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Given this background, Trudeau arguably arrived in China at exactly the wrong moment. Formal talks on a China-Canada free trade agreement would have been the first ever between China and a G7 country. It turned out that there was more value for Xi in slapping the hand of friendship. The Global Times, an organ of the party’s People’s Daily newspaper network, published a cranky English-language editorial in the midst of Trudeau’s visit.

Trudeau arguably arrived in China at exactly the wrong moment

The editorial attacked the “superiority and narcissism” of Canadian newspapers, as an alternative to jabbing the prime ministerial guest in the eye personally. But it is easy enough to read between the lines. “Trade between China and Canada is mutually beneficial, more significant than the ideology upon which the latter’s media has been focusing,” wrote the tabloid’s editor, Hu Xijin. “When Canada imports a pair of shoes from China, will Canada ask how much democracy and human rights are reflected in those shoes?”

The editorial gives patronizing “respect” to Canada’s need to find alternatives to U.S. markets—which, one has to admit, echoes a widely shared premise of our bilateral trade policy—but declares that “China is accustomed to uncertainty in its ties with Canada” and is prepared to wait us out.

Significantly, the article mentions a Globe and Mail item describing China as an “absolute dictatorship,” but does not really deny the charge so much as dismiss it as being beside the point. There is a Trumpian aspect to this Xi-ist (have we settled on an adjective yet?) mood shift. The Global Times’s explicit message, which almost by definition represents party doctrine, is that China has no need to meet Western press and civil society criticisms of China on their own terms—to descend to rebutting them.