There is a great deal of hand-wringing in the business press that Chinese Premier Wei Jiabao's very public and very rare rebuke of Prime Minister Stephen Harper today has been bad for business or that it will cost us business.

Globe and Mail columnist Brian Milner writes, for example, that the rebuke "serves as a stark reminder that in the post-global-meltdown world, China, more than ever, rules the economic roost. And that there is a price to pay for ignoring that fact, however much we might abhor the wretched human rights record of the thin-skinned Communist leadership."

Really?

Here are the stats on the value of Canada-China trade. In 2007, two-way trade between the two countries was up 13 per cent. In 2008, two-way trade was up 11 per cent. In the first six months of this year, two-way trade is up by about 3 per cent -- despite a recession. Those are good numbers no matter what way you slice it. Ignoring China, if you look at those numbers, has certainly not been bad for business. Could it be better? Sure. But it ain't been headed for the dumper.

The tourism industry, one must concede, has to reason to moan because while 134 other countries in the world have "approved destination status" from China -- which makes it super-easy for Chinese tourists to travel to those destinations and, without which, it makes it illegal for Canadian tour operators to even advertise in China - Canada is just getting its ADS now. But wait: It was Liberal governments of a decade ago that first negotiated ADS. Why here's David Emerson, then the LIberal international trade minister in Paul Martin's government, celebrating such a deal -- in 2005. And Harper gets criticized by the Chinese for not getting things done? With all due respect, Premier Wen, when you rebuke our prime minister, you rebuke all 30 million of us - Liberal, Conservative, or NDP -- whether we voted for Harper or not.

Canadians are a polite and patient people, Premier Wen, and we have some tremendous social problems of our own that we are labouring to resolve. We do that in a messy, noisy way called democracy. You don't, buddy.

And, by the way, when are you going to pull your spies out of our country? Those spies are costing us a billion dollars a month! Frankly, that ticks me off that you send your security agents into a country that's stood by you for 40 years.

Now, I don't want readers of this blog to mistake this for an apology for the current Conservative government or an attack on earlier Liberal governments. Because I'm privileged to live in a country that values an independent press, I'm lucky enough to put a question or two from time to time to my prime minister -- Conservative or Liberal -- that might make that prime minister a bit uncomfortable. This is instead, a response, to an unwarranted slight on the government of my country, of Canada, by a country that, it seems to me, has no moral grounds for such a public rebuke of the prime minister of all 30 million of us.

We have the natural resources China's economy craves. We have the financial talent the country needs. Indeed, the state-owned China Daily today [I'm afraid I can't find the link] reported that headhunters from here have been dispatched today to Bay Street to recruit talent from Canadian financial services firm. Why? Probably because our banks have been rated the best in the world.

What about other Western powers? Do you think the Americans can talk tough to China on human rights? ABC News today said Premier Wen is among the 10 most influential individuals in the world on the U.S. economy -- and the only non-American -- because China holds so much American debt. Draw your own conclusions about America's ability to talk tough to China. China holds no such sway over Canada -- a credit, largely, to Liberal governments for their fiscal prudence and discipline. (Prudence and discipline which the current government, frankly, has imperiled but that's an argument for another time.) So who in the West is going to call a spade a spade in China? One of its best frends -- Canada -- that's who.

Canada has had diplomatic relations with China for -- let me check --- why 40 years now! No other Western country can say that. As former Liberal foreign affairs minister Pierre Pettigrew noted today, even the arch-Conservative John Diefenbaker shipped wheat to China when that country was starving in the 50s. Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stuck with China in the 1970s when everyone else in the West would demonize the country. Canadian newspapers were among the first to put their journalists here. And the current prime minister, Stephen Harper, has been a strong advocate for supplanting (or supplementing) the G8 with the G20, precisely because he wanted China at the table.

Canada does this because of the 1.2 million Canadians who have origins in this country and because Canada has generally believed that engagement is the best way to achieve social and political change in China.

And yet, when our prime minister travels thousands of kilometres to visit, his Chinese hosts have the gall to embarrass him in a very public way. I'll tell you something, Premier Wen: There'd be no end of the howling from the media and the opposition in Canada if a Canadian prime minister acted that way toward a guest. It's just not done where we're from.

Harper, to his credit, was polite and respectful to the Chinese in public and, in private, I am told, reminded both President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen that their record on human rights leaves much to be desired. China, let me remind you, still refuses to let independent human rights workers into its country.

Is China improving on that score? Is it ready to join the community of nations that, like Canada, subjects itself to scrutiny on human rights and faces up to whatever defects it might find? I'll let Alex Neve, the secretary general of Amnesty International Canada answer that:

"You could point to some areas of improvement but there’s so many other things that have deteriorated in that time,” Neve told me before I left for Beijing. In the last decade, there has been “the whole relentless campaign against Falun Gong. It’s within that 10-year-period we saw the unbelievably harsh crackdowns last year in Tibet and this year against the Uygher people. It’s in that 10-year-timeframe, we’ve seen the Internet suppression really take off. At the same time, it’s within that timeframe that there have been perhaps very modest steps forward in improving how the death penalty is handled in China. There has been a very encouraging growth in a domestic human rights community, of activists and researchers and human rights lawyers. That’s good news and that’s very encouraging. The flip side is, they have also been under siege. They have been targeted for harassment, imprisonment, mistreatment. Some have had to flee the country.”

Way to go China. Five years may be too long for a Canadian leader to come over and say hi but it's definitely too long for you and your colleagues to come to Canada and see what a success we've made of our plurastic, democratic society.

In the words of Liberal MP Bob Rae, "Seems to me we just have to keep on trying to persuade them that liberty is the better way. It's something we believe in and something we should share with them."