Commentary by Mata Press Service

If you are judged by the company you keep, then Prime Minister Paul Martin has friends in some very low places.

Hu Jintao

The B.C. stop, planned for Sept. 17, will cap Hu's first visit to North America since he became president of the world's most populous country in 2003.

Martin and his "federal sources" have been feeding the media with comments about how great this visit is going to be for B.C.

It will highlight B.C.'s role in Canada's efforts to forge strong links with its second-largest trading partner, said a government official.

Another piped that Vancouver offers North America's closest major deep-water port and international airport to China.

What is being glossed over and hidden is the fact that Hu ranks as one of the worldHs worst dictators alongside the likes of his friends Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Than Shwe of Burma and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Let's help you to get to know Hu, the man who oversees the gross human rights violations in a pariah regime.

Hu the son of a family of Shanghai tea merchants, was always the class monitor through school, says his biographer Ma Ling, a Beijing journalist whose book is published only in Hong Kong and Taiwan and not mainland China.

He seems to have attracted powerful mentors since, first at Beijing's elite technological university Tsinghua, where he studied to be a hydro-electric engineer, and then inside the party.

Over 12 years, he rose steadily to important jobs in Gansu's economic planning agency, before a patron pulled him back to Beijing where he quickly became head of the Communist Youth League and then a provincial party secretary in impoverished Guizhou in China's south-west.

In 1988, Hu was transferred to run Tibet as party secretary, and by the time he arrived in Lhasa the city was erupting as Tibetans rebelled against Chinese rule.

Hu Jintao (right) with Jiang Zemin

Around the same time, the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing were broken up by troops. Between 1,000 and 2,600 protesters were killed. Terrorists did not kill them; their own government did.

The Chinese government later confirmed that over 2,500 demonstrators had been arrested, though other estimates were as high as 4,000. Beijing has still not accounted for those killed, injured or imprisoned.

Hu was among the first communist provincial secretaries to express support for the crackdown on the Tiananmen democracy movement.

The People's Republic of China, led by the benign looking Hu, has an appalling human rights record.

It tortures and ill-treats prisoners.

It conducts more executions than all other countries combined.

It carries out forced abortions and sterilisations on women.

It continues to persecute the people of Tibet.

It tramples on the rights of political activists.

It represses the rights of workers and stops people freely expressing their religious and spiritual beliefs.

So what does our leader of a thriving democracy do

He rolls out the red carpet for the leader of an evil regime.

Amnesty International reported that China executed more people than all other countries combined. Estimates range as high as 20,000 executions per year.

A US Congress human rights committee has heard evidence of the horrifying practice of organ harvesting from executed prisoners.

Skin, corneas, kidneys and other tissues were harvested and sold for profit. Now China is deliberately cloning human embryos to experiment on them.

Apparently there's good news on executions in China, according to an Australian report.

The Chinese Government's official Human Rights magazine offers the reassurance that "the transition from firing squad to lethal injection means the elevation of the degree of human civilisation and social progress." Lethal injection apparently can reduce "the psychological and physiological pains added to the condemned in the deprivation of life. This is no doubt a respect for human rights." Go figure.

China carries out violence against women through the most barbaric population control policy in the world. Forced sterilisation, forced abortion, forced fitting of IUDs, female foeticide and infanticide and sex selection are the result.

According to Chinese Government statistics, 230,000 Chinese citizens are incarcerated in re-education-through-labour camps. China has 20 high-security psychiatric hospitals run by the Ministry of Public Security. A number of dissidents are jailed in these hospitals.

Martin and his Liberal predecessors have always been lured by China's might and money telling Canadians it is better to engage the dragon in constructive relations to serve the national security interests of both nations.

Canada, or at least Ottawa believes that its relationship with Beijing can help political reform in China.

But the efforts to befriend Beijing is actually emboldening the likes of Hu who is leading the charge of an increasingly active Chinese diplomatic campaign aimed at protecting some of the globe's most repressive regimes.

Recently Hu welcomed Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe to Beijing with full honors.

A UN report said Mugabe's controversial slum demolition campaign has been carried out in "an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering"; UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called it a "catastrophic injustice" to the poor people of Zimbabwe.

Hu on the other hand, expressed confidence in Mugabe's ability to handle this "internal affair."

Maybe Martin can rationalize this when he feasts over west coast salmon with Hu.

Or perhaps Martin would like to ask Hu why he responded to the carnage in Uzbekistan by inviting its president, Islam Karimov, to Beijing for a 21-gun salute in May, within two weeks of the Andijan massacre, when soldiers killed hundreds of Uzbek protesters.

One suggestion for a dessert conversation could be why China is systematically blocking stronger United Nations Security Council action against the genocidal government in Sudan and preventing the Security Council from discussing North Korea's flagrant violation of international nuclear and human rights norms.

When Hu was being touted as the supreme leader of China a few years ago, many thought he would be a force for reform.

But the real Hu emerged shortly after his elevation to be China's top dog.

Since the spring of 2003, freedom of expression has been on the ropes in China.

Newspapers have been shut down, editors, journalists and Internet dissidents have been imprisoned, lawyers have had their licenses temporarily revoked, and intellectuals have come under attack.

Chinese intellectuals now openly admit they misread China's new helmsman as Hu the reformer. In fact, they say the political situation is the worst in years.

In January, Hu launched an 18-month campaign to "maintain the advanced nature of Chinese Communist Party members", which will allow him to put his own people into positions of power.

The campaign has people in ministries, factories and schools across China sitting down for regular study and self-criticism sessions.

Jing Huang of the Brookings Institute said the campaign of reshuffling, study and self-criticism is aimed at cementing Hu's position at the top of the party. "This is really to show who the leader is," he said.

"If you refuse to recognize the big boss, you're out. It's a loyalty campaign."

Martin wants Canadians to believe that his dinner and drinks session with Hu in Vancouver will encourage reforms and boost democracy in China.

What he refuses to realize is that Hu's mandate is not to end the repressive dictatorial regime of the Chinese Communist Party.

Hu's goal is to make it stronger.

And to do this, he has a friend in Paul Martin.

For related story, see Has Canada's legal system been corrupted by China?