THE LATEST | CANADATerry Glavin/National Post: “These are all Trojan horses,” Cheuk Kwan, co-chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy and the spokesman for the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China, told me this week. Edmund Leung, chair of the Vancouver Society in Support of Democratic Movement (VSSDM), described the dozen or so non-trade deals as “very, very upsetting.”
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The proposed collaborations can be made to seem quite benign. They’re all about “people-to-people ties and cultural exchanges,” investment in museums, support for “digital content creators” and “visual artists,” heritage, education, “travel exchanges and cultural ties” and cooperation in the “creative industries” deep down into the “sub-national” level. But these are precisely the methods Beijing employs to extend the global reach of its “soft-power” operations in targeted countries…