Should Canada and the US trade with China?

With all the civil rights abused in China, should the Canada and the US be trading with them? In the view of one side, we should not trade with China because of these abused rights. It is thought that if we stop all trade with them, we will have an impact on their economy and they will at least cut down on their civil rights abuses in order to regain our trade and economy. But the view of the other side believes that if we keep trade with China, we can have an impact on their abuses through political pressure. Which side is correct?

It is argued that trade with China is not helping the to eliminate their abuse on civil rights, rather supporting them because we are not penalizing them for their abuses, only doing what they want, investing money into their economy. The question could be raised is about how important trade with China is to our economy, and with China being twenty five percent of the worlds population, it is a very big market, and we gain plenty from this market, so how can we afford to miss out on this market. So how does trading with China help to eliminate the civil rights abuse?

When our Priminister or the United States' president go to China to talk about trade issues or to have other political meetings, they also plan their trip to include talking to China about their civil rights abuse. This is one way that we can put political pressure on China. This leaves us with the question of weather or not these talks actually accomplish any thing. After all, when we talk to them about the abuse instead of pulling out some of the investments in their economy, do they just listen and tell us what we want to hear for the time, or do these talks effect them?

Say we were to think that pulling our trade and investments out of China would impact them, it defiantly would, and surly would hurt their economy and make them think about decreasing if not eliminating the civil rights abuses so that they could once again have our investments so their economy could grow at high rates and become profitable. If we were to do this though, we would be totally isolating ourselves form China, we would not have any idea about what the civil rights were like, because the only contact with China, would be with it's rulers, and the rulers would not tell us about any civil rights abuse. We would then also have almost no influence on China, the only influence would be that if they want our trade and investments back into their economy, they would have to at minium, decrease the abuse of civil rights.

You may wonder what these civil rights abuses are, and one of the most resent and well known one is Tian'an Men Square square. There was a protest by thousands of students. The protest was by prodemocracy students and was peaceful. The Chinees decided to end the protest by sending in troops to halt the protest, hundreds of unarmed protesters were kill and over ten thousand more were injured and hundreds more were jailed. All of this was just for peacefully protesting a pro- democratic government.