It is clear that China’s authoritarian rulers have burned a lot of bridges as of late, and most of those bridges led straight to democratic countries that have historically been allies of ours
When China began playing hardball with us following the RCMP’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecom giant Huawei, Canada was at a clear disadvantage. The arrests of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who have now been held for 530 days, on trumped-up charges, and China’s restrictions on the import of numerous Canadian products, showed how little influence we had.
None of this has gone unnoticed by President Trump. Though he has flip-flopped on China a number of times — he has called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “friend” and initially praised the country’s response — his administration is now actively engaged in a high-stakes war of words with the Chinese, and is taking concrete steps that are actively provoking the “Sleeping Giant.”
There has also been increased military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait in recent months, with China sending warships, an aircraft carrier and fighter jets into the area, and the U.S. deploying a destroyer and conducting large-scale surveillance operations off China’s coast. As punishment, Beijing banned the import of beef from several Australian processors, slapped large tariffs on Australian barley and reportedly told state-owned power plants to stop buying coal from the country.
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