A Uyghur Advocate's Warning to Mark Carney: Canada Is on "a Suicide Mission," and Beijing's Hidden Hand Reaches Into Western Media

“I wonder how many people that Mark Carney has around him that’s actually working for China": Rushan Abbas, Campaign for Uyghurs

OTTAWA/ISTANBUL — On June 12, Dr. Gulshan Abbas turns 64. She will mark the birthday, as she has marked the last seven, inside a Chinese prison — serving a 20-year sentence her family says was manufactured to punish her sister for speaking out.

That sister, Rushan Abbas, co-founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, joined the Bureau Podcast from Istanbul this week to discuss her memoir, Unbroken, and to deliver a blunt warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney: Canada is walking the same road the United States walked decades ago and only really corrected course over the past decade.

Ottawa, she said, is taking “the whole of Canada to a suicide mission,” its deepening engagement with Beijing a direct threat to Canadian sovereignty and national security. “This is not just the story of the Uyghurs anymore. This is the future of the justice and democracy, and the sovereignty of individual nations,” Abbas said. “So I have to continuously speak.”

Among her most arresting claims was that Beijing now operates in the background of much of the proxy clandestine operations worldwide, as well as media influence shaping opinion across the West, in order to fulfill Beijing’s plan to supplant the Western democratic order — a strategy she said she recognized at once, because she was raised inside it.

Beijing’s goal, she said, is to replace the international order the democracies built over the past 70 years with one of its own — and it advances that goal through allies and surrogates. Running through Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran’s arming of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, North Korea’s provocations, and the troublemaking of Cuba and Venezuela, she returned each time to the same refrain: “China’s behind that.” While those proxies sow chaos abroad, she said, “China itself, Beijing, is very effectively implementing their proxies, their people, their spies to everywhere.”

And Canada is in grave danger, she said, not only of losing its sovereignty, but of becoming a tool in Beijing’s global operations:

“I was born, raised and educated in my homeland in the Uyghur region. And when I was growing up, they used to brainwash us every Wednesday afternoon,” Abbas recalled.

“We were subject to political studies. And at that time, the Chinese party officials used to say it very clearly that the Chinese people were subject to humiliation in the last century — China’s century of humiliation. But they used to declare that this century is the century of retaliation, retaliation against the West, retaliation against the white people. So without realizing, Canada is playing a part of China’s retaliation against the freedom and democracy. The Chinese government is using our democratic systems, our social media platforms and the politicians — Canadian politicians, Canadian journalists, Canadian academia — to spread China’s ideological ideas and, basically, jeopardizing Canada’s future.”

Her most precise criticisms concerned the recent conduct of a sitting Canadian parliamentarian. Liberal member of Parliament Michael Ma’s combative questioning of the China expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, Abbas said, was indistinguishable from a Chinese government performance.

“I felt like I was listening to a Chinese official speaking,” she said, likening his tone to Beijing’s most aggressive diplomats and calling it “straight out of China’s playbook” to dismiss documented evidence of Uyghur forced labor.

Abbas placed Ma’s conduct alongside the guilty plea of a Southern California mayor who admitted to acting on Beijing’s behalf — an official who, she noted, had promoted a fake Chinese news outlet denying abuses in the Uyghur region. Both, she said, are “just the tip of the iceberg.” She predicted that the scale of Chinese infiltration inside Western governments — Canada’s among them — will soon be exposed. “How many more out there that we don’t know?” she asked. “I wonder how many people that Mark Carney has around him that’s actually working for China.”

That prediction carried an implicit nod to investigations advancing in Washington, where, she said, opposition to Beijing is now one of the few things uniting a fractured Congress.