By Stephen Nagy for Inside Policy

Beijing understands what many Canadians still resist: that our greatest national virtues, including our desire to be an “honest broker” on the world stage, have become our most exploitable weaknesses.

On December 1, 2018, RCMP officers arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at Vancouver International Airport. As Canadians know well, within days, China seized two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, on fabricated espionage charges. For 1,019 days, they endured arbitrary detention while Canada faced an impossible choice of abandoning the rule-of-law or watching its citizens suffer in Chinese prisons.

This was hostage diplomacy. But more insidiously, it was also the opening move in a broader campaign against Canada, guided by the ancient Chinese proverb “借刀杀人” (Jiè dāo shā rén), or “Kill with a borrowed knife.” Beijing’s strategy, like the proverb, exploits others to do its bidding while remaining at arm’s length. In this case, it seeks to exploit Canadian vulnerabilities such as our resource-dependent economy, our multicultural identity, our loosely governed Arctic territories, and our naïve belief that we can balance relationships with all major powers – even when those powers are in direct conflict with one another.

With its “borrowed knife” campaign, Beijing understands what many Canadians still resist: that our greatest national virtues, including our desire to be an “honest broker” on the world stage, have become our most exploitable weaknesses.

The Weaponization of Canadian Niceness

Canadian foreign policy rests on the Pearsonian tradition. It is the belief that our lack of imperial history and (now irrelevant) middle-power status uniquely positions us as neutral mediators. We pride ourselves on sending peacekeepers, not warfighters. We build bridges through dialogue and compromise.

Beijing exploited this subjective, imagined identity. When Canada arrested Meng pursuant to our extradition treaty with the United States, Chinese state media framed it as Canada “choosing sides” and betraying its honest broker role. This narrative trapped Canadian political culture. Our mythology says we transcend conflicts through enlightened multilateralism. But the modern world increasingly demands choosing sides.

When former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and former Ambassador John McCallum advocated releasing Meng to free the “Two Michaels,” they weren’t acting as Chinese agents. They were expressing a genuinely Canadian impulse that conflict resolves through compromise. Yet this “Canadian solution” was precisely what Beijing sought, abandoning legal principles under pressure.

China’s economic coercion has followed a similar logic. When Beijing blocked Canadian canola, pork, and beef exports – targeting worth $2.7 billion worth of Prairie agricultural products – the timing was transparently political. However, China maintained the fiction of “quality concerns,” making it extremely difficult for Canada to challenge the restrictions via the World Trade Organization. At the same time, Prairie farmers pressured Ottawa to accommodate Beijing.

The borrowed knife was Canadian democratic debate itself, turned against Canadian interests. Beijing didn’t need to directly change policy, it mobilized Canadian farmers, business lobbies, and opposition politicians to do it instead.

The Arctic: Where Mythology Meets Reality

No dimension better illustrates China’s strategy than the Arctic. Canada claims sovereignty over vast northern territories while fielding six icebreakers to Russia’s forty. We conduct summer sovereignty operations that leave territories ungoverned for nine months annually. Chinese state-owned enterprises invest in Arctic mining, Chinese research vessels map Canadian waters, and Beijing now calls itself a “near-Arctic state,” a term appearing nowhere in international law.

This campaign weaponizes the gap between Canadian mythology and capacity. When China proposes infrastructure investment, our reflex is “economic opportunity.” When Chinese researchers request Arctic access, our instinct is accommodation because we’re co-operative multilateralists. Each accommodation establishes precedent, each precedent normalizes Chinese presence, and each normalized presence constrains future Canadian options.

Climate change accelerates these dynamics. As ice melts, the Northwest Passage becomes navigable. Canada insists these are internal waters. China maintains they’re international straits allowing passage. The scenario exposes Canada’s dilemma perfectly. Does Ottawa escalate against our second-largest trading partner over waters we cannot patrol, or accept Chinese transits as fait accompli? Either choice represents failure.

The Diaspora Dilemma

Canada’s multiculturalism represents perhaps our deepest national pride. The Chinese Communist Party has systematically weaponized this openness through United Front Work Department operations, an ostensibly independent community organization that provides genuine services while advancing Beijing’s agenda including: monitoring dissidents, mobilizing Chinese-Canadians for CCP-approved candidates, organizing counter-protests against Tibetan and Uyghur activists, and creating environments where criticism of Beijing risks community ostracism and threats to relatives in China.

The establishment of illegal Chinese police stations in Toronto and Vancouver represents this operation’s logical endpoint. These “overseas service centres” conducted intimidation operations, pressured targets to return to China, and maintained surveillance on diaspora communities.

Canada’s response illuminates our vulnerability. When investigations exposed how Chinese organized crime groups, operating with apparent CCP protection, laundered billions through Vancouver real estate while financing fentanyl trafficking, initial reactions accused investigators of anti-Chinese bias. When CSIS warned that MPs might be compromised, debate focused on whether the warning represented racial profiling rather than whether compromise occurred.

Beijing engineered this trap brilliantly. Legitimate criticism of CCP operations becomes conflated with anti-Chinese racism. Our commitment to multiculturalism gets inverted into paralysis when a foreign government exploits ethnic networks for political warfare. The borrowed knife is Canadian anti-racism, wielded against Canadian sovereignty and this leaves nearly two million Chinese-Canadians under a cloud of suspicion while actual operations continue with limited interference.

What Resistance Requires

Resisting comprehensive pressure demands abandoning comfortable myths and making hard choices.

First, recognize that 21st-century middle-power independence is increasingly fictional. The global order is re-polarizing. Canada cannot maintain equidistant relationships with Washington and Beijing during strategic competition. We can trade with China, but not pretend shared rhetoric outweighs fundamental disagreements about sovereignty and human rights. The Pearsonian honest-broker role is obsolete when major powers want you to choose sides.

Second, invest in sovereignty capacity, not just claims. Sovereignty is exercised or forfeited. This requires sustained investment in military forces, intelligence services, law enforcement, and Arctic infrastructure. It means higher defence spending, more robust counterintelligence, and stricter foreign investment screening, traditionally un-Canadian approaches, which is precisely why we need them.

Third, build coalitions with countries facing similar pressures. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Lithuania, and others have faced comparable campaigns. When China simultaneously blocks Canadian canola, Australian wine, and Lithuanian dairy, that’s not separate trade disputes but a pattern requiring coordinated democratic response. The borrowed knife only works when we’re isolated.

Fourth, Ottawa must do much more to protect diaspora communities while confronting foreign operations. Effective policy must shut down United Front operations and illegal police stations while ensuring actions don’t stigmatize communities. Success requires clear communication that we’re targeting a foreign government’s operations, not an ethnic community.

Finally, we must accept the necessity of selective economic diversification. Critical infrastructure, sensitive technologies, and strategic resources cannot be integrated with an authoritarian state weaponizing interdependence. This means higher costs and reduced export opportunities – but maximum efficiency sometimes conflicts with strategic resilience. Canada can achieve this objective with a synergistic relationship with the US and other allies and partners that understand the tangential link between economic security and national security.

Conclusion

Canada’s myths, that we transcend conflicts, that multiculturalism creates only strength, that resource wealth brings pure prosperity and positivity, coupled with our deep vein of light-but-arrogant anti-Americanism, have become exploitable weaknesses. Beijing systematically tested each myth and used the gap between self-conception and reality as leverage.

The borrowed knife strategy works because we keep handing over the knife. Our openness becomes the vector for interference. Our trade dependence becomes the lever for coercion. Our niceness prevents us from recognizing we’re under attack.

Resistance doesn’t require abandoning Canadian values. It requires understanding that defending them demands costs we’ve historically refused to pay. The Chinese “Middle Kingdom” that tells the world it has had 5,000 years of peaceful history has entered a world that doesn’t reward peaceability, it exploits it. The question is whether we’ll recognize the borrowed knife for what it is and put it down before we bleed out from self-inflicted wounds.

Stephen R. Nagy is a professor of politics and international studies at the International Christian University in Tokyo and a senior fellow and China Project lead at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI). The title for his forthcoming monograph is “Japan as a Middle Power State: Navigating Ideological and Systemic Divides.”