Right,Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Chapter 15, by Dave Jaffe

   The Enemy of China- by Dave Jaffe: PartThree.
 

     The People's Republic of China that Dorothy Pride was intent on changing for the better surely didn't stand out as a shining example of respect for human rights. Most power was concentrated in the hands of the Communist Party whose leader Xi Jinping made most of the important decisions affecting his Chinese subjects. Every year at least 1,000 people were execute for crimes. The government often sold off people's organs without their consent. Close to 450 Chinese villages and towns were terribly polluted and many people in these places died of cancer.
    The Chinese government in the past 60 years had probably killed over one million Tibetan people. It had also persecuted Moslems in the region of Xinjiang. Meanwhile it threw millions  of farmers off their lands to make way for factories and industrial plants. Many Chinese had rioted in reaction to these top-down decisions. "There were 6,000 disturbances in China last year," Pride said in the first decade of the 21st century.
     Pride deluged the Chinese government with requests to let many Chinese political prisoner go free. She clashed with one Canadian Member of Parliament who had refused to help one man's family when they requested that this M.P. help get their family member out of a Chinese prison. She crossed swords with the American dissident Noam Chomsky. "Are you an agent of the C.I.A?" Chomsky asked her. Pride denied this and had no time for Chomsky. She also criticized other M.P.'s for not working hard enough.
    In any case Pride had found an enemy to confront and tangle with. Not all the people who didn't like China's government agreed with what she was doing. "I'm not in favour of writing letters or sending e-mails to overseas countries," said Rodger, a British Columbian who lived on Vancouver Island. "I think you should start changing things at home."
     Dorothy Pride surely didn't agree with this opinion. Her energies may have been misplaced but you can't ignore her commitment. "The Chinese government is terrible," she said. "I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to bring it down."