Former Canadian ambassador to the UN, Paul Heinbecker, speaks to Yahoo! about Harper’s trip to China

Stephen Harper leads a delegation to China, this week, hoping to build economic ties with the middle kingdom - a relationship he once avoided because of the Chinese government's human rights abuses.

Yahoo! Canada News spoke to Paul Heinbecker, formerly Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, Monday, about Harper's trip and his new approach to Canada-China relations.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Yahoo!: What is your opinion about Canada's approach to China? It seems to be trade focused and Mr. Harper seems to have moved away from his tough stance on China's human rights abuses.

Heinbecker: What I think we're seeing is a more mature approach — and I welcome it — I think it's an overdue strategic approach that he's taken. [It's] better late than never.

These are complex relationships. [China] is a major reality in the world and you ignore the Chinese at your own cost.

Yahoo!: Should Mr. Harper be voicing Canada's concerns about China's human rights record?

Heinbecker: Absolutely.

If you can establish relationships with people so your criticism is not coming out of the blue and it does look gratuitous; if you can show a degree of empathy; if you try to understand the size and depth of the problems that the Chinese government has to deal with then your advice might be welcomed.

[On the other hand], if you take the position that the Chinese are a bunch of communists and they're incorrigible and need to be scorned and shunned by the international community then you're not going to get very far with them.

Yahoo!: What about the Syria 'issue.' How should Mr. Harper's government approach the Chinese government for their decision to, with Russia, veto a UN resolution pressing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to abandon power?

Heinbecker: The prime minister is going to have to deal with the issue at some level. Perhaps he'll have [foreign affairs minister John] Baird do it or maybe he'll do it himself.

I find [China's] position even more disappointing than the Russians because I don't expect much from the Russians.

But the Chinese are the future — the Russians are the past in some sense. And it's hard for me to say to you why the Chinese would have [blocked the UN resolution].

Maybe they were doing the Russians a favour so that they werent' completely isolated. I don't know.

But in a situation like this where Assad is behaving as brutally as he's behaving, it's grotesque for the Russian and Chinese governments to try and take the view that the world has no interest in what he's doing.

I guess there's something of a Tiananmen Square factor here. The Chinese are seeing what has happened in Egypt, what's happened in Libya, and what's happened in Tunisia - maybe they think if this keeps on going, one day it will come back to China.

(Reuters photo)