‘We’ve been too naive for too long’: How China is infiltrating Taiwan—and why the West should be heeding its warning
thehub.ca
'We've been too naive for too long': Taiwan's hard-won lessons on Chinese infiltration carry a stark warning for the West—are we paying attention?

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11900959

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11900079

Archived link

When [Canadian] Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Beijing in January and said Canada’s new “strategic partnership” with China set both countries up for a “new world order,” it marked a striking reversal. Less than a year earlier, on the election campaign trail, Carney had named China as Canada’s biggest security threat. And a year before the trip, the Hogue Commission’s report on foreign interference concluded that China is the most persistent and sophisticated foreign interference threat to Canada’s democratic institutions and elections.

The deal cut China’s tariff on Canadian canola seed to about 15 percent from 75.8 percent and eased duties on peas, and seafood. In return, Ottawa agreed to let in 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) a year at a 6.1 percent tariff, down from 100 percent. The partnership also covers clean energy, multilateral co-operation, people-to-people ties, and public security, including an agreement between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security, the police apparatus Beijing has used to monitor and intimidate its diaspora abroad.

The pivot comes as Carney rallies middle powers to band together against U.S. tariffs while moving closer to the world’s other superpower. Taiwan, which Beijing refuses to recognize as an independent country, and actively seeks to reunify Taiwan as part of China even by military force, shows how aggressive China can be. And as Chiense coast guard incursions into Taiwan-controlled waters have spiked in 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump has called a stalled $14-billion arms package for the island “a very good negotiating chip” with Beijing, recently adding he isn’t looking to fight a war thousands of miles away.

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Few Western journalists have watched China’s security apparatus as closely as Jürgen Kremb. A former Der Spiegel bureau chief in Beijing, Singapore, and Vienna who was expelled from China in 1998, he now teaches and conducts research at Soochow University in Taipei as a visiting scholar.

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The Hub spoke with Kremb about what Canada should learn from Taiwan as it grows its ties to China.

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Question: … Ottawa has now signed a strategic partnership with Beijing that includes a confidential RCMP agreement with China’s Ministry of Public Security. From where you sit in Taiwan, which has lived with this pressure far longer, does closer engagement with Beijing typically restrain its interference activities abroad, or does it give them more cover and access and embolden them?

Jürgen Kremb: It’s police and domestic security, and they work like the FBI. There are also members of their staff who work as agents, suppressing dissidents and different opinions. This ministry has about 2 million staff in China … and they open police stations in foreign countries, including Canada. The same in Europe and Australia [and other countries]. Of course that’s against the law of other countries, just as the U.S. or Canada cannot open a police station in Beijing.

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China now is the biggest threat to the security of a lot of countries, because they steal intellectual property, they intimidate their dissidents abroad, they intimidate people who are speaking out against China, they operate a lot of media. So we really have to take the threat seriously… And of course the primary target is Taiwan.

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Taiwan is the testing ground, [but it’s also being] executed against other democratic societies, the so-called West, but the so-called West also includes South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, etc.

Xi Jinping wants to rule the world–Western politicians simply cannot comprehend this. He wants to destroy the liberal concept of Western democracies because their very existence poses a threat to his dictatorship.

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Chinese cars are basically spies on four wheels. In Israel, in Sweden or Norway, and in Japan, Chinese cars are not allowed anymore into military installations because where there are cameras, they are actively spying on the surroundings and sending this data back to China.

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What happens if you work too closely with China? First, you seem to have access to a big, big market and make a lot of money. But one day it’s over, and your whole industry base collapses. So if Canada decides to go that way with closer relations to China, look twice and be very careful, and you could lose more than you gain.

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If you’re getting very close to China, in the end you might not be in the driver’s seat of your own country or of your key industry, because the Chinese sooner or later will overtake your products and influence your domestic policy.

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  • Lucius_Sweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    16 hours ago

    You keep pretending Marxism is about dogmatically paying everyone equally, and I have explained time and time again that you are confusing late-stage communism with early-stage socialism

    I’m not confusing anything, I understand perfectly well that China is not a communist country and has terrible wealth inequality that is increasing by the year. The transition to full communism is a lie sold to the workers so the factory owners can continue to exploit the workers surplus labor.

    As for advancements since Marx, I agree! Lenin, Walter Rodney, Cheng Enfu, and many other economists have carried his work forward. You haven’t given any examples,

    I could list off a few economists too but I fail to see the point.

    just continued to defend your own colonial adventures in Hong Kong while defending the European safety nets achieved by pilfering the surplus value of the global south.

    You have still failed to explain how my adventures were colonial. You have also skipped over the part where I discussed the increasing migrant Han Chinese populations in the annexed capitals of Xinjiang and Tibet and how that is not colonialism. Your own arguments are not even consistent.

    The bits on “forced labor” are entirely unsourced on your part.

    https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/01/un-experts-alarmed-reports-forced-labour-uyghur-tibetan-and-other-minorities

    Here you go buddy, I can find hundreds more if needed.

    Tibet was a feudal slave society before integration into the PRC, where slavery was abolished

    I come from Ireland and have heard plenty of colonial justifications like this from you imperialists. You think you civilised the savages do you? Nobody asked you to. Your colonial excuses are as ridiculous as Topographica Hibernica from 800 years ago, I’ve heard them all before.

    You have no clue what you’re talking about here, and equating Tibet and Xinjiang with Ireland is horrendously insulting to Irish anti-imperialists like James Connolly.

    Don’t you be trying to warp my history to suit you imperial agenda and keep James Connollys name out of your mouth while you do it. He knew exactly what colonialism was and would recognise and empathise with the struggles of the Uyghur and Tibetan people. Connolly was anti imperialist to the core and has written extensively on the subject. You are tying yourself into knots trying to deny the obvious truth that China is an imperial nation.

    China is absolutely Marxist

    They are selectively Marxist not absolutely.

    purely because they distribute the spoils pilfered from the global south to their labor aristocracy, is laughable.

    We haven’t even gotten into China’s neo colonialism and debt trap diplomacy but I’m sure that you will deny that too. You’re a robot programmed to believe “Western imperialism bad, China imperialism good and justified.” I am from neither a western or eastern imperial state and I see through all of you. You are just as bad as them but you can’t even see it from inside the machine.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      16 hours ago

      The transition to communism, a fully collectivized economy, is built on highly centralized productive forces. Markets naturally centralize over time, and erase their own basis. Unless you think the progress of time doesn’t exist, then thus process will continue to unfold naturally. The fact that markets centralize, and the fact that planned economy is more efficient with centralized production than with non-centralized production, is not a “lie.” It’s basic economics.

      The utility of listing off economists that have advanced on Marx in a manner that disproves him is in putting forth a positive position, rather than a negative, ie putting your back behind something you believe in, rather than rejecting understanding.

      As for Han populations increasing, this isn’t colonialism. Colonialism involves pilfering the surplus of a colonial territory while stripping them of their own sovereignty. To the contrary, money flows from the central government to the local governments in Xinjiang and Tibet at far greater rates than flows out. Connolly was anti-imperialist to the core, correct, which is why you do him a disgrace by labeling every socialist government you don’t like as colonial or neocolonial. This isn’t a “civilize the savages” argument like you imply, it’s the fact that Xinjiang and Tibet are a part of China, are not being culturally erased but instead being culturally protected, and are soveriegn within China.

      China isn’t neocolonial nor does it debt trap. This is baseless. The west is actively imperialist. The west uses financial domination of the global south, including dollar hegemony, IP monopoly, unequal exchange, and more to extract as much surplus from the global south as possible. China does not, and the reason it does not is because it isn’t dominated by private finance capital. Private finance capital is the main driver of imperialism as a stage in capitalism, and because you have not looked into the causes of imperialism and neocolonialism and have not looked at the numbers, you assume that the socialists must be guilty as well:

      You have no sticking points. You reject materialist analysis in favor of vibes.