Career diplomat Jennifer May has officially taken on the role of Canada’s new ambassador to China.
May was seen presenting credentials to Chinese leader Xi Jinping during an official ceremony held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, according to photos posted on the official Twitter account of the Canadian Embassy in China on April 28.
May was appointed Canadian ambassador to China in September 2022, succeeding Dominic Barton, whose departure left Canada without an ambassador for more than a year.
Barton left the position months after Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were released after being arbitrarily detained by Beijing for over 1,000 days. Their incarceration was widely interpreted as “hostage diplomacy” by the Chinese regime in retaliation for the arrest of Huawei CEO Meng Wanzhou by Canadian authorities on a U.S. extradition warrant.
Just a month after Kovrig and Spavor returned to Canada in September 2021, Barton advocated for further business investment in China in an interview with the Chinese state mouthpiece, Global Times. Barton had also done business with China as senior management for McKinsey & Company, a U.S. multinational consulting firm that
has drawn controversy for its dealings with the Chinese Communist Party.
John McCallum, Barton’s predecessor as Canada’s envoy to China,
also came under fire for providing legal arguments in defence of Meng while speaking to reporters from Chinese-language media outlets. Subsequently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
asked him to resign in January 2019.
Pledges to Raise Human Rights Concerns
Upon being appointed to her new role, May said she will not shy away from criticizing the communist regime’s human rights violations.
“There’s a lot of other human rights issues that we have concerns about, whether it’s Falun Gong, whether it’s Christians, whether it’s a situation of people in Tibet,” she told
the Toronto Star on Sept. 22, 2022, when asked about the abuse of Uyghurs in China’s western province of Xinjiang.
More recently,
she echoed the concerns for Chinese human rights lawyers Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, who were dealt heavy sentences of more than a decade each by Chinese authorities last month. Xu and Ding are prominent members of a citizens’ movement that seeks China’s peaceful transition to constitutionalism. They were arrested for attending a gathering with 20 other rights activists in China in 2019.
May began her career in public service in 1990 with the Department of External Affairs. Prior to her role as envoy to China, she served as Canadian ambassador to Brazil in 2019. May has also served at a number of Canadian missions abroad, including in Bangkok, Beijing, Bonn, Hong Kong, and Vienna, according to her profile on the Government of Canada website.
