CAPI Publications
The Five Eyes and Canada's "China Panic": A Threat to Diplomacy, Research and Peace in the Pacific?
This discussion paper reveals how CSIS and the Five Eyes manufactured a “China Threat” in 2018 that turned into a firestorm with the arrest of Meng Wanzhou at YVR that December. Fanned by anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic, then stoked by CSIS leaks and a hostile media sensationalizing accusations of ‘foreign interference’, the China threat has mutated to become Canada’s “China Panic” with far reaching implications. This paper examines the three stages in the making of this panic, and how a toxic mixture of Sinophobia and anti-communism has meant that the federal NDP, Conservatives and Bloc Québécois are preventing any resolution of the crisis. Now, as other countries stabilize relations with the People’s Republic of China, Canada is stuck – a diplomatic outlier unable to get its house in order. Meanwhile, CSIS is in the process of installing an unprecedented research surveillance system in Canadian universities, and Canadian Armed Forces are regularly skirmishing with PRC forces in East Asia. The situation has become critical, necessitating some difficult conversations to determine a path forward towards justice and peace.
“An illuminating and meticulously documented analysis of the manufacturing of Canada's 'China panic', this discussion paper is a wake-up call to the progessive left about the drift toward a surveillance state that will shrink the space for democratic discussion and the exercise of human rights.”
William K. Carroll, Professor of Sociology, University of Victoria and Research Associate, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives - BC Office.
Supervising a Peace that Never Was: Recollections of Canadian Diplomatic Personnel in Indochina, 1954-1973 is an edited volume of essays by former diplomatic personnel who were assigned to international commissions in Indochina to initially oversee the implementation of the Geneva Accords in 1954 (the ICSC) and in 1973 to ensure adherence to the Paris Peace Agreement (the ICCS). For twenty years young Canadians were sent on diplomatic postings to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and the following chapters are their memories of time spent in a part of the world that—up until that time—Canada had little interest or presence in.