BC’s most visible foreign diplomat has left her post after nearly five years. Consul General of the People’s Republic of China Tong Xiaoling said goodbye on July 28 in Vancouver, where she was the 13th person to hold the position, in a letter published in Chinese on the consulate’s Chinese website. “Although the international situation is constantly changing and the relationship between the two countries has had ups and downs, it cannot change the historical trend of peaceful cooperation, nor the pragmatic logic of local exchanges,” Tong wrote in the letter, translated into English. “I wish the friendly cooperation between the consular district and China will continue to achieve fruitful results.” Tong also thanked “the vast number of overseas Chinese for building bridges for China-Canada friendship and contributing to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Beijing-born Tong, 60, arrived in Vancouver in late November 2017. She was previously China’s ambassador to Brunei and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and deputy commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong. The consulate’s media office has not responded to questions about Tong’s replacement or her next career path. “The fact that her posting was extended for an unusually long period of five years suggests that the Chinese Communist Party felt that her work performance advanced China’s agenda very well in the Vancouver area,” said Charles Burton, a former diplomat at the embassy. of Canada in Beijing. and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute think-tank. A little more than a year after Tong arrived, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested at Vancouver International Airport on a warrant for fraud in the United States. This began a nearly three-year period in which Vancouver and the Chinese consulate were at the forefront or in the background of international and domestic geopolitical intrigue and turmoil. Tong often publicly demanded Meng’s release and criticized the Canadian government, which was bound by the terms of Canada’s extradition treaty with the US. He sometimes attended extradition hearings in court and delivered gifts to Meng’s residences while pro-state media watched. In early 2020, when the coronavirus broke out in Wuhan, Tong asked the Province newspaper to apologize for using the words “Chinese virus” in a headline. Meanwhile, the consulate has been involved in exporting bulk shipments of personal protective equipment to China and equipping Chinese students with masks and gloves at universities in the Lower Mainland. After Canada’s supplies ran out, Tong helped organize a donation to BC hospitals from sister province Guangdong. Tong was often photographed with municipal, provincial and federal politicians trying to maintain ties with China, despite the kidnapping of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, an international diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics and Xi Jinping’s alliance with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Tong’s tenure also included coordinating local celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the founding of modern China by dictator Mao Zedong in 2019, the centenary of the CCP in 2021 and Beijing in 2022. The consulate became a lightning rod for protests by groups demanding from China to release the Two Michaels, free Uighur Muslims imprisoned in Xinjiang, and to stop the crackdown on human rights in Hong Kong. Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West led the boycott of Tong’s cocktail party at the Union of BC Municipalities conference in 2019. UBCM voted to ban foreign government lobbying events at future conferences. Last November, Tong attacked Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart over a proposed “friendship city” deal with Taiwan’s third-largest city, Kaohsiung. Earlier in 2021, Stewart had indefinitely canceled all meetings with Chinese government officials after former colleague and Conservative MP Michael Chong was among Canadians sanctioned by China in retaliation for sanctions aimed at condemning the Uighur genocide . In late May, Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents warned Stewart that the upcoming general election could be a target for Chinese government interference. Despite the controversy, Burton said Tong was “extremely effective” in promoting the political goals of China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) foreign influence program. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s 2020 report called the UFWD the “export of the CCP’s political system” that undermines social cohesion, exacerbates racial tension, influences politics, damages media integrity, facilitates espionage and increases the transfer of technology without supervision. “Her departure is probably something we would welcome as this kind of work engagement of people, particularly of Chinese descent, who have Canadian citizenship, is not really consistent with normal diplomatic operations,” Barton said. “So one hopes that we will see someone come into the job who is more diplomatically oriented in his mandate as consul general, like other consuls general in Vancouver, rather than someone who has such an overtly political role in seeking to divert the loyalty of Canadians to a foreign country, that is China.” Burton wondered if Tong’s next post would be diplomatic or somewhere else in the Communist Party regime. “It will be interesting to watch where her career goes from here,” he said. The Chinese consulate website also includes a photo of NDP Energy Minister Bruce Ralston presenting Tong with a BC government plaque on the deck outside the Canada Place cabinet office. Ralston is the cabinet liaison to BC’s foreign diplomatic corps. He did not post a version of this photo on his Twitter account, as he usually does when meeting, greeting or saying goodbye to a diplomat.
