The embassy of the People's Republic of China, in Ottawa, on Jan. 17, 2019.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
A University of Ottawa professor who once served as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy adviser said the Chinese embassy in Canada lodged protests with both his employer and the Department of Global Affairs over a trip he made to Taiwan in August.
Beijing’s authoritarian Communist Party considers Taiwan a breakaway province even though it has never ruled the democracy of 24 million people and they are making increasingly bold efforts to diplomatically isolate the self-governed island.
Canada and Taiwan do not have official diplomatic relations but the territory has been building robust informal relations with the West in order to protect itself. The U.S. has repeatedly said China is aiming to have the capacity to capture and annex Taiwan by 2027.
There are no rules preventing private Canadian citizens from visiting Taiwan. Canada’s official position, stated in a 1970 communiqué establishing formal ties with mainland China, is merely that it “takes note” of Beijing’s claim on Taiwan.
In the case of Roland Paris, a professor of international affairs and the director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, China opposed his decision to participate as a panelist in an Aug. 21 Taiwanese government-sponsored forum on Indo-Pacific security.
The Chinese embassy arranged a meeting with the University of Ottawa and filed a demarche, or protest, with Global Affairs over the university professor’s trip to Taipei.
It also registered its displeasure regarding a second University of Ottawa invitee who travelled to the same conference: Jennifer Irish, director of its Information Integrity Lab and an expert in disinformation and misinformation.
Prof. Paris said while this sort of coercion pales in comparison with the types of foreign interference that are now being examined by a public inquiry in Canada – one that resumes hearings Monday – it must still be denounced.
“This incident is minor by comparison to the foreign interference we’ve heard about but it’s still important to call out these actions as a form of intimidation that is now unfortunately part of Beijing’s standard repertoire,” Prof. Paris said.
He said the Chinese embassy also made several attempts to reach him shortly before he travelled to Taiwan, contact he presumes was aimed at dissuading him from going. At the Taipei conference, he learned other international participants had also been targeted with messages from the Chinese diplomatic missions in their respective countries.
Prof. Paris said he initially shrugged off the Chinese government’s behaviour as “largely performative,” like when Beijing complains when Canadian naval vessels transit the international waters of the Taiwan Strait, a passage over which China claims sovereignty and jurisdiction. It makes no difference to him because, he said, the university “completely has my back.”
“It won’t affect my plans,” he said of Chinese government opposition. “I intend to continue travelling to Taiwan.”
Prof. Paris said what’s disturbing is that pressure from the Chinese embassy might succeed in convincing other organizations or individuals to curb their engagement with Taiwan.
“It represents an intrusion into the private affairs of private citizens, and not everyone enjoys the job security that I do as a tenured professor,” he said. The coercion could work against “organizations that are more susceptible to these intimidation tactics.”
There are about 191,000 Taiwanese citizens living in Canada, according to a 2021 report by the island’s overseas affairs council.
And about 50,000 Canadian citizens currently live in Taiwan, its office in Ottawa said.
Ms. Irish, a former Canadian foreign service officer, accepted an invitation to speak on a panel about “protecting digital democracy” at the same Aug. 21 conference that Prof. Paris attended. She said beforehand she received a message from a low-level official at the Chinese embassy, which she interpreted as intending to convey that they knew of her pending trip to Taiwan and “wanted me to be aware that they were aware of that.”
Ms. Irish said she later learned the Chinese embassy had contacted the university about the trip. She said she regarded their conduct as part of “their long-standing policy of wanting to restrain Taiwan’s ability to engage internationally.”
In 2019, Reporters Without Borders released a report saying Taiwan is China’s top target for disinformation.
Ms. Irish said she believes it was “completely appropriate for us to engage with Taiwan civil society representatives, who’ve been at the vanguard of countering misinformation and disinformation, because it’s important that we take lessons learned that we can then employ as we prepare the next stage of the electoral process” in Canada.
Asked why it protested the travel of a private Canadian citizen, the Chinese embassy in Ottawa in a statement defended its conduct by restating, as Beijing often does, that it believes “there is only one China in the world” and that in its opinion “Taiwan is a part of China, and the government of the People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government representing China.”