Canada has slammed the door on 45,000 potential Chinese “investor migrants” who want to gatecrash the country with tons and tons of hot cash. The decision, announced by the Ottawa government last Wednesday, made many rich mainland Chinese furious. Stranded and confounded, some of them bashed Canada as “racist,” “discriminatory”—even Fascist.
But for the rest of the world, the Ottawa government has a point. With the world’s cash flooding into China, which is the most robust market engine in the world, steaming ahead with somewhere between 7 and 14 percent GDP growth per year since 1991, it is baffling for any rational Chinese to go against the global mainstream and throw their cash into the economic torpor of a country like Canada.
It is a challenge to common sense to think of what the Chinese can “invest in” Canada. Last year I visited Scarborough, Toronto: a Chinese colony, or “Chinatown,” as it is more commonly known. The 3-square-mile ghetto is dotted with hundreds of foot massage parlors, with middle-aged Chinese women hanging outside soliciting for customers; and another hundred Chinese restaurants, with haggard and shabby-looking Chinese bosses and waiters yawning or smoking, so bored they looked on the brink of death. There seemed very few “investment opportunities” left, except perhaps visiting the northern shores to collect male seal genitals as an aphrodisiac.
Free Chinese newspapers are piled up at entrances of Chinese supermarkets and restaurants everywhere in the Mong Kok-like ghetto. With layouts, headlines and editorials that sounded like the People’s Daily in Beijing, these Chinatown newspapers unanimously reported and hailed the prosperity of China and decline of the west, or called for Canadian-Chinese to be ready to fight for China against the US and Japan. The classified ads seemed more authentically informative, with information about where to get Mandarin-speaking solicitors for short-cuts to obtaining Canadian citizenship, or casual relief with an apparently illegally working Chinese sex worker.
By rejecting a mass number of rich Chinese applicants, the Canadian immigration department is helping President Xi Jinping to nail his people down to their own soil. Xi called for his people to struggle for a “Chinese Dream” (a term plagiarized from Martin Luther King Jr. or any American for that matter), to make his country strong and proud. It is not constructive to flee China with your cash and build your dream in Toronto or Vancouver instead of Beijing and Shanghai. For the tiny 35-million population of Canada, including some selfish former Hongkongers who landed shortly after the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989, it would be a nightmare to witness the country that they love transform into a Chinada.
Chip Tsao is a best-selling author, columnist and a former producer for the BBC. His columns have also appeared in Apple Daily, Next Magazine and CUP Magazine, among others.