About China: "Canadians need to talk about what's happening under our noses."

Ten years after Beijing insinuated itself into the World Trade Organization, Chinese corporate monopolies and crony-capitalist empires still enjoy protectionist tariffs and anti-competition laws that have rendered the whole idea of liberalized global trade a sick joke. The racket has engorged Chinese industrial barons with the booty of a sixfold increase in Chinese exports that have cost millions of North American workers their jobs and transformed what was an already fraudulent "socialism with Chinese characteristics" into an increasingly vile regime.

Fully half of China's billion citizens subsist on sub-Saharan incomes of less than $2 a day, and they're growing increasingly impatient with the corruption, oppression and persecution that has accompanied the stuffing of Beijing's foreign-reserves treasury.

But the dozens of unelected billionaires who now dominate the People's Congress that pretends to be a parliament have decided they will not put up with backchat from Chinese patriots and essayists or with "mass incidents" of the kind that broke out in Wukan and Haimen. Over the past five years, Congress deputies have doubled military spending, adding to a vast and growing security, surveillance and prisoncomplex apparatus with an annual budget that now hovers in the neighbourhood of $200 billion.

By all the evidence, this suits Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade just fine.

Well, it doesn't suit my disposition at all. The above is from my column in the Ottawa Citizen.

The situation is more dire than you might think. None other than Anthony Campbell, former head of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat in the PCO during the 1990s, has this to say about my column: "The servility of Canada's political leaders (municipal, provincial and federal) to the obvious manipulations of Chinese strategists who flaunt world trade and financial market principles and jail democracy-promoting authors for 10-year terms is a national disgrace.Canada is not a parking lot for Chinese (or American) resources and our complicity with what Glavin rightly describes as "a rigged game" orchestrated by this "increasingly vile regime" in Beijing needs to end. Canadians need to talk about what's happening under our noses and Glavin's piece is a very good starting point."

The column is indeed just a starting point. Stay tuned. It will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. We may start with this. We'll see.

Here's an informed view of how the Year of the Dragon will unfold:

Money started to leave the country in October and Beijing's foreign reserves have been shrinking since September. . . there were 280,000 "mass incidents" last year according to one count -- but that they are also increasingly violent as the recent wave of uprisings, insurrections, rampages and bombings suggest. The Communist Party, unable to mediate social discontent, has chosen to step-up repression to levels not seen in two decades. The authorities have, for instance, blanketed the country's cities and villages with police and armed troops and stepped up monitoring of virtually all forms of communication and the media. It's no wonder that, in online surveys, "control" and "restrict" were voted the country's most popular words for 2011. . . the Chinese government could dissolve like the autocracies in Tunisia and Egypt."

Keep an eye on my pal Mark Collins at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs' Institute's 3D blog. You'll thank me later. Meantime, below is the Chinese human rights activist Ni Yulan, showing up in court after being beaten by police. The trial began with Ni lying on a cot in the courtroom, relying on an oxygen machine. She faces charges of "picking quarrels and making trouble."