Article content continued

This is China laughing in our faces — telling us that we don’t have as many friends as we think and that even when our “so-called allies” do step forward to lobby our cause, they’re only doing it half-heartedly.

You can even picture Trump getting to the end of a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and saying, after he’s already stood up to leave, something like: “Oh right, I almost forgot. So Justin from Canada wanted me to bring this up…”

There’s something more worrisome about that statement though than just the basic fact that China is now at the point in these escalating tensions where they feel confident laughing at us. It’s the way they dismiss this whole notion of gathering allies together to press for an outcome. By doing this, they’re laughing at our whole way of viewing global affairs.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Freeland speaks a lot about the “rules-based international order” — this is the idea that international standards are governed by Western norms of democracy, freedom of speech, judicial independence and so on.

China doesn’t care for these things. Not because they’re ignorant of them. And not because we haven’t done enough in inviting them to join us in them. But because Xi Jinping knows what he stands for and where he wants to take his country — and the rest of the world. And guess what? The rules-based international order isn’t the direction the Chinese Communist Party is heading in.

The Geng Shuang statement isn’t just a rebuke of the current Liberal government, it’s a rebuke of our worldview. What then does Canada do now?