MARK COLLINS – FILTHY CHINESE YUAN IN CANADA, OR, TERRY GLAVIN (PERHAPS) INTEL ANALYST

APRIL 30, 2015 GLOBAL AFFAIRS STAFF 6 COMMENTS

Further to this post, will, pray tell, the trade with China at any cost Globe and Mail for one instance (a sample of kow-towing by the paper: “a veteran diplomat with a love of basketball”–how nice) pay much attention to these matters?

Glavin: Reaping the whirlwind of Canada’s unseemly intimacies in Beijing

As China continues its rapid descent into police state repression and President Xi Jinping’s ruling Communist Party faction tightens its increasingly brutal grip on the country, the bill for all the unseemly intimacies that Ottawa has cultivated in Beijing since the days when the Liberal party ran the roost in Ottawa is coming due. It’s going to sting. 

The whirlwind is spinning suddenly, at a dizzying, nightmarish pace. The Canadian economy will take a hit, perhaps in the billions of dollars. The political fallout is going to be atrocious.

It’s not so complicated if you think of the catastrophe as a series of falling dominoes.

The first to fall was Communist Party kingpin Bo Xilai, whose last foreign-dignitary guest was Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Bo was sentenced to life in prison on bribery charges in 2013. He’d been Canada’s go-to guy in China’s ruling elite for more than a decade. Jean Chrétien, who championed Canada’s trade links to China while he was prime minister and took up the lucrative business himself immediately after leaving office in 2003, called Bo an “old friend.”

But the domino that fell just last week will have even more seismic reverberations: Michael Ching Mo Yeung, vice-president of the Canada Asia Pacific Business Association. The South China Morning Post identifies him as the person named as Cheng Muyang, a fugitive who appears on a “Most Wanted” list of 100 people Beijing’s dreaded Central Commission for Discipline Inspection published last week. Of the 100 fugitives, 26 are said to have absconded to Canada. They are now sought by Interpol on charges of money-laundering, embezzlement and other such crimes. The South China Morning Post noted in its piece about his identity that it does not have evidence of Ching’s guilt or innocence. Ching could not be reached for an interview for this piece.

Beijing’s “Most Wanted 100″ is the most audacious move to date in its Operation Skynet effort, which is what you get when you combine a fraud squad with an old-style Stalinist purge and a cunning geopolitical muscle-flexing shakedown. Operation Skynet agents have been combing through Vancouver’s real estate transaction records in recent weeks. Within hours of Beijing’s Most Wanted list making the rounds, police in Harbin, the capital of China’s Heilongjiang province, arrested and jailed Qu Zhang Mingjie, a local Communist Party official. Qu is the mother of the woman Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson calls his sweetheart, the pop star Wanting Qu, formerly Tourism Vancouver’s “ambassador” to China…

Do read on.  Related:

Top Dragon Purging, More on Zhou; Move Over Mao, Part 2

Disclosure: Mr Glavin is a good friend.