one they could scarcely imagine even five years ago, one in which their country was given the chance to reduce its utter dependency on the United States market and move forward into the land of 1.3 billion people.

The other concern at the time was whether the Canada Investment Act would be deployed to hobble any agreement between Noranda and Minmetals, and it is true the New Democratic Party tried to goad the old Martin government into using it to quash the sale. Thanks to the twentieth-century Mulroney administration, which created the act as a weak sister to the contentious Foreign Investment Review Agency, the ndp whining came to no avail. Here was irony! The right-of-centre business community and Martin’s minister for international trade, Jim Peterson, were all for the deal with Communist China, while the left-of-centre ndp fought it hammer and sickle.

So we’re sitting pretty here, then, in January 2009, because the Noranda deal was the pacesetter that led to China’s takeover of a number of major resource-based companies. Abitibi, Petro-Canada, Inco: the shopping list was long, and doesn’t include the special water-plant operations that are involved in bulk sales to China, or the joint-venture deals that revived the steel industry in Hamilton. No wonder a delegation from Nova Scotia went to Beijing last year to see if the Chinese would like to help reopen some of Cape Breton’s coal mines.

That’s the new Canada: where there’s a need, we have the wherewithal. Hewers of wood and drawers of water we began in the seventeenth century. Hewers of wood and drawers of water we continue to be in the twenty-first, at least while supplies last.

At the dawn of 2005, the People’s Republic of China is in the midst of a strange sequence of events. It is the fifteenth straight year since the slaughter in Tiananmen Square left almost 2,600 dead, and nothing horrific has happened. Nothing catastrophic, ideologically convulsive or unnervingly eerie. Fifteen years of economic growth is significant because, in China, despite three millennia of recorded and culturally cohesive history, it has simply never happened. Not once. The closest it got was eleven years under the rule of the Guomindang Party leading up to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s, and even this period was afflicted with warlords and Communist bandits. Still, these were the first spurts of economic dynamism since the mid-nineteenth century, eventually blown away by Guomindang corruption, Japanese adventurism, and Western indifference.

Chairman Mao’s China convulsed almost automatically just about every decade right up to the Tiananmen protests. Proclaimed from the high rostrum of the Forbidden City in 1949, the People’s Republic was hurled into the insane Great Leap Forward, and the brutal purge, charmingly known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign. (“Let a hundred flowers bloom,” said the Great Helmsman, “and let a hundred schools of thought contend.”)

No sooner had more pragmatic officials got the country patched together in the wake of the dreadful famine Mao’s economic tinkering had caused when he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. This was a cruel power play disguised as an ideological corrective by a disgruntled, sidelined leader. By Mao’s reckoning it was a brilliant success: he regained full power, punished those who had tried to correct the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, and set old China on a course of perpetual revolution. For New China, it was catastrophic: production collapsed on all fronts, two generations of young people had their future permanently blighted, and the patriotism of those who supported Mao for the good of the nation was squandered.