Angry in the Great White North

From the Globe and Mail:

The Dalai Lama arrived on Canadian soil yesterday to the protests of Chinese diplomats upset that the religious leader will meet with a Conservative MP while they continue to wait for a formal one-on-one meeting with Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister.

Officials with the Chinese embassy confirmed yesterday that Chinese ambassador to Canada Lu Shumin has yet to formally meet with Peter MacKay, a get-together that would typically happen almost as a matter of course, according to diplomatic experts.

The lack of a meeting, along with Jason Kenney's scheduled discussion with the Dalai Lama in Vancouver tomorrow, led experts, politicians and business people to express concern about what they believe is a changing government view of the new economic colossus.

So which politicians are upset?

But Liberal House Leader Ralph Goodale, said he thought it amazing that a meeting hasn't taken place.

"It's bizarre, given the size and the significance, and the impact of China in the world and a long-standing diplomatic and commercial relationship between Canada and China," he said.

He noted that regular engagement is important if Canada wants to have influence and to perhaps modify Chinese behaviour.

Let's consider just how successful 13 years of Liberal engagement has been at modifying Chinese behaviour. Research in Motion, developers of the ubiquitous Blackberry, had been trying for two years to leap regulatory hurdles to start marketing their products in China. What was happening during those two years? The Chinese were busily reverse engineering the technology. Only when they were ready to release their copy was the market opened:

On the eve of its long-delayed China launch, BlackBerry is facing a sudden challenge from a cheaper Chinese rival called, unapologetically, RedBerry.

The new service, aimed squarely at BlackBerry, was launched this month by China Unicom Ltd., the state-controlled telecommunications giant that ranks as China's second-biggest mobile operator.

The new RedBerry service could pose a major challenge to Research in Motion Ltd., which is planning to launch BlackBerry in China by the end of next month. Its China launch has been delayed by two years of negotiations and regulatory obstacles, and RedBerry has now been introduced ahead of it.

The government-allied utility, China Unicom, actually bragged about the theft:

China Unicom left no doubt that it is brazenly attempting to capitalize on BlackBerry's global fame.

"The RedBerry name extends the vivid name of BlackBerry that people are already familiar with, and it also combines the new red symbol of China Unicom," the company said in a press release.

China Unicom spokesmen refused to comment yesterday on whether they expected any disputes over trademark infringement. RIM did not respond to requests for comment made through its New York-based public-relations firm.

"From RIM's point of view, this is rather disturbing," a Canadian business consultant in Beijing said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's obviously a copycat name. It's a fairly clever example of brand piracy."

RIM announced plans to crack the Chinese market in the first quarter of 2002, and it has already begun selling BlackBerry in Hong Kong. But despite signing a memorandum of understanding with China Mobile in 2004, it has faced lengthy delays in launching in mainland China.

When I said the delay was to allow the Chinese to copy the technology, I was speaking my own opinion. The official reason is far more reasonable:

One reason for the two-year delay, according to an Ontario government source, is China's concern that the high-level encryption technology in the BlackBerrys could make it difficult for China's security authorities to gain access to e-mail messages. Chinese security agents routinely monitor e-mail messages on China's Internet servers.

Oh yeah, that's much better.

I still don't understand why China is such an amazing market. They seem committed to stealing everything. Police-state tactics undermine the value of information technology products and is an unending public relations nightmare for companies that help Chinese authorities. In return, we get cheap plastic garbage made by armies of exploited Chinese women:

David Redmon's punchy documentary critique of globalization, "Mardi Gras: Made in China," looks at the conditions in a factory in the Chinese city of Fuzhou where young workers, mostly women, are paid $1.20 a day to work 14-to-20-hour shifts in enforced silence making the beads showered onto revelers in New Orleans in exchange for baring their breasts at Mardi Gras.

The Chinese factory owner, who sees himself as a good guy and model manager, boasts of the punishments he exacts in wages from the workers toiling in sweatshop conditions when they don't meet their quotas. In a nifty turnabout, the filmmaker asks the revelers if they know where the beads come from. They don't, of course, and even when told, few seem to care. When he also shows the Chinese workers pictures of how the beads are used, they giggle in embarrassment. -Stephen Holden, The New York Times

I for one would not mind paying four times the price for a quality product that lasts ten times longer. Do my kids need those cheesy Happy Meal toys? I'm embarrassed when they are playing with them, because whenever I turn one over and see that "Made in China" embosser, I think of these factories.

But what can you do?

Apparently you shouldn't do anything, nor would the government if Ralph Goodale had his way, because this is all part of plan to modify Chinese behaviour.

Yeah, right.