Shilling for Communism on Canadian International Development Agency money

Shilling for Communism on Canadian International Development Agency money
By Judi McLeod
Friday, July 13, 2007

It should come as no surprise that Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) money bankrolled an electronic newsletter persistently defending China’s Communist regime.

CIDA’s founding father is none other than longtime UN poster boy and Kyoto architect, Canadian Maurice Strong. At least two Canadian prime ministers and the power behind the throne in the latter day PMO figure prominently in the ongoing affairs of the state-owned China International Trust and Investment Group Corp. (CITIC), which is “the communist regime’s most politically connected financial and industrial conglomerate.” (Asian Pacific Post, Feb. 19, 2004).

The nepotism inherent in China’s Canadian family tree is one for the books.

CITIC counts among its advisors former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s son-in-law Andre Desmarais of the Montreal-based Power Corp. China booster Maurice Strong is a former Power Corp. CEO, who hired former Prime Minister Paul Martin during his Power Corp. tenure.

Pick up almost any Chinese rock and you’re going to find another Canadian political snake slithering away.

The founders of CITIC are none other than the infamous Li Ka Shing and Henry Fok. Wang Jun, CITIC chair was caught up in the Chinagate scandal. He’s a business partner with another Chinagate player in a Macau casino under a franchise by Fok, Stanley Ho and other principals, including Cheng Yu Tung, a close partner of Li Ka Shing who bought the former Expo land in Vancouver back in 1986.

Li owns most of the prime real estate on Toronto’s waterfront, including all the surrounding former CN property with its world famous CN Tower.

CIDA, which funded the China Development Brief electronic newsletter, gets around. CIDA funded a $3-million “study” to determine if another UN University of Peace should be built on Toronto’s waterfront.

Strong seemed to have hightailed it back to China, when a $988,000 cheque drawn on an Arab bank became an exhibit in the largely ineffective Paul Volcker-led Oil-for-Food investigation. Strong supporters have always said that China, on the fast track as the superpower to replace the USA, counts on their man to get there.

For more than a decade, the CIDA-supported Nick Young has been telling the world that China is not as repressive as Western media and human-rights groups make it.

For reasons that don’t require the brainstorming of Scotland Yard, the Communist system has suddenly turned against Young.

Seemingly out of the proverbial blue, Chinese police investigators and local officials descended on his office, interrogated him and ordered him to shut down his electronic newsletter, described by Canada’s Globe and Mail as “a well-respected monthly publication on development and civil society in China”.

How can a publication that supports the repressive Chinese regime be described as “well respected”?

Under threat of deportation and being banned from the country for five years, Young has been accused of conducting “unauthorized surveys” in violation of a law on gathering statistics.

“My hope is that these actions have been precipitated by zealous security agents, and that more senior figures in the government and Communist Party will realize that actions of this kind are not in China’s best interest,” Young wrote in an e-mailed statement from the Orient.

Young’s newsletter, China Development Brief, is published courtesy of funds and donations from many international aid agencies and foreign institutions, including the cash-rich CIDA.

Young operated with freedom in a country where farmers and students are jailed and worse, all for posting anti-government essays on the Worldwide Internet.

No reporters are asking why Young’s “non-profit” publication has been kept afloat by international aid agencies.

A British citizen born in Zambia in 1956 and educated in the United Kingdom, Young has escaped criticism for touting the virtues of Communist China.

His checkered past includes a stint from 1986 to 1990 in Nicaragua where he worked as a freelance writer and journalist, filing stories to international publications, including The Scotsman and London Magazine.

Young founded the non-profit newsletter in 1995 at first focusing on international aid and development. In 2004, it began, a la Maurice Strong, to tout “constructive engagement between China and the world”.

“I have spent the past decade telling foreigners that China is not as repressive and totalitarian as Western media often portray it to be,” Young said in his statement.

Young should try telling that to the tragic victims of Falun Gong and to Chinese prisoners whose live organs have been sent to market soon after their execution.

According to the ever deceitful mainstream media, Young’s newsletter might have become “politically sensitive” in China because of its coverage of civil organizations, The authorities have been increasingly aggressive on clamping down on these groups, particularly those with foreign financial backing, because many of them supposedly played a key role in the political revolutions in the former Soviet Union in recent years.

With a significant meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in the offing this fall, the Peoples Republic of China is poised to silence the media in the months leading up to party congresses.

While his newsletter was advocating that the international community should be respectful of China, advertisements asking readers to report on any foreign power—specifically China--trying to gather information that could harm the United States, were run by the San Francisco bureau of the FBI in local Chinese language newspapers.

Aside from the historical proclivity of Communism to turn first on its useful idiots in any purge, the last chapter has yet to be written on the fate of the China Development Brief.

Could it be that the Chinese regime shut down the newsletter to disassociate itself from a looming scandal before the scandal hit?