Mr. Charles Burton

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  www.olympicjournal.ca/?feed=rss2 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 8/20/2008    Last Visited: 8/21/2008  

  Charles Burton is a graduate of the History of Ancient Chinese Thought Program of the Philosophy Department at Fudan University and former diplomat at Canada's Embassy to China who now teaches at Brock University

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  www.embassymag.ca/html/index.php?display=tp&tp_date=121 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 8/6/2008    Last Visited: 8/24/2008  

  Charles Burton, a political science professor and China specialist at Brock University, said he thinks the embassy is concerned with the "color commentary of foreign broadcasts not being consistent with official Chinese government messaging."
  
  "They would prefer to show the depiction of the Olympic opening ceremony as that of Central Chinese Television, which is answerable to Chinese Communist Party Central Committee through [the] propaganda [department] for all its content rather than have commentary done by Peter Mansbridge and the CBC team," he said.
  
  Touchy issues the Chinese want to avoid mentioning are issues of human rights and freedom of expression, he said, as well as "references to the Tiananmen incident, Tibetans or Uighurs, that sort of things."
  ...
  Mr. Burton said that, on the whole, China has not lived up to the commitments it made to greater openness when it was awarded the Olympics.
  
  "The idea was that the Olympics would lead to greater opening of China, and China would comply more with international norms with regards to human rights and social issues," he said.
  ...
  Assuming, as did Professor Charles Burton, that Mr. Harper would be personally uncomfortable in appearing with senior leaders of China, somehow revealing on his part a sanctioning of all internal and external Chinese policy, fails the test of logic and diplomacy.
  ...
  If Canada is currently low on the Chinese radar, as asserted by Professor Burton, it is now rapidly sinking below the horizon.

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  www.uyghurcongress.com/En/news.asp?ItemID=-1970806405&p - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 6/17/2006    Last Visited: 11/1/2007  

  The assessment, commissioned by the Foreign Affairs Department and completed this spring, was conducted by Brock University political scientist Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat who participated in several of the annual discussions.
  
  His report found that many officials in both countries have mounting concerns about the process, seeing it as ineffective and largely a propaganda exercise.
  
  The dialogue was launched in 1997 as part of an agreement between the two countries when Canada decided not to co-sponsor a resolution about Chinese rights violations at the United Nations human-rights commission in Geneva.It is an annual event, usually lasting one or two days, in which Canadian and Chinese officials discuss an agenda of human-rights issues.
  
  In his report, Mr. Burton found that much of the dialogue consists of a prepared script, read by Chinese Foreign Ministry officials and repeated at meetings with other countries.The content of the script is well known in advance and of little interest to either side, he said.
  
  Canadian officials are concerned that there is "little connection" between the talks and the situation on the ground in China, he said.Moreover, the Chinese government is less committed to the talks, dragging its feet on arrangements, downgrading its delegation, and reducing staff in its human-rights division, he said in his report.
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  "It's very hard to identify progress on human rights as a result of this dialogue," Mr. Burton said in an interview.
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  "What I found most unexpected was the high degree of dissatisfaction among the Chinese ministries," Mr. Burton said in the interview.
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  Canadian rights activists agree with many of the concerns in Mr. Burton's report.

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  www.torch.org/2001.htm - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 3/31/2001    Last Visited: 3/14/2007  

  Professor Charles Burton, PhD, and former Counsellor, Canada's Embassy in Beijing, "Canada and China"

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  uyghurcanadian.org/smf/index.php?topic=2462.0 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 6/11/2007    Last Visited: 7/7/2007  

  The Chinese Foreign Ministry officials made the proposal at a meeting in September of 2005, with a Canadian embassy official in attendance, according to Charles Burton, a political scientist and former Canadian diplomat who was also at the meeting.
  
  Mr. Burton briefly mentioned the incident in the public version of his government-commissioned report on the annual human-rights dialogue between Canada and China.But some details of the Chinese proposal were censored from the public version at the insistence of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs.
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  At the meeting in 2005, during Mr. Burton's study of the dialogue, the Chinese diplomats said they could allow participation by these groups and more discussion of sensitive issues if Canada made "goodwill gestures" such as a $60,000 donation to an impoverished county in Yunnan province or Canadian-financed scholarships and sabbaticals at Canadian universities for Chinese officials, Mr. Burton said.
  
  He said the Chinese diplomats made a "clear and explicit connection" between the request for Canadian financial aid and the offer of concessions on the agenda and participation in the dialogue.
  
  Canadian rights group are outraged at the request.
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  In his report last year, Mr. Burton concluded that the annual human-rights review is ineffective and plagued by "pervasive cynicism."Most of the dialogue is scripted in advance and supervised by Chinese bureaucrats who have no involvement in human-rights issues, he found.

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  www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/08/06/f-china-risebg.html - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 8/6/2008    Last Visited: 8/7/2008  

  Charles Burton of Brock University in St. Catherines, Ont., says hosting the Olympics could in the long term make China more dangerously nationalistic.
  
  "It could embolden [China] to try to reassert what's seen as its natural role in international affairs, the role it occupied over 1,000 years when it was militarily and politically dominant in the world," Burton says.

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  www.bodgyalo.com/new_page_43.htm - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 4/9/2004    Last Visited: 5/4/2004  

  That's how Tony Blair handled it, said Charles Burton, a China specialist and former Canadian diplomat to Beijing.
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  U.S. President George W. Bush has also seen him, "without making any kinds of claims about the capacity in which" they were meeting, said Burton, who teaches at Brock University.
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  "I think in terms of a calculation of Canada's national interest, it's probably perceived as not being a benefit to us to do that, in the sense it would lead to diplomatic protest by the Chinese and it's largely a symbolic matter," Burton said.

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  www.embassymag.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_pat - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 8/6/2008    Last Visited: 8/24/2008  

  Charles Burton, a political science professor and China specialist at Brock University, said he thinks the embassy is concerned with the "color commentary of foreign broadcasts not being consistent with official Chinese government messaging."
  
  "They would prefer to show the depiction of the Olympic opening ceremony as that of Central Chinese Television, which is answerable to Chinese Communist Party Central Committee through [the] propaganda [department] for all its content rather than have commentary done by Peter Mansbridge and the CBC team," he said.
  
  Touchy issues the Chinese want to avoid mentioning are issues of human rights and freedom of expression, he said, as well as "references to the Tiananmen incident, Tibetans or Uighurs, that sort of things."
  ...
  Mr. Burton said that, on the whole, China has not lived up to the commitments it made to greater openness when it was awarded the Olympics.
  
  "The idea was that the Olympics would lead to greater opening of China, and China would comply more with international norms with regards to human rights and social issues," he said.

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  www.kurtismccartney.com/rss.xml - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 7/15/2008    Last Visited: 9/7/2008  

  Charles Burton of Brock University offers Rise of China, a media rich exploration into Chinese Political and Social culture and its recent evolution.This includes a deeper canadian perspective on the development as he is an active part of the political process. Prof.

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  www.cbc.ca/news/background/dalailama/ - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 3/18/2008    Last Visited: 3/19/2008  

  "Tibet in those days was a land in a pre-rational state," says Professor Charles Burton, a China specialist at Ontario's Brock University, "There wasn't much of a sense of nationhood, and someone from China, or British India, who showed up in Lhasa with a treaty, they were just apt to sign it for their own purposes."
  
  Mao stamps down hard
  
  Contemporary Chinese policy towards Tibet, Burton says, is firmly anchored in the historical notion that Lhasa has been subservient to Beijing for most of the last millennium.
  
  The 20th century has been particularly tough on Tibetan aspirations for independence and recognition as a modern nation-state.
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  With the 2008 Summer Olympics coming up in Beijing, opponents of Chinese rule in Tibet see a golden opportunity to put their cause to the world, according to Professor Charles Burton.But he's not hopeful they'll succeed.
  
  "The [Olympic] games will embolden elements in China who want to make us aware of their plight," says Burton, "and the Chinese have promised to address Human Rights concerns as part of the package of getting the Olympics.

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