Terry Glavin: Beijing offers a poisoned chalice. Carney shouldn’t drink from it

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The new and improved blueprint formalizes the People’s Republic of China as a “military-civil fusion” of the Chinese state and nominally private companies and institutions that requires military and civilian planning, coordination, policy alignment and resource-sharing. It calls for peacetime-wartime integration as a central purpose of the Communist Party’s 15th five-year plan, for 2026-30. And Beijing’s peace-war integration has dramatically ramped up China’s hybrid-warfare collaborations with Russia in targeting Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan.

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The Trump administration has rendered the United States largely irrelevant in this new theatre of operations. Dozens of U.S.-backed academic and civil-society organizations with a focus on Beijing’s human rights abuses and the persecution of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, journalists and civil rights activists had their funding cut within days of Trump’s return to the White House on Jan. 20 last year.

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The tariff war the Trump administration immediately launched against China ended in a draw, if not an outright American defeat, as Beijing demonstrated that it could sustain its global exports sufficiently without any access to American markets. Just as the Carney government has returned Canadian policy to the exuberant enthusiasm for China that marked the early years of Justin Trudeau’s “postnational” government, the Trump administration has lately turned the American clock back a quarter of a century.

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The Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan A. Czin, former National Security Council director and former senior Central Intelligence Agency analyst, says Trump’s recent summit in Beijing was almost entirely devoted to trade and commerce, “conspicuously neglecting any of the many security issues that bedevil the relationship.”

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Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, Czin describes Trump’s deal-making for a joint board of trade and a board of investment as “a throwback to the bygone era of engagement and economic dialogues that the first Trump administration ended.” Beijing convinced Washington to focus on “constructive strategic stability,” and Trump’s acquiescence has given the impression that the U.S. is buying stability with the currency of accommodation at the expense of U.S. allies and partners in the region that are “on the receiving end of China’s growing might, most notably Japan and Taiwan.”

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In these ways, when it comes to China, Trump and Carney, ordinarily depicted as polar opposites, are on the same page.

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While the Trump administration had pledged to greenlight the sale of $14 billion in armaments to Taiwan, after his return from Beijing in May, where Xi implored him to think twice about the deal, Trump told Fox News’ Bret Baier: “I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China. It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly. It’s a lot of weapons.”

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Meanwhile, the hybrid war goes on.

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Over the past five years, the social media giant Meta has taken down thousands of accounts associated with covert Chinese and Russian disinformation operations. Google had already shut down 100,000 accounts by the time of the Spamouflage arrests in New York, and Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has blocked hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to Chinese state agencies.

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On July 1, China’s new “Ethnic Unity” law comes into effect. It’s a comprehensive, enforcement-heavy statute aimed at shoring up the domination of the Mandarin-speaking majority Han Chinese over Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hui, Mongolian and other minorities whose homelands ended up within the borders of the People’s Republic after 1949. The law’s Article 63 stipulates that organizations and individuals outside Chinese territory that commit “acts aimed at the PRC that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division” will be targeted by the law.

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The walls are closing in on dissident Chinese expatriates: to criticize China’s government is to expose your parents back in China to the loss of their pensions, your siblings could lose their jobs and your children could be barred from university. If you’re targeted as a foreign adversary you risk being subjected to malicious, covert operations run by Chinese law enforcement of the kind a February Open AI threat report described as a well-resourced, meticulously orchestrated strategy targeting Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. That operation involved 35 fake X accounts and nine channels on the microblogging site Tumblr. In the case of the Madrid-based human rights organization Safeguard Defenders, the organization’s external liaison for the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, Laura Harth, was targeted in an elaborate Chinese-run “deepfake” pornography smear.