Your 🇨🇳/🇨🇦 Briefing Friday, November 25th, 2022
Indo-Pacific Strat Sunday, Kris Wu gets 13 years, pension funds & Xinjiang, and climate gives a ray of hope for warmer relations
Welcome to Maple Kingdom, here are the top 5 stories we are tracking this week.
Mélanie Joly to release the Indo-Pacific Strategy Sunday in Vancouver
New HKW report finds that 3 federal and 6 provincial Canadian pension funds are passively funding Xinjiang businesses associated with the internment and surveillance of Uyghurs.
A new climate Op-Ed from Darren Touch and Caroline Brouillette arguing for areas of cooperation between Canada and China
Kris Wu, who is a superstar pop musician in Asia, gets 13 years in Chinese prison for rape.
Bail hearing for Yuesheng Wang, the first person to be charged with Economic Espionage in Canada
A Rushed, Misspelled Press Release for a Bizarre Event
Just before we published Global Affairs Canada announced a press conference to announce the Indo Pacific Strategy. There are four odd things about this event:
It is happening at 9am PST during Canada’s world cup game. Not cool, Global Affairs, not cool.
The press release misspells the name of one of the cabinet ministers attending it, which is awkward and shows the rushed nature of the preparation.
The event is outdoors in Vancouver in November, so it will almost certainly rain and will be cold and windy at the place they have chosen.
The event itself has a follow-up event the next day for technical questions, which makes very little sense as the media will have to assemble twice.
The whole thing is, well, weird and rushed, and also its a Sunday which means that the coverage will be muted. For such a big deal, this all seems… odd.
We’ll have full coverage Sunday after the event in your inbox. With today’s announcement that the US will ban Huawei I don’t envy the lawyers working all weekend to make sure that the strategy lines up with this new set of facts.
HKW report finds that Canadian pension funds are funding Xinjiang businesses
Hong Kong Watch has been spending time diving into emerging market financial products in order to encourage divestment. They have found that there are numerous public pension funds that have tiny amounts of capital involved in companies that have contributed to the problems in Xinjiang.
The fund in question:
The MSCI Emerging Markets Index captures large and mid cap representation across 24 Emerging Markets (EM) countries. With 1,386 constituents, the index covers approximately 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalization in each country.
OK, so this fund is 24% China, and of that 24%, about 3.5%, or less than 1% of the total fund, is in Xinjiang businesses (note that doing business in Xinjiang does not mean the company has anything to do with the conflict, necessarily; there are in fact many businesses in Xinjiang who are staunchly in support of the Uyghur minority.)
This is not the first time stories like this have emerged; there was a similar story in 2021.
This is an interesting story of how far Xinjiang-related concerns will go; these are pension funds who have invested in products that they did not themselves make who then invested into companies who may have had something to do with the horrors of Xinjiang.
The contention that HK watch is making here is that any engagement, no matter how large or small, is evil. This is the justification for a huge amount of the policy around Xinjiang in the last year, and it’s very hard to understand where the chain of responsibility stops.
A new Climate Op-Ed from Darren Touch and Caroline Brouillette
This week Caroline Brouillette (Climate Action Network Canada) and Darren Touch (Indo-Pacific Advisory committee) collaborated on an opinion piece working to understand how China and Canada might cooperate around the COP15 in Montréal. They offered four practical pieces of advice for policy makers:
Start talking at the current COP27 in Egypt to kickstart the dialogue in Sharm.
Start direct talks between the different ministries involved (environment, natural resources, etc) before the event itself.
Work on making sure that the “areas of consensus” are identified and work to make sure that these frame the discussion.
Invite world leaders to Montréal for the summit.
The piece itself shows how climate is one of the last remaining places where cooperation is being actively encouraged by both countries. Worth reading here.
Kris Wu sentenced to 13 years in prison for rape
Many readers may be unfamiliar with Kris Wu, a Canadian who was recently sentenced to 13 years in prison in China for rape and other charges, as well as a fine of nearly 100 million CAD.
Kris Wu is one of the largest hip-hop stars in China, a former member of the Korean pop group EXO. Kris is more than just a music star; he is a phenomenon with millions of followers. A year ago when he was arrested, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter blew up about the stories of his relationships with underage girls.
This story came to light because of the courage of Du Meizhu, who worked in the face of her life being totally destroyed to bring him to justice. The story is pretty incredible, and details here will explain the process she went through to ensure he would spend time in jail.
This story might seem small in Canada as he is not really a very well known celebrity, but consider this: he is almost certainly in the top 20 most famous Canadians alive today, measured in terms of fanbase. He was a huge part of the legitimization of Chinese hip-hop, and the fact that he was brought down by one blogger and her sheer determination is an incredible story.
Bail hearing for Yuesheng Wang, first person to be charged with Economic Espionage in Canada
Wang Yuesheng appeared in court this week and began to construct a narrative to defend himself against the charges against him.
He allegedly emailed himself documents that were Top Secret Hydro Québec projects (Editors Note: I am astonished to write these words) including one dubbed “Project X” and another called “Uniform, ” a collaboration with the U.S. military in which Wang was not involved.
This story will develop further next week when the judge decides if he will be granted bail Monday.
This will be a slow developing but compelling case that we will feature in January or February in greater detail.
Readings This Week
Chinese students in Canada mobilize covertly to deliver anti-Xi message Before the protest started, some of them “were indeed affected by fears, but the event received a good outcome,” Mr. Yang said in a recent interview. “I told them ’As long as you get used to it, you will realize it’s not that scary.’ ”
Man accused of espionage to benefit China tells court he wants to stay in Canada to clear his name “I want to stay here to clear my name,” Yuesheng Wang told the court during the second day of a bail hearing.
New group with Beijing links to promote friendly candidates in Canadian elections he council will “support incubating Chinese ethnic candidates to participate in the election,” says the statement.
Chinese embassy rips ‘sinister’ Canadian media over election-meddling reports “Recently, a few Canadian media and politicians have accused China of interfering in Canada’s federal election. However, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau stated on November 20 that he himself has never received any information on China’s ‘funding’ of Canadian federal candidates,” reads the statement in Chinese, attributed to simply the embassy.
Senator Yeun Pau Woo on the Indo Pacific Strategy
Opinion: LILLEY: Trudeau's shifting story on China's interference in Canada a real problem “Let me be clear, I do not have any information, nor have I been briefed on any federal candidates receiving any money from China,” Trudeau said.
CA/CN Committee Testimony from this week (we didn’t cover because it was very Taiwan focused)
Follow the Protests in China with this handy tool
U.S. bans Huawei, ZTE equipment sales citing national security risk
Tweets of the Week
Thank you!
Thats all for this week! Thanks for reading. Next week interviews and new content will be divided between two or even three publications, with the Indo-Pacific Strategy launch.