“Canada’s China Class”

Closed-door hearing takes place days after trial of another Canadian, with diplomats barred from attending

The trial of a Canadian man detained for more than two years in China on espionage charges has taken place, with relations between Ottawa and Beijing in freefall.

The hearing in the case of Michael Kovrig came days after the closed-door trial of another Canadian man, with both detained in apparent retaliation for Canada’s arrest of the Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou under a US extradition warrant.

Kovrig, a former diplomat, was detained in 2018 and formally charged last June with allegedly spying at the same time as his compatriot, the businessman Michael Spavor.

Our China class will write this off as an unfortunate incident. So long as the money flows from Beijing all is well.

The world is now wide awake to communist hostility — coordinated action must follow

Winston Churchill was rebuked as a warmonger when he tried to alert the United States to the immense danger of the Soviet Union with his “Iron Curtain” speech. In March 1946, the USSR was still America’s heroic ally; Stalin was the benign pipe-smoking Uncle Joe who had valiantly defeated the Germans, thereby sparing countless American boys an early death.

But this wilful ignorance was best captured in another call to arms that also celebrates its 75th anniversary this year: that of George F Kennan’s “Long Telegram” on the sources of Soviet conduct, which was received by the State Department in February 1946. Written by Kennan under the pseudonym ‘Mr X’, the Telegram was an attempt to bore through the layers of ignorance, foolish optimism and disinformation spread by local Communists and Soviet sympathisers. He hoped to mobilise his fellow foreign service officers in the State Department and their chiefs, and through them the press and then Congress, to “contain” the further spread of Stalin’s power across Europe. Kennan had to estrange the USSR in order to make his colleagues and the wider world see its threat.