Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday at a summit in South Korea, where he intends to talk about “a much broader set of issues than trade.”
The leaders of Canada and China haven’t met formally since former prime minister Justin Trudeau visited China in 2017. One year later, the Canada-China relationship fell apart after Canada arrested a Chinese telecom executive at the request of the United States, and China responded by detaining two Canadian men, detentions Canada said were arbitrary.
Xi angrily confronted Trudeau at the G20 summit in 2022 and claimed his government was leaking information to media.
Here’s a look at what might be on the agenda for this week’s meeting:
Last October, Canada followed the lead of the Biden administration in the U.S. and imposed a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles and other goods, alleging unfair competition.
China responded with tariffs of its own on Canadian canola products, seafood and pork products. China’s ambassador in Ottawa has said Beijing would drop these tariffs if Ottawa drops its electric vehicle levies. Some premiers have urged Carney to do just that, while Ontario has argued the measures are needed to help the auto sector navigate a green transition and American trade pressure.
The leaders are likely to discuss overall economic ties, including China’s imports of Canadian oil amid a trade war with the U.S. and efforts to boost the number of direct flights between the two countries.
In September, Carney said Canada could “engage deeply” with China on energy and basic manufacturing, adding Beijing is “very sincere and engaged” on climate change because it’s “a country run by engineers.”
China is one of the world’s largest emitters but is also a leading source of clean technology. It partnered with Canada to host a United Nations biodiversity summit in Montreal in 2022, despite the heightened diplomatic tensions between Canada and China at the time.
In January, a federal inquiry declared that “China is the most active perpetrator of foreign interference targeting Canada’s democratic institutions” at all levels.
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The inquiry report said Beijing “poses the most sophisticated and active cyber threat to Canada” and CSIS says China “increasingly uses social media and the internet for disinformation campaigns involving elections.” During an election debate in April, Carney called China “the biggest security threat” facing Canada.
China has rejected these claims, saying they lack clear evidence and echo tropes about Chinese people as malicious actors.
Parliament passed a bill in June 2024 allowing for the creation of a foreign influence transparency registry to identify proxies working for other countries. Carney’s government has not yet taken steps to introduce this registry.
China executed four Canadian citizens in early 2025. Beijing said at the time all four were dual citizens and had been rightfully prosecuted on drug charges.
Abbotsford, B.C. native Robert Schellenberg has been on death row in China since 2019. Ottawa has called his sentence for drug smuggling arbitrary.
Opposition parties have urged the federal Liberals to grant honorary citizenship to Jimmy Lai, a prominent publisher detained under Hong Kong’s sweeping national security law.
In 2018, Beijing imprisoned Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, two Canadian citizens, and held them for more than 1,000 days — the duration of Canada’s house arrest of Huawei executive
Meng Wanzhou who was wanted by American authorities over fraud allegations. In 2021, Canada launched an “arbitrary detention initiative” aimed at rallying countries against hostage diplomacy.
China has repeatedly reminded Canada of its “One China” policy, which holds that Beijing is the only representative of China and that Taiwan is not a country. Canada has still deepened business ties and security co-operation with the island.
Ottawa participates in naval exercises in the Taiwan Strait meant to signal the area remains international territory — exercises which particularly annoy Beijing. Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand has said while engagement with Taiwan is not going to end, Canada still adheres to its One China policy.
China calls itself a near-Arctic state and the country looks to develop shipping routes and natural resources in the region. “China is also active in Arctic research, much of which can be considered dual use … having both research and military application,” says the Arctic foreign policy document Canada released last December
The document says “Canada will co-operate with China to address pressing global issues — such as climate change — that have impacts on the Arctic,” but will carefully weigh any requests from China to do research in Canadian waters.
Anand recently declared China to be a strategic partner of Canada, three years after the government’s Indo-Pacific strategy branded Beijing as a “disruptive global power” whose values don’t align with Canada.
Anand said the purpose of this shift is to build a framework for dialogue with China, including on key issues where the two countries disagree.
Carney said this week that he and Xi will discuss “the evolution of the global system.” That might include discussion of efforts to end gridlock at the United Nations and to make it more reflective of the world’s population, or reforms to how developing countries take on debt to finance climate resilience projects.
Both leaders say they want to uphold the rules-based order and international trading system, though each country has a vastly different understanding of what that means.
China’s foreign ministry says Beijing wants to build ties with Canada through “mutual respect.”
“Although the two countries have different systems and development paths, they always share extensive common interests and a broad space for co-operation,” Beijing’s foreign ministry wrote in an Oct. 17 summary of Anand’s visit with her counterpart.
“China is ready to strengthen communication with Canada, enhance understanding, overcome disruptions, rebuild mutual trust, and improve bilateral relations with a forward-looking spirit.”
Carney is also expected to visit China in a year’s time when the country hosts the next APEC summit, a meeting that has almost always included the sitting Canadian prime minister over the past three decades.
