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When John McCallum was a federal cabinet minister, the now-ambassador in Beijing was a champion of expanding connections between Canada and China, and doing it on Chinese terms. McCallum, who accompanied Freeland last week, buys in to Beijing’s “friend of China” platitude. He accepts the Chinese foreign ministry line that China is the future, and sustaining Canada’s economic growth means Ottawa should acquiesce to Beijing’s “distinctive” domestic governance and strategic aspirations abroad.

As Justin Trudeau himself said in 2012, “We deceive ourselves by thinking that trade with Asia can be squeezed into the 20th-century mould. China, for one, sets its own rules and will continue to do so because it can. China has a game plan. There is nothing inherently sinister about that.”

McCallum the minister would have agreed, even if turning away from human rights abuse in China is tacit consent of arbitrary imprisonment, torture, suffering and death. But McCallum the ambassador is subordinate to his former junior cabinet colleague Freeland, who has a more textured and sophisticated grasp of Communist regimes, and how to realize Canada’s overall interests in relations with them. Her priorities for relations with China wouldn’t sit well with McCallum, and there will be tensions between them that Beijing will try to exploit to further its own goals with Canada.

If the federal government was reticent to reveal what was said last week, the Chinese press was more forthcoming. The China Daily reported that Wang said “China and Canada should maintain high-level exchanges and exchanges at other various levels, promote the construction of a China-Canada free trade zone and expand anti-corruption and law enforcement cooperation.” Canada has a problem with this last point, which implies extraditing Chinese nationals from Canada, despite our concerns over China’s lack of due process of law and extensive use of the death penalty.