 Which is great. Welcome to the 14th Kesterton Lecture. It's one of two public lectures that the School of Journalism and Communication does every year. The other one, the Paula Talah Lecture, is in honor of one of our late faculty members. And it was about three weeks ago at the Graduate Student Conference downtown. The Kesterton Lecture is named after Will Kesterton, who was the key figure in the early days in the growth of Carleton's journalism program. He was born in 1914, and he was initially a teacher. He joined the army in 1942 as a private and remained in the army until 1947. At that point, he came to study at Carleton, which many of you, I'm sure, know as Canada's oldest journalism school. And at that time, had only been operating for a couple of years. In 1949, Will Kesterton became the second faculty member hired by the school. And he taught media law and other subjects to virtually every student at the school until his retirement in 1979. He stayed as a professor emeritus until 1986, and he died in 1997. He was an extraordinary teacher, a pioneer in the writing of journalism history in Canada, and also played a great role in examining the relationship between journalism and the law, which is an issue that continues to draw lots of attention and interest. Shortly after his death, the school launched a major fundraising campaign supported by many of our graduates to create the Kesterton Endowment Fund, which, among other things, supports this lecture. It's the second Kesterton Lecture we've hosted in our new home, the River Building. And it's nice that it's late enough in the year that you can actually see some of the sites outside rather than coming here when it's dark, because it's quite a spectacular location. And the river is pouring down at the moment. We hope we're not going to be flooded. I don't think we will. But our school's more than 65 years old, but this is the first time we've had to occupy a building that was designed specifically for us. And it gives the school the tools and the surroundings we need to teach journalism in the 21st century. Our new building's already a showcase for the university, and it's a great home for events like this tonight. As I mentioned earlier, this is the 14th Kesterton Lecture. And for the last few years, we've concentrated our journalism on journalism and international events. Matthew Fisher talked about Canada and Afghanistan. Greg Yip talked about the US economy. Elizabeth Palmer last year spoke about social media in the Arab Spring. We're happy to continue that tradition tonight with a look through Canadian eyes at China, a subject that comes up about every 10 seconds after you start a discussion about any international, economic, social, geopolitical, environmental, cultural, or military issue. The school is also involved in international journalism in other ways, including our African internship program for students started by Ellen Thompson, the other person who was carrying the benches with me, and also through the Traverse Fellowship that honors the late former columnist, editor, and foreign correspondent, Jim Travers from the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, and Southern News. That fellowship annually provides a Canadian journalist with $25,000 to study and report to Canadians on an international issue that affects Canada. Last fall, the first winter, Katie DeRosa traveled Australia and Thailand to examine how Australia deals with human smuggling. Canada was contemplating modeling its approach on the Australian detention camps model. Her stories were published in a series by her employer, the Victoria Times colonist, carried by post-media across the country and its chain, and was also the stories where an honorable mention for the 2013 Canadian Hillman Prize, which honors excellence in journalism and service of the common good. Two weeks ago, we announced the second winner of the Traverse Fellowship, Mike Blanchfield from the Canadian Press. He'll be traveling to Geneva. It's now April, so it's later this month, to follow Canada's stance and involvement in negotiations on an international treaty to ban cluster bombs. To follow up the Landmine Treaty of the late 1990s, he'll then go to Southeast Asia to report on the impact these deadly weapons have had on civilians of all ages, years and even decades after wars end. With Mike's 15 years of international reporting, we're confident his work will be a finalist for awards in the coming year as well. A common theme underlies both the Traverse Fellowship and the lecture series. They're both, and this lecture series, they're both based on the belief that even in the internet age, the core and essence of journalism remains what it's always been. Being there, seeing things for yourself, talking to those involved, and reporting to your audience, what you see, what you hear, know, understand, analyze, and conclude. About five years ago, just before the Beijing Olympics, one of our graduates, Jeffrey York, who was then the Beijing correspondent for the Globe and Mail, spoke to our Kruger College at the annual dinner. His message was blunt. At a time when everyone was predicting the Olympics would be a catalyst that would move China towards democracy and human rights, Jeff said there was no chance that was gonna happen anytime soon. If our speaker tonight doesn't update that prediction in his comments, feel free to ask him in the question period that we'll follow. Mark McKinnon, also a Carlton journalism graduate from 1997, arrived in Beijing to take up his post on the last day of those Olympics. He's currently Beijing bureau chief for the Globe and Mail. Before China, he was posted in Moscow in Jerusalem, and is reported from throughout Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East in that time period. He's a four-time national newspaper award winner, also the author of the New Cold War, Revolutions, Read Elections, and Pipeline Politics from the former Soviet Union, published in 2007 by Random House. In a couple of months, he'll wind up his term in China and move to London to become the senior international correspondent, covered in international affairs for the Globe and Mail starting in the fall. He's been an extraordinary almost five years for the world and for China as well. Mind-boggling changes have taken place in the country in that period, yet parts of China remain almost unchanged from decades ago. It's that disparity in dichotomy that Mark has covered in tremendous depth and scope over his term in China. More recently, he's chronicled that so well in the Globe series China Diaries over recent months, and his train trip to the country, the highlights of which appeared last weekend in the newspaper, and I think he'll probably tell you it's going to become an e-book as well. Our faculty takes great pride in the accomplishments of our graduates, and it's with particular pleasure that we welcome them back to tell us what they've seen, learned, and concluded. Please welcome this year's Kessler's and Lecturer, Mark Kagan. Well, for coming tonight, I'd like to thank Chris Waddell for the very nice introduction, and all of you for choosing to spend your Wednesday afternoon with me or Wednesday evening. It's a fabulous opportunity for me to come back to Carlton University and lecture some of those who once lectured me. And that wasn't me if I was sleeping in the back of your class and taking past building. The Kessler's and Lecturer has drawn some great speakers in the past, and you heard some of their names right now. Last year, the fabulously talented Liz Palmer gave this address, but I should state from the beginning, and I tried to tell Chris this, that I'm no Liz Palmer. Liz stands on Takio Square, unfazed by the chaos around her, and tells millions of people calmly what's happening and what it means to them. I'm one of those who needs to read what they write before they know what they think. By the time I get around to the part of my day where I'm writing down what I think, I'm alone with my laptop and usually my cat. Sometimes the cat walks out. I hope he'll be more patient than my cat. And forgive me if I have to read what I think. As for the topic, notes from a changing China. I haven't promised very much in specific, obviously, and I did that on purpose, mindful of something that the CBC's Patrick Brown, another one of those easy talking TV types, said to me when I first came to Beijing five years ago, almost five years ago, four and a half years ago. Essentially his warning was this, anybody who makes a declarative statement about China can easily prove themselves right, and just as easily be proven a liar by others. Here's a few examples of what Patrick meant. China is a dictatorship. China is democratizing. China's economy is the engine of global growth. China's economy is a bubble that's sure to pop. China's the world's biggest polluter. China leads the world in green energy. China is rising peacefully. China is a threat to its neighbors. The Chinese people don't care about politics. There were 180,000 protests last year in the country. All of these statements are true, even if many of them are contradictory. China is really that big. So to condense things a little, I'll start off by talking about the trip that Chris mentioned that I took around China earlier this year. It was 22 days and almost 8,000 kilometers on the rails. It began this way. In the Globe and Mail's office in Beijing, actually we squat in the kitchen of the CTV office. But that's another story. I keep a list of all the places I need to visit, all the stories that I want to write. And as you can imagine, when you're covering a country of 1.3 billion people, that list keeps growing. One afternoon I decided to plot the most important undone China stories on a map. And by complete chance we came up with this arc, which quite accidentally almost traced the route of the Long March that Mao Zedong and his Red Army had taken eight decades earlier in a very different China. You throw in my long-standing love of taking the train, and it's quite inexplicable how much I like a cabin full of sleeping strangers snoring and petiving. And an idea was born. And strangely enough, the Globe and Mail agreed to pay for this. I won't talk too much about the individual stops of the journey right now. 1999, you can get a subscription to the Globe and Mail. But we started in Wukong. I'm going to see if I got the right one here. There we go. It's hidden under the music signal down there. It's a tiny fishing village in coastal Guangdong province in the southeast of that map. That's how I'm in inter-democratic revolution at late 2011. Just over a year later, the villagers I met were realizing that their victory, which is seeing them rise up and win the right to freely choose around village council for the right time, didn't mean very much. All the villagers in Wukong have been allowed to do was elect a tiny brick that would be placed at the bottom of China's power pyramid. The reasons why they rose up, land that had been unfairly seized by corrupt officials and sold to developers, couldn't be fixed by a local council. From Wukong, I headed north to the big city of Changsha, Guangzhou, arriving in midst of an editorial strike at Southern Weekly, which is part of China's bravest and most important newspaper group. The day I was there, saw small protests in support of the striking journalists, not organized by any force, but by ordinary Chinese who had lost their homes, their jobs, their freedom. Oh, I've got two things to move on. It's very confusing, because they tried to stand up to corrupt and capricious local officials. They saw Southern Weekly as the only media outlet in China that would tell their stories. The only way they could hope to seek justice in a system hopelessly tilted against them. I'll come back to that theme a lot later. From Guangzhou, we took China's new 300 kilometer an hour super train north, whooshing through rice paddies and past villages of stone homes that looked to be from a different China than the different sentries from the China I live in. We arrived in Mao Zedong's home province of Hunan, where we experienced firsthand how one of history's greatest mass murderers is still revered in 2013. We met crowds of people who believed that he was a deity, somewhere in the sky, able to anch the prayers of those who lived today in the People's Republic that he founded. Then we traveled south by slow coach, the China's poorest province, Guizhou, where the still nominally communist country's gap between rich and poor is at its widest and most dangerous. We visited a school that had no life, no heat, no chalk, like their parents a generation before. The students and ones of the village here had no chance to compete with those growing up a world away in Beijing and Shanghai. The chat irony of Wanza is that the left behind students there are the direct descendants of China's great teacher, Confucius. Then we headed on an overnight train to the fast-changing city of Chongqing, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited not so long ago to meet a panda named Arshun and a politician named Bo Xilai. Both the panda and the politician have been in captivity ever since. Then it was west to the edge of the Tibetan plateau, where over the past two years, more than 100 monks and lay people have felt so desperate that they lit themselves on fire, often showing the name of the Dalai Lama as their final act. My trip ended in northern Shaanxi province in a village called Liangcha He, where China's new leader, Xi Jinping, had spent his teenage years. He was what they called a sent-down youth, a sign to do farm labor after his farmer, after his father, a communist hero named Xi Zhongsun was purged near the start of the Cultural Revolution. When you talk about the potential for change in China, and my trip convinced me that at the very minimum, the legal system needs and must have a dramatic overhaul before popular anger spills over into something unpredictable, you need to talk about Xi Jinping and the moment that he now has is China's sixth paramount leader since the Communist Revolution in 1949. Standing there outside the Cape House that Xi Jinping helped build for himself, I'm sorry we don't have a picture of it here, with its Communist star in the year 1970 etched into the stone over the entrance. From speaking to those who had worked in labor gangs as Xi Jinping, I couldn't help but think that China finally has a leader whose whole life has prepared him for this moment, has given him an understanding of this system. You know, that's good and ill. Here's a man who fell to the absolute bottom of society, only to recover when his family was rehabilitated, and now he has risen to the very top. Here's a man whose father led the push for economic reforms during the era of Deng Xiaoping. Who oversaw the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, a project that turned a fishing village near Hong Kong into the shop window for China's opening to the world economy. Here's a man whose father wore a watch given to him by the Dalai Lama, long after he was no longer fashionable or safe for a Communist leader to do so. And here's a man whose father, if the anecdote circling in Beijing is to be believed, was the only senior Communist leader to speak out against the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. But here's a man we otherwise know very little about. Xi Jinping became the leader of the Communist Party in the military last fall and assumed the presidency less than a month ago today. But there are already stylistic changes that we can see and that I think vowed well. I was sitting in the front hall, a front row of the Great Hall of the People last fall when Xi Jinping walked in at the head of the new standing committee of the Politburo. Frankly, it was easy to be cynical. Seven men in suits, all of whom chosen by a background deal that is more in common with the way neighborhoods are divvied up on the Sopranos than the internal democracy the Communist Party claims. By my watch, the new Politburo Standing Committee walked out 1146 a.m. on November the 18th. The same moment on the same day, down to the minute, that Hu Jintao had led his Politburo into the same room to meet the public a decade before in 2002. There's stability and then there's nervous superstition. The Communist Party of China has obsessed with the former and consumed by the latter. By my eyes stopped rolling when Xi Jinping spoke. First of all, he apologized, kind of, for keeping everybody waiting. It was a little thing, so there haven't been too many instances when the Communist Party has apologized to anybody, to anybody for anything. Secondly, you just sounded like a nice ordinary guy. And that's obviously a very superficial analysis, but similar remarks rippled across the Chinese internet as soon as their genial new leader who was so very different from the wooden Hu Jintao started talking. And if it's possible for an authoritarian president to have a honeymoon period with the public, Mr. Xi has that right now. I was back in the Great Hall of the People again last month when the Communist Party's number two figure, Li Keqiang, gave his first press conference as the country's new premier. Actually, it was less of a press conference the way a journalism student might expect than it was a scripted play. The only questions asked by foreign journalists were those pre-approved by the Foreign Ministry. My colleagues were laughing at me for stubbornly sitting there with my hand up, like Li Keqiang might point and go the Canadian in the back. But what Li said was noteworthy. He talked about the corruption epidemic that's rotting at everything from the Communist Party's credibility to the safety of China's public infrastructure to the trustworthiness of its factory exports and the inability of its food. The words gutter oil probably don't mean anything here, but when you're going to a Beijing restaurant, you fear it. But it wasn't just that he was blunt about the country's problems. Previous Communist Party leaders have done that. But he promised a self-imposed revolution and laid down three basic promises that the public could actually measure his government's performance by. He said that no new government buildings would be constructed, that the civil service would shrink rather than grow over the next five years, and that spending on lavish official banquets and travel would be reined in. And then crucially, he welcomed the public and the media to help scrutinize whether those tasks were achieved. There'll be a breakthrough for China if these promises are kept, and the public and the media are allowed to play their roles in doing so. So far, these changes are only stylistic. The nature of the regime remains intact. The internet controls are still there. I waste so much time every day trying to get onto Twitter and Facebook. And so is the strict surveillance of known opponents in the one-party system. On the day Liu is made Premier and giving this very optimistic-sounding talk, Hu Jia, a democracy activist, who is one of the bravest people that I've met anywhere, was detained and wrapped up by police as punishment for criticizing the way that Xi Jinping and Li Kichang have been chosen without consulting the people. This is still the same nervous police state that overreacted to online calls for a demonstration. It was a call for a Middle Eastern-inspired jazzen revolution on the Wang Fujin pedestrian mall two years ago. They flooded the center of Beijing with police and tackled anyone who dared to go to the designated protest site, which was a McDonald's restaurant on a Sunday afternoon. So you can imagine how some people just got, just trying to buy filet-o-fish. But China's new Premier talked of reforming China's labor camp system, which had been used to punish dissidents without the bother of a trial since the Mao Zedong era. The new President has talked about the need to put power, the Communist Party's power, inside what he dubbed a cage of regulations. Maybe change in China will continue step by step. No lurches, no jazzen revolutions, no Tiananmen. That's actually the hopeful assessment I get when I return to the campus of Beijing University, the seat of the 1989 unrest, and talk to the students from the Tiananmen plus 20 generations. The students I've met know why they're predecessors. The students of 1989 took to the streets. They also know, contrary to the Western myth, a lot about what happened on June 4th, 1989 when the tanks were sent in to crush the pro-democracy protests. But they weren't ready to repeat that challenge to authorities, in large part because they believe the country is progressing, however slowly in the right direction. They're willing to wait, at least for a while longer. It's important when discussing China to stop and take the long view from time to time. Let's ponder that. I traveled undercover, posing as a Russian historian to North Korea in 2009. Today's Pyongyang is not unlike Mao's China. Poor, afraid, empty, hopeless, and as we've seen this week, belligerent. From North Korea, today's China looks like a wonderland of freedoms and opportunity. When photographer Sean Gallagher and I returned to China at the end of our paranoid five-day stay in Pyongyang, during which we were questioned every evening about our stories, at one point it was asked to name the group of seven painters just to prove I was Canadian. And Sean was accused of not being British because he couldn't remember when put on the spot what year the Tower of London was built. He said it wasn't good at history, so they said, what were you good at? And he said, I was really good at science. So he said, well what's the definition of a vacuum? Obviously even the intelligence services aren't online there. The two of us were laughing out loud and almost kissed the tarmac when we landed back at Beijing airport. Freedom, Sean said, and it wasn't quite a joke. The most positive change I've seen in my time in China has been the ever more honest discussion of the country's environmental problems. And with it, the question of how much quality of life the country wants to sacrifice in the name of economic development. The first day I spent in Beijing, as Chris mentioned, was the last day of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The air was clear, the city was at its friendly best. My wife and I sat in the Temple of the Earth Park with my predecessor, Jeffrey York, watching the closing ceremonies of the games on a giant screen television. I'd read about China's giant struggle to clean up in time for the Olympics, and the long distance runners who said they wouldn't compete in Beijing. And I thought, what was the fuss all about? Whatever problems there had been, they'd been fixed in time to host this spectacular game. It turned out that the clean air I was breathing was a magic trick, achieved partly through shutting down factories in and around Beijing, and sharply curbing the number of cars allowed to be on the road. Plus the wind happened to be blowing in the right direction for almost the entire duration of the game. Over the next four years, we discovered what the fuss had been about. I've worked in Cairo and Jakarta, two of the grimeous cities on the planet, but neither can touch Beijing's bad air days when the smog is so thick that it can literally become impossible to see that high-rise tower across the street night that's not an exaggeration. Those days we call our home city Mordor, after the eternally dark realm from the Lord of the Rings. The other morning, my three-year-old daughter woke me up with the news that it's a pollution day today, Daddy. We have to wear our masks. Sad stuff. And I'm not the only parent who's wondering whether it's fair to raise their child there. Infuriatingly, the Chinese government refused to treat citizens like adults. The official media for the first four years I was based there would call these days fog when it was clearly nothing of the sort. Weather maps printed in the newspapers said the air quality was moderate, 365 days out of 365. Giving the same reading whether the sky was clear blue or impenetrable gray. And for the most part, there were successfully fooling their people. Taxi drivers would roll their eyes by asking them to close their window on a bad air day. My co-workers in the CTV office and Globe and Mail Kitchen would shut the windows when I walked in on a bad air day, but I knew they would reopen them as soon as I left. The first crack on that wall of mind control that's what the sky looks like in Beijing. The first crack on that wall of mind control came thanks to the US Embassy in Beijing which started a Twitter account in 2008 under the handle at Beijing Air. That guy is Xi Jinping. Every hour at Beijing Air post the air quality readings taken by the embassy in the same part of East Beijing that I live in I should let it go black and gives a curt analysis. Sometimes the air was good or at least moderate which means something less than 100 AQI this is an index that we treat like windshield factor that's right. We get up in the morning we all look at the air quality index so the windshield factor I've been gone too long obviously. Other days it was unhealthy for sensitive groups or just plain unhealthy. In the fall of 2009 a year after the Olympics and Paralympics had ended the readings were over 300 with alarming regularity. The US Embassy bluntly tweeted out on those days that the date that the air was outright hazardous. The top of the scale was supposed to be 500 but in November 2011 the US Embassy equipment showed a reading of 522. At a loss for words somebody in the embassy tweeted out that the air was hashtag crazy bad. I think the description was perfectly apt but it wasn't a very diplomatic way of putting it. China's foreign ministry complained bitterly about US interference as domestic affairs. The diplomatic crossfire though caught the attention of citizens on Sino-Weibo China's own Twitter like social networking service and people began to debate what their government was and wasn't telling them about the air. By this January we saw a nightmare stretch two weeks of 500 plus air quality including one day where it hit an unfathomable 755. Most Chinese that are no longer snickering about the foreigners and their crazy science. They have air quality monitors on their smartphones and they put on masks on the days when the hashtag crazy bad outside. Most importantly the government that once lied to them is being forced to respond to public pressure to deal with the air. We shouldn't as the quote we shouldn't pursue economic growth at the expense of the environment since such growth won't satisfy the people. That's from Li Keqiang in his first press conference and that's another important breakthrough. Again maybe change in China will come step by step. But you can see how important the US involvement and the blunt telling of the truth was. If I put this thesis of slow but steady progress to a dissident like Ai Weiwei he'd say yeah but but nothing is really changing but Lu Xiaobo the democracy activist who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize is still in prison putting his name on a short list of the likes of Andrei Sakharov and Anson Tsuchi as Nobel laureates who were unable to accept their prizes. Ai Weiwei himself remains under no welly and hoes arrest. He's free to do as he pleases within the confines of the courtyard courtyard home and art studio but he's under surveillance the second he opens the front gate. Oddly enough brings me to Canada's relationship with China. You guys have good water here. Should we engage in this slowly changing China that Li and Xi are steering or should we stand with the Ai Weiwei and Lu Xiaobo's? When I arrived in China the Harper government had perhaps the toughest policy towards China of any major country. Ottawa spoke out about human rights violations. Parliament gave honorary citizenship to the Dalai Lama. Mr. Harper's decision not to attend the 2008 Olympics was right in Beijing as a snub and the PM famously promised not to sell out Canadian values to the almighty dollar that he called it. With an attention grabbing policy that did nothing but ensure that no one in China saw or heard anything about Canada. We didn't matter. Canadian companies lost trade opportunities. The human rights situation didn't get any better. But now I'm not worried that we've gone too far the other way. I covered Prime Minister Harper's first visit to Beijing in December 2009 when he met a famously chilly Premier Wen Jiabao. Some saw Premier Wen as chastising Harper but I thought progress we're talking again. With the Prime Minister's return trip last year which is viewed as a major success back home that actually made me a bit queasy. Most will remember the visit only for the Pandas or perhaps because Mr. Harper was the last person to see Bo Xilai alive but he's since been is being charged with kind of a cover for murder as well as massive corruption. He hasn't been charged I should say. He's in the legal system somewhere. Arshun and Jili the Pandas we received were adorable although we've since learned that Jili couldn't make it to Canada because she was less male than we originally believed her to be. What Mr. Harper didn't do in China was publicly say the word Tibet or speak up for the Dalai Lama that he once proudly made a Canadian citizen. He didn't publicly visit a church something his own office of religious freedom would probably frown on. He didn't mention Liuxiao Bo not even want to ask Mr. Harper a specific question about the jail novel Laureate at a press conference in the Chongqing Panda Enclosure a very fitting place. I asked Mr. Harper if he'd raised Mr. Liu's case or that of jailed Uyghur Canadian Husein Chilil whose disappearance was once a front burner issue in Ottawa-Beijing relation. And the Prime Minister replied by referring to the two individuals you mentioned. Notice the deliberate refusal to use either man's name. Now some will say so what? The Canadian Prime Minister is in China to promote Canadian trade not human rights in China. If you offended his host by talking about the people they keep in their jails all the positive momentum in Beijing-Ottawa ties over the past few years could have been lost. Perhaps. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel who visited China the same month as Mr. Harper made an appointment to have dinner with Mo Xiaoping Lu Xiaobo's lawyer. She tried to visit Southern Weekend the censorship battling newspaper that went on strike earlier this year. Now both visits were perhaps predictably blocked by Chinese authorities but at least Ms. Merkel signals for her hosts that Germany is still caring about issues beyond trade. And she did manage to visit a historic cathedral in Guangzhou. She let the world know that the issue of how China's government treats people matters to Germany and the ties between Berlin and Beijing would never be what they could be until China addressed those problems. And it has to be said trade between Germany and China hasn't seemed to suffer. Promoting human rights in China is often a very simple case of promoting the use of the country's own laws. Lu Xiaobo is in jail for advocating that the Communist Party follow the Constitution that it wrote without consulting its people. The Constitution that it contains a lot of very good ideas with an enormous caveat in the preamble but the primacy of Communist Party rule who's Angelil wasn't even arrested in China. It was seized in Uzbekistan in 2006 and extradited. They've been convicted of terrorism and sentenced to life in prison. Although none of us here knows what evidence there were against him. When I spoke to Chen Guangcheng the blind dissident who last year took refuge in the US and Beijing. I asked him if he had considered even for a minute taking refuge in the Canadian embassy instead. He told me that while he pondered several European countries Canada had never crossed his mind. That made me a little sad. But I suppose I'm being idealistic here but foreign policy. So let's approach this from an angle of real politic. Let's put aside the talk of human rights for a moment and focus on cold Canadian interests. China is the biggest market in the world. That's why everyone from shipbuilders in Montreal to soybean growers in Manitoba to real estate developers in Vancouver are obsessed with trying to attract Chinese customers. Canadian businesses know they can't succeed if they don't know what the rules are in China. If the rules written in Beijing aren't enforced in Yunnan or Hunan or Xinjiang and if the law can be completely disregarded in Lu Xiaobo's case with all the international attention out it can just as easily be ignored when Canadian investors are being strong armed or lied to by their partners. I believe the SAGO Sino Forest the Toronto-listed Chinese forestry company demonstrates why it is crucial for Canada's political leaders to consistently push for the application of the rule of law in China. Not just an investor protection agreement like the one Canada in China signed last year but a legal framework that means something to all Chinese citizens protecting them from abuse. Because that will also protect foreigners visiting and doing business in China. The foreign investment protection and promotion agreement or the FIPA as is known was the other great accomplishment of Stephen Harper's last trip to China was actually the result of decades of negotiations rather than a present to China's new friend. But I can promise you that having a FIPA or a FAPA or a FLIPA that seeks only to protect foreign investors won't mean very much in rural Yunnan. The local communist party boss doesn't think the laws any laws apply to him anyways. In the case of Sino Forest this was a company started by an entrepreneur who partnered with a former forestry official. Together they took advantage of China's land privatization drive to snap up large swathes of forest land often by paying off village officials to help them convince the literate residents to sell their shares of the land for far less than what they were worth. The founders successfully bet they could declare just about any value for their trees and it would be hard for others to question their assertion. I met a government forestry official who told me that Sino Forest holdings in Yunnan province were worth only a tiny fraction of what they had declared to Canadian investors. He laughed at me when I raised the suggestion that Sino Forest might have violated the Ontario Securities Commission regulations. Our conversation went a little bit like this. So Sino Forest went to Canada and told everybody they had millions of dollars worth of forest properties here in Yunnan. Yes I told him. And people believed them? Yes. But they were coming here themselves to have a look. Yes. Well whose fault is that? In other words, why would you trust our system when we don't trust it ourselves? The case of Silvercorp, a Vancouver headquartered mining company that is in reality based in China's central Henan province is even more troublesome. A Canadian research and short-selling house called EOS sent an investigator to Henan province to determine whether Canadian investors had again been misled. Now I'm no particular fan of these short-selling companies. Their motives are their motives are impure at least in the case of muddy waters, the one that did the initial Sino Forest research. I found their work to be sloppy and exaggerated. Their interest is less in getting the truth out there than being the ones who profit from the takedown. What happened to Hong Kuen if he was the silent pink shirt who I can't seem to bring back right now? All right. The EOS researcher I interviewed in Beijing can't be justified. And it speaks again to the complete lack of rule of law and judicial independence in the country. Hong Kuen is a 36-year-old Vancouverite. His friends call him Dino. He was sent to the city of Luoyang in Hunan province late 2011 to examine how and why a mine in the middle of nowhere was suddenly claiming to produce the highest-grade silver in the world. He paid a local resident to go to the mine, take some photographs, collect the ore that fell off the trucks. And of course, that ore didn't seem to match the high-grade stuff that Silver Corp was claiming to come from the mine. The company has some title to do, push back hard when EOS released this finding, attacking the short sellers motivation and their methodology. And much of the market eventually agreed with Silver Corp. And at share price rebounded after a sharp dip. That's all fine. But when Dino tried to leave China by evasioning airport at the end of 2011, he was arrested and sent back to Luoyang. He was taken to a PSB office, put in a cell and interrogated. I should explain here that the Public Security Bureau or PSB is a little bit like the old Soviet KGB. Above the law, even if the theoretical enforces it, and they come up a lot in the next few paragraphs. I've seen videos and other evidence from the investigation. And what's clear to me is that PSB had an aim other than determining whether Dino broke any laws when he was investigating Silver Corp. The most troubling thing I saw were receipts for the hotel rooms that the PSB officers used while they were interrogating Dino. The fat yow, a Chinese official term for a tax receipt, were made up to a subsidiary of Silver Corp. In other words, the company was subsidizing the police investigation into somebody that bothered them. That's against Chinese law and the PSB's own internal guidelines. But despite the fact we've printed that evidence in the global mail, which is available online in China. Dino remains behind bars eight months after we ran our story. The PSB officer has not been reprimanded. Silver Corp. shares are still traded on the New York Stock Exchange. I've discovered in a very personal way how the laws of China can be bent by those who are expected to enforce them. In 2010, I became interested in how some surprisingly rich Chinese officials have been able to quickly and successfully immigrate to Canada. My focus fell on the investor immigration program. The system allows immigrants to be fast tracked if they can prove they have a certain amount of money in the bank and they're willing to invest a certain amount of that in Canada. As part of the screening process, applicants are supposed to show how they got that money so that immigration Canada can be convinced they obtained their wealth legally. Most applied from China by immigration consulting companies, as they're known, that are all over Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. So I hired a Chinese friend with the right sort of accent to call 23 of these companies and put a hypothetical situation to them. We were a quality control officer at a Chinese state-owned company and we needed to go to Canada as quickly as possible. Our problem was this. While we had plenty of money in the bank, it all arrived in a lump sum. Our official paychecks could never explain our wealth and while we hadn't been paying a lot in the way of taxes. Eighteen of the 23 companies we called said they could help us falsify financial records so that it would look to Canadian officials like we had made the money steadily, paychecks by paychecks over the years. We were told the tax records could be created too. Then we added an additional challenge. Also helped my cousin, we asked. He's also got money, but he went to jail once for stabbing a man. Most of the companies still on the phone at this point said there wasn't anything they could do for a man with a criminal record. But four of the consulting firms said that even that problem could be fixed. One of them assured us that, quote, the Canadian government can't come to China to check the archives. Several days after the article ran, I got a call from the PSB, kind of come to their office in Beijing. They'd like to discuss the story. I went expecting they might ask me for some of the names, the other names the company's involved in this business. China was, after all, in the midst of a perennial, one of its perennial crackdowns on corruption. And I had named only four of the immigration consultancies in my article, but mentioned that 18 has been willing to help our fictional crooked official. That wasn't what they were interested in. I was taken to the basement of the PSB office and given a seat facing a panel of five police officers, only slezgy more intimidating than you guys today. One of them was holding a video camera. Another guy behind a curtain came out every now and again and videoed me from behind as well. They didn't want to know the names of the other 14 consultancies. They wanted to know who gave me the information on my story, who made the phone calls, who was the unnamed immigration consultant that I quoted speaking out against his corrupt colleagues. And bizarrely, did Jason Kenney make me write the story? People who don't have my mobile number, Jason Kenney. They demanded that I hand over my notes and recordings and threatened during one of the repeated questionings that followed. I ended up having five sessions in the basement of the PSB office to charge me with obstruction of justice if I didn't comply. The very least they vowed it would be difficult for me to renew my visa and my residence permit when they expired. Now, obviously, we didn't comply. Instead, I flew to Bangkok with all my notes and recordings and couriered them to Toronto. And after speaking to my editors, we called the Chinese Foreign Ministry and said that the Globe and Mail, the first Western newspaper, allowed to open an office a mile down to China would close this bureau before it gave into these pressure tactics. Eventually, the foreign ministry prevailed in the PSB and the PSB stopped bothering me for a while. But why did it all happen? I later learned that one of the companies that we had named in print as offered to create false financial records and erase our cousin's criminal record was owned by a former top officer in the PSB. Even when caught breaking the law, he had the power to instead order a PSB investigation into whistleblowers. The law didn't matter. So, yes, I think the Canada's leaders should talk about Liu Xiaobo when they're in Beijing if only because Canadians and Canadian companies in China need them to. I spent a lot of time in Burma over the past two years watching an amazement as that country becomes a better place day by day. Although we have seen some dangerous backsliding in recent weeks. The first time I entered the country was in early 2011. Journalists weren't very welcome then. It was still a military rule of state, so I had to travel undercover. This time I was a businessman selling Canadian medications to Burma's pharmacies. It was an often nerve-wracking experience and at one point I ended up changing my shirts and pulling on a ball cap at a restaurant bathroom and slipping out by the kitchen at the back of the restaurant in order to shake the men on motorcycles who have been following this medical salesman ever since he left the offices of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. A year later when I was back in Rangoon to cover Aung San Suu Kyi's election to parliament after a free and unfettered election campaign marked by an enthusiasm for politics that developed democracies like Canada had long forgotten. Then it was no problem to see Aung San Suu Kyi. The only trick was getting an appointment between all the diplomats and journalists and activists and businessmen who also wanted to see her. Coming back to China I wonder if we'd be seeing this moment in Burma if Western leaders had agreed to stop talking about Aung San Suu Kyi the way they've chosen to forget about Lu Xiao Bo as well as Lu Xiao. Before I move too far away from the topic of media harassment and since someone decided to give me a microphone I have a small complaint to put on the record. In the summer of 2009 deadly riots broke out in a room chi the same predominantly Uyghur Muslim city in China's western Xinjiang province that Huzliang Chilil's family lives in. I flew out there to cover the angry aftermath of the riots which had left almost 200 people dead. After a few days in a room chi I decided to push further out to the remote and ancient city of Kashgar near China's border with Afghanistan. I spent a day touring the walled city of Kashgar which is far more reminiscent of Central Asia and the Middle East than any other part of China and I spoke to people there over the unrest in a room chi as well as Beijing's plans to demolish the old city of Kashgar and put up a more Chinese looking downtown of the place. Then I checked into my hotel. Early the next morning there was a knock bang bang bang on the door. Now the panel beside my bed a do not disturb switch I just leaned over and it said me was housekeeping with flicks flicks flicks flicks flicks flicks it didn't work. Whoever was outside pounded on the door again. Eventually I got up and entered the door and in the hallway were four men three of them in police uniforms. Makai, they asked using my Chinese name they told me I had to immediately leave Kashgar for my own safety. Desperate to buy some more time in the city and knowing there was no greater crime in China than being forced to skip a meal I complained there was unfair to deport me until I had the free breakfast that came with my room rate. The police officers saw the logic in this and I was escorted to the buffet. The other hotel to guess must have thought I was a mass murderer given the number of police officers watching me eat scrambled eggs with chopsticks. I was taken to Kashgar airport and told to buy myself a flight out of town. Now in the movies the guy getting deported never has to stop and pull out his credit card. So I dug in my heel and said no you're kicking me out you buy the plane ticket. They refused and for the next seven hours I sat in Kashgar airport with police officers watching me drink coffee. Now my wife and colleague Carolyn Wheeler was in Beijing that day on her way to scrum Canada's visiting minister of transport. The guy named John Baird. The people of daily asked Mr. Baird to comment on whether he thought the Canadian media was covering the Xinjiang rise properly. A very loaded question for one that might have allowed Mr. Baird to comment on my situation. Mr. Baird who you may have heard is now Foreign Minister of Canada replied there was here's his quote a lot of symmetry between the Chinese government's complaints about the Canadian media and his own cabinet's complaints about the Canadian media. He said this while was surrounded by police in Kashgar not able to cover anything at all. So again Canada should clearly support the rights of Chinese journalists because their interests are for your society where the legal system is fairly applied are Canada's interests and the interests of Canadian companies working in China like the Globe and Mail. But back to this moment that China is facing this chance that the new leadership has to change things. I definitely envy whoever becomes my successor in the Globe's Beijing Bureau. They will arrive in an era when it's easier than ever before to get to know the Chinese people. When Frederick Nassau the first Globe and Mail correspondent in what we then called P. King arrived in 1959 he would have been confined to his hotel near Tiananmen Square. He would wait for the telex machine that he kept in the bathroom to quick to light with the news which most often was just the latest inflated statistics about agricultural production or a missive hailing Sino-Soviet friendship. When Frederick Nassau wanted to go and interview people he had to wait for his minder to take him to pre-selected interviewees who had invariably tell him how marvelous life was in the People's Republic. Indeed, Mr. Nassau never reported on the famine of the Great Leap Forward that killed millions while he was one of the only foreign reporters in China. There was just no way for him to find out what was going on. Today you can just turn on Twitter or Facebook and yes, many young Chinese do know how to reach them despite the great firewall of internet restrictions or better yet go to China's own Sino-Weibo with its 300 million registered users with 300 million registered users or you can just walk down the Beijing streets and sit down beside whoever you want to talk to or you can spend three weeks on a train talking to whoever sits beside you. Though quickly reader here news of the latest corruption scandal or the standoff down the street or the forced forced demolition of a home whose owner is refusing to leave or the protest in the next village gains environmental degradation. Since the Tiananmen Square crackdown 24 years ago China has been governed by an informal pact between the Communist Party and the 1.3 billion people they govern. That pact boils down to the economy will be opened you'll be free to make make your fortunes just don't challenge our right to rule. Lawlessness and official corruption are threatening that pact. People don't believe they can keep what they have. They don't trust the system. Is that insecurity that's motivated the Wu Khan uprising? No longer covered it's the first dot that's about it right? And the other and many of the other 180,000 protests a year. As I said at the beginning change does not have to mean a western style democracy but there must be a fairer China and soon. One where the migrant workers who are born in the countryside can send their kids to the same schools and hospitals that those born in Beijing or Shanghai and there's a system right now called the Hukou system where if you can live and work in Shanghai for 10 years but if you were born in the countryside your kid has to go to a school in the countryside and has to go to the hospital in the countryside. A China where factories are forced to give their staff decent wages and working conditions. A China where you can discuss things freely on the internet without being afraid that the public security bureau will pay you a visit. China where the next I away away is allowed to just be an artist or the next UCL Bo is just another grumpy writer trying to get published. Maybe though not necessarily a fairer China will be one that elects its own leaders. Either the communist party will leave that push towards fairness I think it will come in the next 10 years and like I said I've seen many positive signals the new leadership at least intends to reform or the communist party will be pushed into that reform. Change is coming and Canada should decide what role that wants to play when the moment of change comes. Should we put our trust there in Xi and Li or should we speak out more clearly for the UCL Bo in the I away ways. This isn't just about human rights it's about Canadian interests. And what kind of China we want our pandas to grow up in 10 years from now. Thank you very much for listening and if you haven't answered any questions you can ask. Thank you very much Mark we do have lots of time for questions we have two microphones if people would like to line up to ask your questions I'd only ask two things please one is to identify yourself and the second please remember that we're asking questions and so make them short and you mark lots of time to respond and if I'll be the judge and decide if I think the questions going on a little too long we'll ask you to get to the point but otherwise please. My name is Herb Davis I wonder if you could offer some work thoughts and comments concerning the situation in Tibet and their quest for linguistic and religious freedom and the second part of that question if you had the opportunity to advise Dr. Lopsang Sangui the Prime Minister of the government in exile in Durham saw what to do to help facilitate greater dialogue or even some level dialogue with China What advice would you offer? Thank you. I wouldn't advise Dr. Sangui I would advise the Chinese government that they should speak to the Dalai Lama while they can because he is a moderating force I think I believe on the Tibet independence movement the Tibet autonomy movement and he is the one that can make a deal that after everyone will respect and my previous posing was the Middle East and everybody reviled Yasser Arafat but he was the guy that can make the deal and the guy that had they had something with him that would have gone ahead now in terms of the situation in Tibet I'm glad you asked about that because you'll see the worth of sort of how my trip did end before I got to Tibet as a foreign journalist I can't go there I haven't been able to go there for four and a half years I have a my visa has markings in it that would not allow me to get on a plane or train going to Tibet I can report from the merge and Sichuan province and Qinghai province and I've spoken to a lot of monks and monasteries there who are terrified to speak to me but they still want to tell me what they can they just they feel very repressed obviously they don't they they deeply believe in their religion that's why they're monks and they feel they're not allowed to express themselves that way and they've been they're having a the education system crammed down their throat that tells them that the person they believe is the reincarnated Buddha is in fact a demon it's a very very difficult cell so I wish I knew more about the situation I wish they would open it up then we could have a more balanced view than the one I'm giving you that's the sad truth is that I've never been I'm worried more worried that no one can reach Pyongyang and I'll tell you that working in Beijing these days and asking them about North Korea there's a definite frustration on the Chinese side about the North Koreans they feel like they're not being listened to and obviously the regime in Pyongyang is entirely reliant on Chinese economic support and military support and they feel like they tried to tell the North Koreans not to do this last nuclear test in February and the North Koreans ignored them and ever since then they've been sending messages to Pyongyang they're not getting the response they're used to so there's a real concern in China about how this is developing my sense is that the North Koreans don't want a war they're trying to push this until they get what they really want which is to sit down with the Americans face to face have a discussion about aid economic aid but at the same time there is a these cycles of rhetoric inside Pyongyang I've always they usually end with something on fire on the other side there was the attack on Yongkang Island in 2010 and the sinking of the Cheonan warship these it's very difficult for North Korea to ramp up it's domestic audience this high and not have some something on fire to show as a victory so I worry that they're going though there will be something that will happen in the South Koreans I spent a lot of time in South Korea over the last few years they're in the mood to punch back and I don't know if the North Koreans understand that and if they're not taking the call from Beijing maybe they're not getting that message so it is it's very dangerous I don't think we're on the break of nuclear war but I do think we're in a very on the edge of a very dangerous moment I was just reading that the China last year signed an agreement with Russia to purchase oil paying them in U.N. What will this mean for global economics in terms of the Pekka dollar that can be the American dollar you have to get one of the economic crisis that's coming up here but there is there definitely something they've been spending a lot of time on they made a similar deal with the Brazilians to exchange directly without going to the middle currency of the US dollar they definitely want they love the idea of the U.N. being an international currency they have a bigger problem with anyone besides them selling the value of that currency you can see what the problem is if you're going to be an international currency it needs to be traded freely and therefore they can't control the value and then before they can't control prices at home and the under reported cause of the 1989 protest in Taylor Square was a spike in the price of pork so if they can't control the price of pork that's more terrifying to them than just about anything during your four years in China you must have observed on the periphery the military and what its activities are Xi Jinping was made the chairman of the CMC immediately whereas his predecessor had nearly two-year period of of the meeting I was wondering if you'd comment on military influence in the government and also make a comment about the bold pushes that China is making particularly the South China Seas that's a very good question I think they're linked those two things that you brought up I when you look at the Yalu Islands that you with Japan in particular which is not the South China Sea but the East China Sea but I'm just making I find that one to be more indicative I don't think that I think the the the actual incident to the purchasing of three of the five islands from a Japanese citizen to the Japanese government wasn't actually that big a deal in fact it gave you know made it easier for the Japanese government to make a to negotiate with them with the Chinese if they chose to do so but the Chinese chose in terms of this is a provocation and it pushed it quite a bit and I think that was about that was probably driven by hawkish elements of the PLA the People's Liberation Army I don't know that but the PLA officers that I've met are generally very hawkish and the Yalu Islands that's absolutely fundamental I think that during the period where he was consolidating power Xi Jinping was working very hard to appeal to that wing of the party so there would be no threat to the peaceful transition now that he's got all three of the levers the presidency the general secretary the community of the Communist Party and the head of the PLA I think you might see you're already seeing a bit of a backing down on the rhetoric there's talks of a summit over the islands that's really I think that the PLA is you occasionally see pushes for the PLA to be taken outside of communist party control to make it into a national army rather than what it is right now which is the party's army and the party for I think existential reasons doesn't want that to happen so it has to accept PLA's influence inside the political structure but you know I think that it spikes up at times like we just saw over the transition I think it will now cool off of it because their ability to influence events has waning now that the the new Politburo standing committee is in place just a guess Mark I really enjoyed your presentation I wonder however if I used to teach government studies for many many years and I used to ask students from China that joined my class what they thought was the key to China's rather remarkable success and in most cases almost all cases the answer was liberalization of markets and my answer to that was well I'm sure that had something to do with it without those but there are more than 120 other developing countries and most of them have more liberalized markets than China and none of them except for a couple of East Asian countries have performed in a way which is even close so I wonder you have you have focused on certain issues that are very important but I wonder if I were to ask you the question how do you account for China's and of course China's collapse has been predicted yearly ever since the growth process started the financial system going to collapse it's all a bubble it's now a long way into this process and I think I would like to hear how you understand that process and I'd like to suggest that in looking at China all of us also need to have some sense that stability is an enormously important ingredient here and the 97, 98 Asian financial crisis Joseph Stiglitz I remember said just after the crisis the world can thank its lucky stars that China hadn't liberalized its capital markets before 97, 98 so I would like very much to hear how you understand that um you know there are other developed economies that have done very well Australia's developing economies South Korea obviously had a very rapid acceleration over the last 20 years so it's easy to describe it all to state control I'm not sure it's the entire answer on stability if you're absolutely correct and at that press conference the great hall of the people that we were that I mentioned where Lee Kuchang gave his first remarks I was sitting beside a colleague from the times of London and we were I think some fairly cynical remarks and he said all right how would you do it what would you do how would you run this country of 1.3 billion people any different what could you do can you think of a better way to have the outcomes they've had I you know it's very difficult to pretend that you can imagine a different course for the country that it's had right now it's done economically it's done very well I wasn't predicting its collapse and maybe I um I took some paragraphs out as I was going to smooth the narrative maybe I smoothed it too much I wasn't predicting its collapse I was saying that the people feel the deal has been broken and they have to maybe draw up and use social contracts in some way some and so a reform of the legal system one in which the judiciary is made independent where you loosen the social controls a little bit can be assuade this popular anger that I'm talking about um about a month ago or two months ago maybe the New York Times had a few articles about Chinese hackers getting into their network and their email accounts and part of what the New York Times thought was going on was they were trying to figure out who their reporters were talking to in China and I'm pretty sure I read after this and it may have been on your Twitter account that you've also had experiences with hackers getting and trying to get into your email account I was wondering if you could talk about how you and other journalists deal with this and and what kind of problem this presents for reporting in China thanks very much um yes that was probably on my Twitter account I didn't really like when all when everybody else started saying hey it happened to me I thought I should just turn to your friend because New York Times the Wall Street Journal did a story about how they'd been hacked um in my case it actually ties to that prolonged story that I was telling about how I've gone to uh written a story about how the immigration consulting process that worked and um there was an effort to get my note to get me ahead of my notebooks and recordings from that and after I flew to Bangkok and heard things back home I came up and one day I opened up my computer and every file that had anything related with the word China in it had it hadn't disappeared for my laptop which would have made more sense but it had uh it now had zero KB that you open it it was still there it would be a file called you know immigration consulting and click and my files are related to Japan my files are related to Thailand we're all intact so I brought in the Canadian embassies um a computer expert I invited him if you can might have a look and he said whatever this is someone has designed this specifically for you and your computer this is you know very targeted attack so you can guess that who might have had the motivations to do that um it was a lesson they also got my contact list um the phone numbers email addresses to everybody in contact with I mean I'm sure they had most of those anyways we have to assume that most of your phone calls are monitored if you're especially if you're calling anyone like an highway way I'm pretty sure they both lines are being tapped to that point but it is you know since then I've had to be a lot more careful with uh you know a little more old fashion keeping things in notebooks and such with the emergence of social media sites like you mentioned Weibo and the increased internet access of the average Chinese citizen I was wondering what kind of social and political effects you've noticed while you're in China what sort of effects that's had on it and what you think what is in store for the future if previously people only had access to what was in the people's daily what was on CCTV and that was pretty dry stuff pretty controlled stuff and now Weibo is censored to a certain extent and and the history of Weibo for those who aren't familiar with it is in 2009 on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square there was a whole these campaigns started to build up online on on the Chinese Chinese users on on Twitter in particular and Facebook as well trying to raise awareness of what had happened so both these websites were blocked inside China so Weibo emerged almost simultaneously I think it actually existed but it suddenly shot up in popularity the way they've avoided getting the same treatment is they self-censor they have a I've met someone who works not for them but for Baidu and he explained that they have a system where if someone uses uses the word say Tiananmen massacre it just goes away it never happened if you use some code they think might be referring to that it gets put into an ice box and some until a human sort of sensor can look at it decide if your intention is right or wrong and then if it's okay they'll toss it back in so it's very it's still a controlled sphere however the conversations that are having there and the way they go and the speed of it even if they do get censored some of these you know if it's only there for five minutes before it disappears 200 other people might retweet it and put it on their account so that things are getting out in a way they can't control anymore and these the Wu can uprising the the popular protest that I went to was all done was organized by bloggers really that's in a tiny fishing village in Guangdong so you can see the potential for change and the threat that poses to the government and actually the government's trying to respond they've ordered bureaucrats to start opening up their own Weibo accounts and to get involved and social social whatever it was working looking for sort of public governance so it's incredibly important I don't think we know where it goes yet and I think that what the role of the heads of companies like Baidu and Sinai do from here and they they have an enormous amount of power as long as they're compliant and doing what the government wants them to do it's you know it's all states with them the old boundaries but what if one day they decided not to censor there's a bunch of other cyber sort of issues like IP theft and all these sorts of things I mean it's hard to get your head around and and my question to you would be what recourse do you think western governments have against this sort of thing and is it being taken seriously at the domestic level in China do the leaders sort of is this on the well I'm sure it's on the radar but do they have any sort of plan or do they acknowledge it publicly that it's happening and is there something that can be done about it they don't acknowledge publicly that it's happening and it's important I think you know that the building that this the cyber tax was we're emanating from religiously emanating from was that it was the people's liberation army so we talked a minute ago about these sort of separate spheres that people's liberation armies carved out now does the people's liberation army seek the approval of the civilian oversight before it goes and steals something from the Pentagon I don't know if you go to the press one of the paragraphs I skipped over was that the Chinese government for all the openness that my successor will encounter in this great new atmosphere you'll be coming into the Chinese government remains a very closed entity the you know very few people last year when they were changing over their power structure there were very few people who knew no one knew until the very last minute who the seven new leaders would be there were no inside sources there's no way to break through so you really just have to go to the aforementioned press conferences and ask and you get a you get a their stable response is but you know we're deeply concerned about these cyber attacks you can't prove they came from China and China is the number one victim of cyber attacks so they immediately turn around and say they're doing it to us we're doing it to them maybe they are I don't know if any if any media companies are investigating whether or not the Pentagon is hacking into China at the same time as China's maybe this is just the way you know sort of the new Cold War is being waged but yeah you know for companies and I've read some some really scary stuff about companies I forgot you know they're being hacked by basically losing their entire you know they're everything they owned to invisible hackers from somewhere the Chinese have been noises about let's have a conversation about this let's strike a deal again implying that it's a two-way street and if they if we're going to stop everybody has to stop I don't know what the truth is on that I just wanted your assessment on the what the reaction has been in China on the government's new investment conservative government's new investment foreign investment rules particularly kind of the message of hands off our oil sands after after the CNOC investment but also the concerns raised here about Chinese telecom companies coming to Canada and has there been much reaction what has been that reaction been in China but also what does that mean do you think the Canada-China relationship and should people here be worried about those companies coming here because even the conservative government's caucus is whether or not they should be worried of like your assessment on it I'll tell you that after the next CNOC deal I went to one of the negotiators on the Chinese side and he was delighted he didn't and I expected him to be angry about the aforementioned sort of hands off our oil sands because he also he focused on the exception on accepting exceptional circumstances I'm sure you've been a language better than I do it so he they were delighted because someone had set up a playbook after they've been rebuffed by the Australians by the Americans someone has said this is how you do a deal and here's the circumstances under which it can be done they're actually very grateful to the Harvard government for setting up a playbook that they can take to the Australians and say listen if we do what we did in Canada if we make the concessions we made in Canada if we overpay like we did in Canada can we do this as for Huawei and sort of the Chinese companies that's the telecoms companies akin to the cyber cyber spying allegations the Chinese get extremely defensive and I didn't properly answer your question about the domestic audience and what do people think about it at home and when they when they they allege the American attacks most Chinese believe yeah I'm sure the Americans are doing this too so they say Huawei is this company that's hacking into there's a threat to the security of Western governments they just say this is you know this is American sort of the trying to protect Apple or trying to protect through their own companies I mean domestically they just say this is all Western propaganda there isn't very much women's political involvement in China there was one I sat in the in the great hall of people and they were doing their voting for all the different committees and they would have the names of the candidates up and of course the voting is there'd be like 18 Communist Party candidates and 17 are going to get seats but for whatever reason I didn't quite understand they would always have in brackets knew around women if the candidate was a woman on the board on the screen in case people didn't know those women and so into their voting somehow who was considered a candidate for all of your ascending committee and people just refer to her as the woman so that tells you how rare and exceptional she is I don't know if you had a chance to watch the footage of China's first female Taekwunot landing back on earth and so the capital lands and I think it was in Qinghai province and out comes first the first male pilot and then the second male pilot which sort of was a bit counterintuitive and then they sort of hoisted out the third one they were oh she's one this is the CCTV on that she's a commentator saying oh she's a woman her legs will probably be a bit wobbly now and what a glorious smile that's the great thing about female astronauts that they have great smiles that was really quite and this was and you know I'm sitting there in a newsroom full of most of the Chinese people and I was the only one who was really sort of saw this as shocking you know this is the way the official media still talks about women so the interesting character is probably Yuan she's the new first lady of China and she's forced in her own right for the first she you know they call her the Chinese Michelle Obama I think that might be a bit strong but you know she when they landed in Moscow she she was off the plane beside Xi Jinping and she looked very kind of like she was part of the team like she was you know his partner we'll see how much that happens because that's that's actually a new development we've never seen I never saw the wife of Hu Jin Tao or Wen Jia Bao and Wen Jia Bao's wife is quite rich I know that but my question also talks is on the foreign acquisition well the Chinese acquisition of the Nexon I'm wondering in the midst of the fifth agreement and increased interaction between the Canadian and Chinese economies there's been this national debate with regards to foreign acquisition of Canadian companies particularly with regard to the oil and gas industry what do you think the Chinese acquisition of Nexon means for the Canadian economy and what do you think of the Harper government's position given the Chinese acquisition of Nexon I think the answer that they eventually gave that or not so much the answer they gave but one of their points they made when they were considering and all that you know why didn't we get the Canadian state out of the oil out of the oil and gas business if it was just to be other states governments coming in it was mostly the private sector and all the energy that would unleash that they wanted to have in their energy I think there's something you can watch for though there I mean why why does the Chinese government want Nexon and and they're you're starting to see them where they'll the resources will be in the production will be Chinese owned they're looking to buy into the pipelines that shift them and the terminals of the port so if they get to a point where they control the production the transport and the the port then sure that gives them a say and what happens to the oil when it's bought and sold at least that's the Chinese calculation they're they're they're they're playing well down the field and looking at a moment when they need to play those cards say hey you know we've we paid for the right to say what happens to this so I do think there are some serious questions raised by having a foreign government buy up national resources that you guys your own government have I'm wondering what you've seen about the implications of the one child policy and the shortage of women in China that's very good question and it is absolutely when you talk about human rights or I mean that is the first issue that comes up for ordinary Chinese that's the one thing that bothers them perhaps more than anything else the the fact that they know where children that they can have has been predetermined now if you had anyone from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences here they'd tell you what a great success the policy has been and how the number how the China is already so huge and how could they possibly be any bigger population-wise than they are but it is a it's um the one thing I would say is that I'm going to stop writing that China is about to change it's one child policy because I've had that story I've written that in the global mail twice I've seen it in every other newspaper you know four or five times in the last four years it's a constant almost expectation that they have to fix this policy especially with the demographic problems they have coming towards them with aging society and the fact that you know you're going to have one grandchild expected to support some two parents maybe four grandparents you know they need to have more young people in the country and they have this still this is this policy that is almost beyond question at the highest levels and on the question about the dwindling number of women I was in a village on this train trip which I'd say there were I think I wrote there were 80 men and no women in the entire village because the village that were there the few women that had grown up there had all gone away to go work in factories or what happened it's we talked about anger in the countryside I imagine 80 men growing up in a village with no women it's going to be a problem someday maybe that's a good note on which to end it I'm not really sure but anyway thank you very much for coming this evening I'd like to thank about all of you Mark for coming to Canada for a few days to talk to us to give us an incredible insight into what has gone on he's been in China in a wonderful period of time to see the changes that have taken place and I think he's given us this evening a bit of a sense of things we can look forward to and maybe he can watch from London as well so on behalf of all of us Mark thank you very much for coming today