By Dermod Travis

On December 2, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper lands in Beijing for his first official visit to China, he could do far worse than emulating fellow conservative leader Ronald Reagan during the former president’s visit to West Berlin in 1987. Reagan’s trip will forever be etched in history by those famous four words: “tear down this wall”.

What words, indeed what acts, will define the prime minister’s visit to China? As Harper prepares to depart, he must be guided first and foremost by an impartial analysis of the interrelationship of Canada’s economic ties with China and the Communist regime’s brutal human-rights record. The two are as inseparable with China as they are with Zimbabwe or Burma.

Business groups such as the Canada China Business Council have argued forcefully that raising China’s human-rights record is bad for Canadian business. But if raising human-rights issues has had any impact on Canadian business, the record indicates that Canada should be doing it even more often and more loudly.

From 1997 to 2008, Canadian exports to China increased from $2 billion to nearly $12.7 billion in 2008. Exports are up a further seven percent for the first five months of 2009. The increase has been constant, except in 2002, when exports fell by $400 million. As a percentage of total Canadian exports, China’s share has tripled to 2.71 percent of total exports during this period.

Yet, when Prime Minister Harper meets with Chinese president Hu Jintao in Beijing, 1,381 imprisoned Tibetans will still be awaiting trials following last year’s predominately peaceful uprising across Tibet. Two others were executed by firing squad last month.

The few trials that have taken place have been conducted in secrecy and in the absence of basic legal oversight and due process. In 2008, a number of Chinese lawyers were even prevented from defending Tibetan citizens in court.

Human Rights Watch has revealed a judicial system in China so highly politicized as to preclude any possibility of fair trials for Tibetans. And while the Chinese regime rejects the term “political prisoners”, these 1,381 Tibetans are indeed political prisoners in their own homeland.

It’s unlikely that the prime minister will be allowed to travel freely to Tibet on this visit. However, if he were to visit Tibet he would find that religious repression in Tibet is “high” and that the Chinese government’s control over monasteries and other religious institutions is “extraordinarily tight”, as reported in October by the U.S. state department.

A common theme throughout the state department’s International Religious Freedom Report 2009 is the interference by Chinese authorities in the traditional norms and depth of study of Tibetan Buddhism. This includes limiting the number of monks at monasteries; limiting where monks can travel for religious training—ranging from refusing to issue passports for foreign travel through to refusing permission to travel within a single county; co-opting the education of young reincarnated lamas; and pressuring government employees to withdraw their children from all forms of religious education.

This report also documents numerous cases of Buddhist monks and nuns “subjected to extrajudicial punishments, such as beatings and deprivation of food, water, and sleep for long periods”, whereas “the bodies of some people...who died during interrogation were disposed of secretly rather than being returned to their families”.

The U.S. state department’s 2008 Human Rights Report on China notes that “other serious human rights abuses included...the use of forced labor, including prison labor” and that “The government continued to monitor, harass, detain, arrest, and imprison journalists, writers, activists, and defense lawyers and their families, many of whom were seeking to exercise their rights under the law.”

When the prime minister meets President Hu, he must move beyond pro forma statements of support for Tibet in order to make real progress toward a fair and lasting resolution for the Tibetan people and to make Tibet a substantive and results-oriented part of the visit’s agenda. We hope that he will also speak forcefully for the millions of Chinese reformers who seek a free and democratic future for China.

In 1990, Nelson Mandela visited Canada to pay special tribute to our government for continuing “along the path charted by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who acted against apartheid because he knew that no person of conscience could stand aside as a crime against humanity was committed”.

Canadians can only hope that the acts that will ultimately define the prime minister’s visit to China will clearly show with the Chinese government that Canada does not stand aside when crimes against humanity are committed.

Dermod Travis is the executive director of the Canada Tibet Committee.