You are the lord of a small estate in 19th-century England. The lord of the much bigger estate on
the other side of the county asks you to dinner. He serves you a magnificent feast, but you can’t
help noticing that he mistreats his tenants, working them to the bone and caning any who get out of line.

Do you say something? Remember that he is a much more powerful man than you. You sell much of your
produce to him and, as his wealth and power grows, you hope to sell much more to him in future. If


you speak out about his abusive conduct, he may well decide to buy from someone else. Do you risk
offending him by denouncing his behaviour, or is it wiser to keep quiet?

This is essentially the question that Prime Minister Paul Martin will face when he arrives in
China. China is a much bigger country than Canada. Canada makes a lot of money on trade with
China. It hopes to make much more as China’s economic power grows. Yet China is unquestionably a human-rights abuser.
What to do?

Mr. Martin’s predecessor, Jean Chrétien, made it clear what his answer was. Keep quiet. In his
numerous visits to China, most of them focused on drumming up trade, he spoke softly if at all
about Beijing’s deplorable human-rights record.

 “I’m the prime minister of a country of 28 million people”, Mr. Chrétien famously said of a
meeting with the Chinese president at the time, Jiang Zemin. “He’s the president of a country with
1.2 billion. I’m not allowed to tell the premier of Saskatchewan or Quebec what to do. Am I supposed to tell the
president of China what to do?” Only in the final years of his prime ministership did he begin to
speak more frankly about human rights in China, and then only because critics were calling him weak.

Mr. Martin has a chance to toughen Canada’s stand. He left Saturday on a five-country, nine-day
tour of Asia that will include almost three days in Beijing and Hong Kong. It is his first
official visit to China as prime minister. Mr. Martin is as keen as Mr. Chrétien was to increase Canada’s trade with China. A
delegation of Canadian business people will be in China while he is, and that’s fine. Canada needs
to improve its commercial ties with China. But we tend to forget that China needs Canada, too. As a
developing country it needs foreign help to build its energy and resource sectors. As the host of
the 2008 Olympics, it is keen to improve its international image. That gives Canada leverage.

Mr. Martin should use it to remind China’s leaders as forcefully as he can that human rights
matter. He should urge his hosts to begin exploratory talks with the Dalai Lama over the plight of
Tibet. He should urge them to free the many political prisoners who languish in Chinese jails. He should urge them
to lift restrictions on the Chinese media. Most important, he should urge them to reform their
closed, outdated political system and move toward representative democracy.

Will the Chinese take offence? Quite possibly. Beijing often blusters and sputters when other
countries comment on its “internal affairs”.  It even threatens, in some cases, to cancel
contracts and sever economic ties. But no country with any self-respect should let those kinds of threats stop it from
giving voice to its most deeply held values.

Canada wants good relations and lots of trade with China. We happen to disagree with its leaders
about human rights and democracy. Mr. Martin should not be afraid to say so.