China does not have the moral fibre to take America’s place on the world stage

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Mellissa Fung is a journalist and author, whose most recent book is The Last Mandarin, with Louise Penny.

In January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called it as he saw it: The post-war international rules-based order is crumbling.

Long-time allies are scrambling to realign, rebuild and redirect away from the U.S., which has quickly shown that it can no longer be trusted to be a reliable partner. In his second term, Donald Trump has turned the United States inward, retreating from climate agreements, defunding international institutions, and abandoning the mantle of global leadership – and, what’s more, actively stoking conflict.

And in response to this shift, America’s former allies are increasingly casting their lots east. A parade of leaders, including Mr. Carney, have made the pilgrimage to Beijing this year to strengthen economic and political ties with China. And China says it is ready to fill that vacuum. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was unsparing – if carefully indirect – when he declared that the international system’s failures lay with a “certain country” that sought to “magnify differences and disagreements, put itself above everyone else, stoke bloc confrontation and even revive the Cold War mentality.” Mr. Wang then outlined his country’s Five-Year Plan for economic and social development, positioning China as “a staunch force for peace … a reliable force for stability … and a progressive force in history."

China has been preparing for this moment for years. Its Belt and Road Initiative now spans 150 countries. It is the undisputed world leader in renewable energy, making more solar panels than the rest of the world combined, and in electric vehicles, producing two out of every three EVs worldwide. Beijing has mostly sat back and watched as new wars and conflicts broke out, but has advocated for a two-state solution in Gaza, peace talks in Ukraine, and the need for state sovereignty in Venezuela.

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But leadership also means ensuring your people have equal rights, particularly women. At the 2025 Global Women’s Summit in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a US$10-million donation to UN Women, with an additional US$100-million for international projects promoting women and girls to the South-South Cooperation Fund, stepping in to fill a void created by Washington’s retreat. There, Mr. Xi spoke eloquently on the need to press for women’s rights. “Statistics show that globally, over 600 million women and girls are still mired in war and conflict,” he said. “Around 10 per cent of women and girls are trapped in extreme poverty. At the same time, deep-rooted problems such as violence and discrimination still persist, the gender digital divide is widening, and equality between men and women remains a lofty yet arduous task.”

He’s right. But the gap between his rhetoric and the reality is impossible to reconcile. And if China fails to close that gap, it will never truly be able to lead the world.

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“The Chinese government has been continuing to issue these pleasant-sounding pledges and promises, from protecting social economic rights, gender equality, and so on,” Maya Wang, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, tells me. “But these promises are really empty promises.”

Decades after Mao Zedong said that “women hold up half the sky,” in a bid to encourage women to join the work force during the Cultural Revolution, a nascent women’s rights movement emerged in China in the early 2010s. Young college-educated women organized nationwide campaigns against sexual harassment and gender discrimination. But after Mr. Xi consolidated power in 2012, he began to restrict independent women’s groups, censor online discussions about gender equality, and shut down feminist platforms.

In 2015, his government arrested a group of women now called the “Feminist Five,” in the middle of the night two days before International Women’s Day, as they prepared to hand out pamphlets about sexual harassment on public transit. They were charged with disturbing public order, despite having disturbed nothing, and held for 37 days. Mr. Xi would go on to co-host a UN summit on women’s rights in New York later that year.

In 2016, amid low birth rates and a severe gender imbalance, with an estimated 30 million more males than females in the country, Mr. Xi loosened the one-child policy that caused many of those issues; five years later, all restrictions were removed. And in 2023, Mr. Xi declared – to the women delegates of the National Women’s Congress, no less – that China needed to return to a more “traditional” culture, in which women focused more on marriage and child-rearing. Scholars describe this as an aggressive campaign to revive Confucian ideals of motherhood and wifehood, framing women’s rights as subordinate to state goals. The current politburo, introduced in 2022, includes no women for the first time since 1997.

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The problems Mr. Xi highlighted at the Global Women’s Summit – extreme poverty, violence, and discrimination – are often most acute in rural China, and the 2022 case of the “chained woman” put that on dramatic display. When Xiao Huamei was discovered leashed by her neck in a dilapidated shed outside her home in Jiangsu province, local authorities appeared to defend her husband’s actions. It was only after weeks of sustained public outrage and pressure within China that an investigation revealed that she was indeed a victim of human trafficking and years of abuse.

While organizing remained nearly impossible, it reawakened women in China to the fact that equality is still very much a dream. “When I speak with Chinese women, they talk about the government,” Ms. Wang said. “They talk about censorship and democracy in quite a strident way. And they are not as afraid as I think the general population is.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine women will truly be able to speak up for their rights, when you consider the case of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai. In November, 2021, she accused former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli of pressuring her into sex. Beijing responded by scrubbing her post within a half-hour and blocking her name from social-media search results before Ms. Peng herself vanished from public view.

In response, the Women’s Tennis Association suspended every tournament in China, walking away from one of its most lucrative and growing markets. At the time, Michael Caster, co-founder of the human rights watchdog group Safeguard Defenders, which monitors disappearances in China, noted that the organization had “more credibility … than Interpol” in confronting Chinese abuses. Yet within two years, even with Ms. Peng’s whereabouts remaining unclear, the WTA’s resolve gave out, and play resumed in Beijing. If a tennis tour’s conscience has a shelf life shorter than China’s patience, one wonders how much longer a trading partner’s can last.

It is incumbent upon countries seeking closer economic ties with China to press Mr. Xi on human rights broadly. Certainly, countries have tried to do so in the past – including Canada, which joined several other countries in a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, only to be dismissed with contempt. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian characterized the move as interfering with the Games “out of ideological prejudice and based on lies and rumours.”

But despite Beijing’s understanding that it has significant leverage in this moment of global disruption, a united front of pressure would challenge Mr. Xi’s long-standing policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other nations. This doctrine in itself limits China’s ability to step into leading superpower status. After all, economic power alone does not make a global leader; leadership also requires a willingness to confront injustice and the moral courage to defend fundamental human rights, even when doing so carries political or economic costs.

The U.S. showed that. Pax Americana was flawed and unevenly applied, and it was typically in service of American interests, but the U.S.’s efforts to improve conditions in the world more broadly earned it crucial credibility among other countries. The U.S.-led Women, Peace and Security Agenda brought women into peacemaking, and the now-defunct USAID, despite its controversial population-control measures in Africa, put a spotlight on issues like maternal health and gender-based violence.

To be clear, none of this is an argument against engaging with China. Economic diversification is more than prudent; it is urgent. But engagement is not the same as endorsement. Canada can and should strengthen its trade ties with China, while being clear-eyed – instead of actively blind – about its failings.