The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Can China Mediate An End To The War In Ukraine?

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

We begin today, as we do every Monday, with the latest Covid update and its worrying.  Dr Jason Kindrachuk joins us from Winnipeg.  And then a short excerpt from my conversation at the University of Toronto on Friday with China expert and former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd -- could China mediate an end to the Ukraine war?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Could China be the mediator in Ukraine? And, sorry to even ask this, it is the in Stratford, Ontario. Yes, first day of spring. Great weekend, at least it was in southern Ontario. Nice warm temperatures. And, you know, hints that really we've gotten through winter but have we gotten through covid this is a covid monday and as you know in spite of some thoughts on my part that maybe we

should sort of back off on the covid mondays a lot of you and i mean a lot of you have said, no, no, no, don't you dare back off. Stay with it and keep us updated. So we will. We're actually going to start this Monday off on a COVID note. But I do want you to know that a little later in today's program, we will also be talking to the former prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, who is an acknowledged China expert. He grew up in China. He speaks fluent Mandarin. And he's the global president of the Asia Society.

So he knows of what he speaks. thoughts, his sense of whether China could play a mediator role in ending this awful conflict, this awful war in Ukraine. You see that today the Ukrainians said no to the Russians' attempt to end the war by asking Ukraine to surrender the city of Maripol. the Ukrainians have said, no, we won't do that. So the fighting, the conflict, the war continues. Could China make a difference? We'll ask that of Kevin Rudd. But first we start on COVID because I know you probably not wanted to read these stories and maybe you haven't read them, but they're real. They're out there.

There are parts of the world that are watching a new wave hit. Is it going to come this way? Is it already coming this way? So we reach out as we always do on Mondays to one of our friends in the infectious diseases area. But, you know, this year, finally, and good for them. You know, it's March break in many parts of the country, and has been, and these doctors are humans,

and many have families, and they take a little bit of time off. Good for them. So we've reached out to a new a new expert for this week and i've read his works and i've watched and heard him over the last months he's dr jason kinder chuck in winnipeg he's at the university of manitoba. He's a medical microbiologist, infectious diseases guy. And he has some pretty strong feelings about this. So let's bring him into the program and let's find out just where he is on COVID and the potential for resurgence.

So I don't know whether you watch the Godfather movies, but in Godfather 3, there's that great line by Michael Corleone, Al Pacino. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. And it sounds kind of like what we're facing right now with COVID. For most of us, we thought, okay, we finally passed the big hump and we're clearly on the downslide. Now we're getting these warnings, clearly, problems in Europe and other parts of the world and some indications that we might be facing similar situations here

in Canada. So where are we? Place it in context for us. Where are we on COVID? Well, it's a great question. You know, first of all, that quote is fantastic, right? I think this is exactly where we are. And I've said this so many times during the pandemic. Where are we? So things are certainly, you know, on the upswing from where we were in 2020. You know, certainly with Omicron, we've seen a lot of infections, but we have a very high vaccination rate. That's been very, very good for us. But we also know that Omicron has made its way out to the community. So we've actually been able to either see some bump up of people that were vaccinated that ended up getting infected, or people that didn't get vaccinated

will likely have some immunity from getting infected. So things look different than what they did in 2020. The difficulty is that Omicron is a different beast altogether than what we did in 2020. The difficulty is that Omicron is a different beast altogether than what we faced before. We keep seeing these new variants that emerge that are more transmissible than the last variant, right? So it's kind of like in the Jaws sequels, you know, the shark has inevitably gotten bigger and larger and more steadfast in its mission. Same thing with SARS-CoV-2. So the difficulty for us now is when we think about people that are vaccinated we think about where immunity is in the population it isn't this you

know kind of heterogeneous picture where we can say okay there's 80 percent of people are vaccinated so that means eight out of every ten in my community are vaccinated so we can protect those two out of ten that aren't in fact what we see is that different communities have higher low vaccination rates, depending on a lot of underlying variables. So there's still area for this virus to maneuver in. And I think that's the big question is, what is this going to look like moving forward? We're seeing some bump up, certainly in different countries in Europe right now, as they've moved away from restrictions. I think the big question is going to be, how much bump do we see in regards

to transmission as we loosen restrictions and how high can we go without having to re-implement restrictions to try and gain safe healthcare and ensure the safety of those that are vulnerable. So it continues to be very, very fluid. I think we keep needing to get the messaging out of saying people need to get vaccinated, they need to get their boosters, but they also need to appreciate that from a behavioral standpoint, their behaviors and our individual behaviors still have a massive impact. Regardless of whether or not there are restrictions and mandates, we still can make behavioral

decisions that will help with trying to curb transmission of this virus like what the big thing is this idea about masking right so i know that prior to 2020 you know we certainly we saw people that were masked in public it wasn't common in in our communities i think that is hopefully something that's changed a big part is going to be people you know being cognizant of whether or not they have underlying symptoms moving away from this idea of trying to tough it out. And certainly the prairie perspective of it's just a mild flu. I'll be OK. You know, I can still work. We need to get away from that because we don't necessarily know what those respiratory conditions are.

And at the same time, if we are sick, we need to go out having a mask and wearing it is imperatively important. I think we need to appreciate when we think about vulnerable people in our community, it doesn't fit into this one easy grouping of just people that are over 65. When you start looking at people that are vulnerable, it's a wide range of underlying health conditions, but also socioeconomic conditions, and certainly moving into racialized communities we see a variety of vulnerabilities that are much broader than i think we need to we maybe appreciated in the past so again these behavioral aspects of masking and distancing and and recognition of

symptoms all these things continue to be unbelievably important and we have this, you know, puzzling, puzzling lead. I can't even say the word. It's a puzzle. Why weist, so try to weigh in on social behaviors of people, behavioral behaviors of people. I can only do it from what I've seen in the context of the work that I've done. Part of it, I think, is probably exhaustion. Certainly, we've gone from this idea that, oh, the vaccines are here, hopefully this is the end of the pandemic, to now saying, listen, the pandemic is going to be with us for a while, but the vaccine still help against hospitalization and severe disease. I think there's an exhaustion that builds up when you realize that the thing that you were maybe hoping was going to change the complete nature of the pandemic overnight, in fact, is not able to do that. And to be fair, the vaccines have worked unbelievably well.

They have very much changed the dynamic of what we've seen globally. But we still have the concern with transmission and we still have new variants that are emerging. And of course, it's a global pandemic, so it's not just our communities, it's communities across the globe that are playing a role in this. All this makes it difficult. And I think there's this aspect, once people got that second vaccine, the feeling the feeling that well maybe things are changing in my community i don't know as many people maybe that are getting sick so i can change my behaviors um it's tough to upsell vaccines i wish it wasn't i think we have to do a better job from a science communication standpoint

um but we also have to be transparent with the realities of this virus that um we don't know when it's going to end and predicting when it's going to end is i think a fool's errand we need to basically get people vaccinated and continue to adjust our vaccine schedules based on what we see with the virus did we and i use that term we loosely i guess i really should use the term governments did governments move too fast in starting to pull back on the restrictions starting to leave the clear impression that hey this is done we can start getting back to normal you know i think there's there's a place to occupy in the center on this right so we need to make some move forward certainly the the you know face the pandemic has changed so we have to be able to

start to take some steps forward and loosen restrictions to see what is our buffer zone for being able to go back to normal without giving the virus too much oxygen. The bigger question is, how much can we loosen? And I think that's where, certainly I have some questions, is what are the safeguards or the benchmarks that are in place for us to be able to say, okay, we now are in a place where transmission is increasing we have to you know basically kind of pull the hatches closed a little bit and maybe move back to you know to you know non-pharmaceutical interventions x y and z

to try and keep things curved i think when you open things up completely if you don't have that ability to do broad surveillance in your community, that becomes difficult to assess where the virus is. If you're relying on hospitalizations, well, we know that those are lagging indicators. So transmission's already gone very wide in the community at that point. Now trying to get control of it is going to take a much greater effort. So I think there certainly has been a tendency to maybe move ahead quickly, but I think more so in regards to messaging. I think this idea of living with the virus, I think we've forgot to maybe talk about the idea of learning to live with the virus, which part of this is continuing to learn about the virus. As we've learned about BA2, as we're learning from what we're seeing from our European partners, what we're seeing in other areas of the globe we should be able to learn from those uh from those uh efforts to basically guide what uh what our response is

going to be over the coming weeks and not thinking ahead by months or years and in time but you know it's going to be ugly out there if we try to put a cap back on it i mean even in yeah even in europe in in countries that are facing difficulties right now, they're not doing that. They're not putting the cap back on it. And they're going around like it is done, like it's over. Like we watch every day in the States, you know, whether it's sporting events or big events of any kind. Nobody's wearing masks. I mean, they're just not wearing masks.

Yeah, everybody's moved on, right? It's difficult. I think we get into this perspective of saying what was acceptable in regards to community transmission for COVID. So we have to appreciate we don't know what an annual COVID type of transmission will look like. So when the virus does eventually become endemic, which it probably will, but it doesn't look like it's there yet, what will that look like in regards to morbidity and mortality? We don't know. And that's the difficulty is when we're communicating a gain, trying to say to the public, we need to be risk aware and we need to be precautionary. It's difficult once people have moved ahead, especially when government has already been voicing that.

I think the big thing for us is going to be continuing to try to be transparent with information that we have. And we may not be able to go backwards in regards to re-implementation of a lot of mandates. But if we can continue to try and educate people on behavioral changes and those little things that make a difference, I hope that that in some way will help us get some control over this or keep control and maintain control. Last question. Is this a difficult time to be a doctor in what you're telling us? Because,

you know, you see so much bounce back now and not just by a certain fringe. It's more than that. I just say, don't tell me that that i don't want to hear it anymore it's a difficult time you know i i was in liberia in 2014 worked uh you know still work a lot in west africa um you know we had some pushback on on ebola when we talked about messaging to the communities and and to the public and talked about you know the the vaccines that were coming online we've never seen pushback like this um and I think it's a moment of clarity for the research community. I think what we've learned is that our communication with the public needs to be better. I think that we've spent far too much time in communicating with ourselves and not necessarily talking in a language that was fully transparent

to the public. So we need to do a better job, but it is difficult. Getting a lot of emails and a lot of texts and messages transparent to the public. So we need to do a better job. But it is difficult, you know, getting, you know, getting a lot of emails and a lot of texts and, and messages from people that, that absolutely want to see you fail. And decrying the efforts that you're undertaking to try and protect people. That's difficult, especially over a couple of years time. I think we're starting to see the public come around, I think we're starting to see some protectionism again of the research community. And I think over time, when people realize how big COVID was, and the extent of male, I faced some onslaught, but not nearly as much as my female counterparts or those from different racialized communities. It's been very, very difficult, I think, for many people on that front. And that's outrageous. And let's hope that changes. Dr. Kindrachuk, it's been good to talk to you thanks for doing this

thank you jason kinder chuck dr kinder chuck at the university of manitoba in winnipeg and we thank him for his time today and trying to give us a sense of where we are and where we may be going i know this sounds like it's never going to end it is going to end and it is ending but we're not quite there yet so take the advice wear a mask get your third shot if you haven't had one all right change of topics coming up we're going to take a quick break and then when we come back we're going to talk Ukraine. All right, then. Welcome back.

Peter Mansbridge here in Stratford, Ontario. You're listening to The Bridge on Sirius XM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Wherever you're listening, we're glad you've joined us. So as I said earlier, Ukraine has turned down Russia's surrender offer. Not Russia surrendering. That would be taken up fairly quickly. But Ukraine surrendering, they're not going to do that. And I don't think any of us are that surprised that they are not going to do that.

Here's the challenge. If there's going to be a peace, who's going to mediate it? Who's going to be at the table trying to get the two sides to talk? Who has cred on both sides? Well, a lot of people have suggested that the best person to do this would be president xi of china so we're going to talk about that for a few minutes and we've got the perfect guest to do it with his name's kevin rudd

you ray may remember him from the early 2000s as the Prime Minister of Australia. He's now the global president of the Asia Society, and he is an acknowledged expert on China. He actually grew up in, well, in Taiwan. He knows a lot of Chinese experts who live in China he talks with them regularly and he has his thoughts on the current situation and China's particular role in it

he's convinced that Putin told Xi what he was about to do but also told him that it's going to be over in a couple of days and that has left over in a couple of days. And that has left Xi in a difficult position, because when Putin told him just before the Olympics, Xi came out very much as the absolute 100% ally of Russia in whatever it chose to do. There were no barriers to that friendship, said Xi. Well, Kevin Rudd believes now that, you know, that 100% commitment is probably more like 90% now because the war has not gone well for Russia, and it's awkward for China, to say the least, and they want to find a way out. So could they be the perfect candidates for some form of mediation?

That's the question. So we're going to delve into that. Kevin Rudd spoke on Friday at the Munk School of Global Affairs on public policy at the University of Toronto, and I was lucky enough to interview him at that session. It's available online. You can find it without any trouble. But I wanted to pull an excerpt from that to give you an indication of kind of what his feeling is on this.

So just queuing it up now, you can probably hear me padding for time, and it's somewhere right about here. Is there an exit ramp for Putin that she could create? In other words, could she be the mediator in this? Is that a role he could embrace or not? I think our friends in Europe often sometimes give me the impression of thinking they're pixies at the end of the garden, and that is that here are happy Chinese friends

as a bunch of international citizens always keen to mediate in one dispute or another where they've got good offices. That's not the case at all. And when you've seen recent expressions of a European enthusiasm for Chinese mediation, I think it betrays a deep level of European naivety about the Chinese Marxist-Leninist state and its underpinning national security interests over the last 30 years with the Russian Federation. So, having got that off my chest, let me...

I think I just got called a pixie at the end of the garden. There are good pixies and there are not so good pixies. But it's just for those of us who know the Chinese system well, it ain't their shtick. They will talk about their desired role in a mediation, but on the substantive heavy lifting of being an active, impartial negotiator with equities both in Kiev and in Moscow, if you can't bring yourself as a Chinese state to describe Putin's special military operation

in Ukraine with an invasion, which is still the official Chinese position. But I'm not sure. I would imagine President Zelensky would be soliciting the Chinese to intervene and to put pressure on the Russians and to mediate. But here is my real answer to your question, which is, if the Chinese concluded that Putin was in diabolical trouble, they may seek not so much to rescue Putin's reputation, but to rescue Xi Jinping's reputation at five minutes to midnight by then seeking to become the arbitrator of an outcome. This is something that you've written about and talked about before. I think it was in 2017, you mentioned this, that a major threat to Western nations,

especially when thinking about the rise of Russia and China, is that the West should be more aware of the health of democracies. And quoting you, the fundamental shifting of what democracy is. That was 2017, as the fragility of democracy led to where we find ourselves today in the context of China, Russia, and the invasion of Ukraine. It's very interesting, Peter, when you look at the ideological entrails of the Chinese domestic discourse on America and the West, what they conclude is And thirdly, that the collective West, and more broadly the democratic world beyond the West, has lost its own self-belief in its own civilizational mission.

That's what I read in the Chinese ideological texts, and nerds like me are required to read this stuff, and so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone listening to this program it would destroy your ability to sleep for months on end and but if you go through this stuff the deep analysis of all of us canada australia the united states not just the anglosphere but the democratic world is that our model is failing and that the authoritarian state capitalist model is succeeding. That actually is the internal Marxist-Leninist conclusion.

When you hear Xi Jinping say, we are now entering into a period of unprecedented change, change is not seen yet in an entire century, and we are seeing the rise of the East and the decline of the West. Xi Sheng Xi Jiang. Dong Sheng Xi Jiang, I'm sorry. It's the four-character phrase that they use to describe this. This actually is not just a random statement.

It's the product of dialectical materialist analysis within their system. So we can say, well, that's all commie speak. Well, yeah, but it is their deep view. And then there's a parallel question for us. What is the condition of our democracy? And when I look at any possible upside for what's unfolded in Ukraine, it is this deep, deep awakening on the part of all of us

and the peoples of all of our democracies. There is something we're fighting for here, which are liberal democratic principles. If we look at the history of the world since the Enlightenment, securing these freedoms is really a relatively recent phenomenon, really the last hundred years or so. When did women get the vote in Canada? When did women get the vote in Australia? When did we have a universal franchise? When did we cease having to be fearful of the unfettered powers of monarchs one or two hundred years ago. My argument, and that's probably a speech I gave in Madrid that you're referring to,

is there has to be a democratic reawakening within the democratic world, as opposed to this sort of relativist view that, ah, well, democracies come, political systems go. In other words, that we become so postmodern in our view of ourselves that everything becomes relative. Not in my view, and that's certainly not the Marxist-Leninist view. And I think Ukraine brings this together into a single crucible. I ask the question because for most of us, and I'm sure most of us who are watching this discussion right now, a month ago, we were living in a period of some relative calm.

And, you know, many of us felt, you know, we were kind of past COVID or getting past it. And suddenly things were going to be so much better. And now this has been thrust upon us. We perhaps should have been much more aware that it was coming at us, but suddenly there it was, which leads to this question out of that discussion we just had about whether or not, are we at a hinge point in history here? I know that's an overworked phrase but nevertheless, are we? I'll start again my answer by saying what do the Chinese

think about this? And why do Putin and Xi Jinping bond so deeply on these questions? They talk about this stuff all the time. Driven in large part out of China's own dialectical materialist and historical materialist analysis. I had to reread Marx to understand the way in which these folks think. And their deep conclusion is that we are at such an inflection point. When he says rise of the East, that means rise of China and by extension rise of an authoritarian capitalist

model a state capitalist model um uh and fall of the west decline of the west means the collapse of liberal democracies and liberal democratic capitalism as we've known it and practiced it in our democracies for the last 100, 150 years or more. So that's their perception. Is it valid, which is the other part of your question, Peter? I don't believe so. On the authoritarian side of the ledger, it's very strange how fearsome authoritarian states look from the outside. But once you get on the inside of them,

strength rapidly translates into brittleness. You see, in our systems of political and economic governance in the collective West, for all of our faults, and I could write you an essay on the faults of our respective Canadian and Australian democracies and I've been part of the dramatist persona and sort of the unfolding of those things in my own country. But the bottom line is we've got two sets of flexible, what I describe as automatic stabilisers in our systems. One thing is called elections.

You can kick the bums out so long as the electoral system is fair. Look at the American system. They kicked the bum out. His name was Donald Trump. There was a huge political accident when Trump was elected, and the country, with an overwhelming popular vote and a reasonable electoral college vote, said, hey, we've got to have a correction system.

You have no such system in China or the Russian Federation. And so if you've got a brilliant Chinese emperor, which they've had in the past in the ages of Qianlong and Kangxi and the rest, then the empire prospers. The Chinese also have a tradition of what they describe as bad emperor syndrome as well, where officials are too fearful to provide the emperor with fair and impartial advice on what's going on in the world for fear that they'll lose their heads. The second automatic stabiliser in our systems is markets.

Markets are great stabilisers because they arbitrate price and they bring to life the principles which Adam Smith expounded on a couple of hundred years ago. And so they have their own corrective mechanisms as well through prices and ultimately price through exchange rates. And so, in other words, the automatic stabilisers, both politically and economically within our systems, while imperfect, have a predisposition to self-correct. Authoritarian states rely upon not an invisible hand to do that,

but the hand of numero uno. And I don't know anyone bright enough to be numero uno who can do that effectively without ultimately creating a massive, massive reaction. Here's my last question before I ask you to kind of sum up your thoughts on this day. And my question was partly in some of the questions I saw from the audience, which is about information

and about, more specifically, misinformation. And the question is about China. What does China rely on in terms of information on this story, on the Ukraine story right now? Do they rely on Putin's version of events, or do they rely on the events that the rest of us in the world are not just hearing, we're seeing, we're witnessing it on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis.

What are the Chinese beliefs? The Chinese Communist Party has a 100-year-long history of dealing with Moscow. The party was founded in 1921. It was run by the Comintern out of Moscow, really until Mao asserted his own authority over the party and over the Comintern in the period 1935 to 1942. And if you read the long-released internal documents of the period, it's quite fascinating to see how distrustful the Chinese Communist Party were of the Ruskies way back then in terms of actually telling them the absolute truth. They still had a comradely relationship and they still, as it were, managed a common program for revolutions in China and around the world.

But did they actually trust what the Russians said as a matter of face value? No, not at all. So the idea that the Chinese system would sit back and take everything that Vlad says as gospel, I think, stretches the truth. I think what I will say about the Chinese diplomatic apparatus is that it's highly sophisticated, and their analytical community in Beijing is strong.

They will have, prior to the Ukraine crisis arising, a system there would have at least 500 to 1,000 Russia experts across multiple think tanks. So their ability to, as it were, read everything in the Russian literature in Russian and reach their own discernment as it were, read everything in the Russian literature, in Russian, and reach their own discernment as to what's actually going on, I think is real. I think the other source of information is their own intelligence gathering. They've got the Ministry of State Security, which is probably as formidable as the FSB,

and the Russian External Service in terms of intelligence gathering. Not as sophisticated as the CIA or MI6, but they're out there gathering stuff. And then there's good old CNN, which is what's the media saying, even though we'll rail against what the media says on a daily basis. If you roll into the Ministry of Propaganda in Beijing, I'm confident they'll have the usual wall full of television screens with CNN, BBC, and the rest to see what the hell's being said around the world about what's going on. Then it's synthesis.

How do you pull this together? So it's multiple sources. Reminds me of the day I was in Tariq Aziz's office in Baghdad just before the bombs fell in 2003. And his most reliable source of information was on the monitor he had in his office, which was on CNN, which, of course, was banned in Iraq at the time. Well, there we go. An excerpt from my conversation with Kevin Rudd, China expert, former Prime Minister of Australia. As I said, it was just a short excerpt from an hour-long conversation

that I had with some questions from the audience as well. There were people tuned in. It was a Zoom conversation, literally from around the world. And so some of their questions were put to Kevin Rudd as well. Fascinating conversation. I hope you have a chance to listen to more of it. You can find it at the Munk School website, no problem. All right.

Here's one last thing on Putin because Putin is the puzzle in this, right? As you can tell. How do we figure this guy out and what kind of state of mind is the puzzle in this, right? As you can tell. How do we figure this guy out? And what kind of state of mind is he actually in? I found this really telling. Over the weekend, the president of Belarus, which is basically the only country that is supporting Russia in an active way, was questioned about Putin.

He's met with him a number of times over the last month, talks to him, I assume, almost every day. The very fact this question was put to him, and then even more so that he answered it, tells you something. The question was, is Putin sane? And the Belarusian president answered the question. He said, hey, I mean, I'm transpilating here and taking a little liberty with the inflection,

but he said, hey, Putin is completely sane. He's in better shape than ever. It just seems to me, can you imagine like somebody saying, Churchill, oh yeah, Churchill, he's completely sane. I don't know. One assumed the response probably should have been, are you crazy? Are you crazy?

What a stupid question. And move on. But no, he played the game. All right, that's going to wrap it up. Tomorrow is a very special day. Brian Stewart in on Tuesdays, as he has been for the last almost a month now, pointing us in the direction of looking at this conflict, this war, this battle, in ways we haven't thought of before.

And he's been great. Just last week, remember, he talked about we're entering the mud season? Guess what everybody's talking about now as of this weekend? Hey, they're entering the mud season. So we look to Brian for that kind of sense of where things, the direction things are going. That's one. And two, a fabulous conversation with the author,

Canadian war historian, Margaret Macmillan. She's in England. She teaches at Oxford and the University of Toronto. And we talked yesterday afternoon, and I'm going to run the whole conversation in about 20 minutes and it's really, really interesting. So you don't want to miss that. Wednesday, good talk.

Sorry, Friday is good talk. Wednesday is Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Friday is with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce. So lots coming up through the week. You have thoughts, give a shout out at the email for the podcast, The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. All right, that's it for this Monday. Happy opening day of spring. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.