Article content continued

Canada, of course, lets journalists run wild, blathering on about human rights and other unimportant issues, without even the cudgel of some potential jail time to keep them in line. As reported by The Canadian Press at the time, the new ambassador advised that politicians “should spend less time bowing down to Canadian journalists preoccupied with human rights and get on with negotiating an important free trade agreement with China.”

Photo by Andrew Vaughan / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Lu has expanded on his numerous criticisms and complaints since then. Earlier this year he equated Canadians to white supremacists. He accused Ottawa of “backstabbing” China by detaining Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in her Vancouver mansion at the request of the U.S, and warned of “repercussions” if she wasn’t freed. In an address Friday he gathered many of these themes into one prolonged diatribe on the inadequacies of Canadian values and our fixation on democracy.

The core of the problem, as Lu explained it, is that Western societies don’t understand Chinese history and are misinformed about its present. The West views China as an “abnormal” country, to which we “condescend” in our mistaken belief that other societies value democracy as much as we do. As an example, he noted recent reports on the vast network of detention camps set up in China’s Xinjiang region, where a million or more Uyghur Muslims are being held in a massive state effort to eradicate their ethnic identity.

Despite plenty of evidence attesting to the ugly realities, Lu insisted the camps are just “vocational education and training centres” aimed at exterminating the threat of terrorism, just as the brutalities of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution were justified as necessary in eradicating “counter-revolutionaries” and “bourgeois elements.” Lu doesn’t question China’s latest cleansing program any more than Mao’s thugs questioned the need to imprison, torture and humiliate “revisionists.” Reports on the camps, he complained, are both “distorted” and “defaming.” As proof, he boasted, “In the recent two years or so, there has not been a single violent and terrorist attack and no more innocent people have been harmed.” Jailing people by the hundreds of thousands will do that for you.