I was delighted to learn that Jonathan Manthorpe has a new edition of his book Claws of the Panda coming out. So excited that I’m jumping the gun a bit: the updated and substantially expanded edition doesn’t come out until the weekend, but I wanted to catch up with him as soon as I could.
Manthorpe is one of Canada’s most experienced foreign correspondents. He wasn’t the first Canadian journalist to write in detail about the Beijing regime’s campaign to intimidate Chinese expatriates in Canada, but the original 2019 edition of his book is an indispensable resource for the rest of us who needed to catch up. Despite the lurid title, it’s a low-key and methodical summary of decades of Canada-China relations, beginning with Christian missions in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Canada, Manthorpe argues, has always had a missionary impulse with regard to China: relations between the two countries, the theory went, could help China become more like Canada.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
The new edition has the kind of cover blurb from Michael Kovrig that any author would pray for: “If you value living in a free and open society, read this excellent book and heed its warnings.” It’s an appropriate addition. Kovrig and Michael Spavor were taken into custody by the Beijing regime just before Manthorpe’s original edition was published. Everything since then — the long, tense detention of Kovrig and Spavor; the revelations of CSIS warnings about election interference; the unlucky involvement of David Johnston and the work of the Hogue Commission — has happened since that first edition. All of it is covered in this new second edition.
What does he think of the foreign-interference commission? “It’s irrelevant,” Manthorpe said tersely when I asked. A small-ball attempt to barely influence a federal election is not where the action is, he said: it’s the constant campaign of fear and intimidation against members of the Chinese diaspora in Canada. That’s the story Manthorpe has been telling for longer than most of us have been following it, and I’m delighted to recommend you read his book, after you hear us discuss it.
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