Beijing's Ministry of State Security media links in British Columbia
Former RCMP analyst unspools media web spawned by charismatic Chinese spy
By John Kennedy for The Bureau
With the travel I’d done as a writer, translator and human rights activist in China, after returning to Vancouver, it took a full two years to advance through the RCMP’s hiring process and join the force’s E-Division as a Mandarin analyst.
My patience came from a sense of duty.
I wanted to serve the country that raised me as a permanent ward of the court —commonly known as a foster kid — but also to eventually resurface information collected from my involvement in Chinese dissident circles.
My mission was patriotic and personal — to inform my fellow citizens of China’s Ministry of State Security’s (MSS) contribution to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) political warfare against Canada, an effort I began online in 2018 under a pseudonym.
This was a calculated plan.
I believed my open-source intelligence might assist — or at least prompt – RCMP to investigate the infiltration of Canada’s Western border that my trained eyes could see in broad daylight.
That training was somewhat serendipitous. And in a sense what happened still fills me with regret. As a young Canadian mastering Mandarin in Guangzhou, I encountered an extraordinary MSS officer, disguised as a proto-democracy blogger. Only in hindsight did it become clear that YANG Hengjun (杨恒均) was very likely tasked to infiltrate Western media, and his path went through me.
My efforts with the RCMP didn’t turn out as hoped.
I purposely disclosed to the force my anonymous, online project of exposing China’s brazen United Front Work Department (UFWD) networks, in my mandatory security clearance application.
I wanted to believe that Canada’s federal government would pick up the trail. Others, including the French Military, eventually did. Later, I also shared my work with CSIS, who valued my collection and analysis.
And yet, as we are told, the RCMP and CSIS operate in parallel worlds. But the RCMP could have, and I argue should have, acted on the information I lay out below. Something in Canada needs to change, starting with the laws, or rather lack of laws, regulating investigation and prosecution of foreign interference.
In any case, my time with the RCMP was short.
I joined in the spring of 2020 and left in the fall. My husband and I, like so many other families trying to get a real estate foothold in Vancouver, were pushed to migrate to a more affordable province. As The Bureau’s Sam Cooper has demonstrated in recent years, Canada's housing affordability crisis is, no doubt, partially attributable to CCP-abetted financial activity, including money laundering.
So this is my story. Optimistically, it will resonate in Ottawa with the honest politicians that want to protect our democracy. It will certainly illustrate the befuddling sophistication of Beijing’s networks in Canada, and spotlight actors in a covert takeover of Chinese media in Canada, thatThe Bureau’s reports have only started to explain.
But getting into the nitty gritty details of YANG Hengjun’s legacy MSS network in British Columbia and its relentless engulfing of Canadian politicians, requires a bit more backstory.
Fatal Weakness
By 2007, five years into my time in Guangzhou, things were going well — by everyday Canadian standards, not the China Dream sort that has corrupted our political culture for several decades. I’d found my own path to journalism, I’d nearly mastered Chinese, and my ex-boyfriend’s flat in semi-rural north Panyu was the perfect place to work from home for the website Global Voices Online.
It was the golden age of blogging: everyday dissidents had just discovered each other, news bloggers went where foreign correspondents didn’t, and the annual Chinese Blogger Conference, or CNBloggerCon, was born.
CNBloggerCon grew in the space created through Beijing’s efforts to lure in Silicon Valley — we organized around the strict narrative of pure business activity, and if free speech happened that was the cost of keeping the Venture Capitalists engaged.
My translation efforts had progressed from migrant worker poets like Zheng Xiaoqiong, mostly soft dissident content, through the Lower Body school, to an amateurish attempt to translate a spy novel, Fatal Weakness, that was trending at the time.
Fatal Weakness is a story not about how small things, like tax evasion, can bring down a cartel, but of a rogue Ministry of State Security officer who aspires and inspires, through various manipulations, to pit the United States and China against each other, and in the end, save the day for his bosses back home.
The novel was written by YANG Hengjun, a fast-rising blogger that seemed to embrace the budding movement of free expression.
I turned my mind to his novel and published my work episodically. He noticed and reached out. Here are a few lines he wrote to describe what followed.
“A netizen friend sent me mail to recommend a Guangzhou blogger known as Feng37. He said that this was an interesting website which contains translations from my novel Fatal Weakness. I went there and I found that the quality of translation was extremely good … We agreed to meet in front of the Yuxiu Library … I walked around once and then I noted a tall white young man leaning on the railing with a Chinese newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other hand … So this Chinese-language blogger Feng37 was an authentic young Canadian man!”
YANG Hengjun and I hit it off, but as it turned out, I couldn’t translate fast enough for him. He pushed and pestered, and later in 2007 I quit Fatal Weakness.
But not before introducing YANG to the tight-knit community of bloggers and journalists in Guangzhou and another circle of colleagues and friends involved with CNBloggerCon.
With regret that plagues me today, it’s more accurate to say that I was YANG Hengjun’s entry point to those two circles. Fast forward to summer of 2008.
A few of us drove with YANG to dine at an exclusive restaurant. For some reason, he decided to flash his MSS badge to get us through the compound gates.
I didn’t really understand what it represented at the time. He wasn't People's Liberation Army or anything quite so jarring. Regardless, YANG Hengjun wasn’t the writer he claimed to be.
Some of us immediately broke off contact. But others rode his coat-tails to influencer status, in the Chinese Communist Party’s subtly manipulated blogging-for-profit space. A monetization of personal expression that may cautiously approach, but never crosses CCP red-lines. And so small fortunes accrue to lucky writers who are boosted by Red Algorithms.
That golden era of writing in China faded for me, and a rejected visa application in early 2012 left me stranded in Hong Kong, where over the next three years I worked first for South China Morning Post and then Amnesty International's East Asia office.
In December 2014, I was startled to see YANG Hengjun materialize again, this time in Vancouver, leading a global network of pro-CCP media influencers, from an outfit called the International New Media Cooperation Organization.
INMCO (国际新媒体合作组织) from its founding dinner in a Beijing restaurant on December 11, 2014, had as its explicit mission to answer Xi Jinping’s ethno-nationalist call (“聚焦全球华人,弘扬中华文化;让世界了解中国,助中国走向世界”) a full decade before that mission appeared in the 20th report to the CCP’s National Congress.
Aligned with Xi Jinping from its initial announcement and, comprised mostly of pro-CCP media organizations, INMCO surprised few with its mission statement: to use the power of media to repay the motherland, is both the glorious and difficult mission of overseas Chinese (“如能通过媒体的力量报效祖国,这是海外华人光荣而艰巨的任务”).
Canadians among INMCO’s founding executives included the publisher of West Vancouver-based World Chinese Weekly (where YANG Hengjun worked), Zhang Hui (张辉), and MA Zaixin, reportedly a former China Daily editor linked in his own right to MSS.
Other founders were Phoenix TV senior reporter Kevin Zu Keqin (祖克勤), singer Edward Ye Hongtao (叶洪涛), and Respon president Winnie Liao (廖子蔚) who, just a few months later, funded INMCO’s first major project.
Politicians and Chinese Canadian Media
Some well-informed readers of The Bureau, or the Canadian broadsheet Globe and Mail, will recognize names like Winnie Liao. Be assured these names are widely known in Chinese Canadian circles.
Winnie Liao gained wider prominence as the Trudeau fundraising powerhouse implicated in ‘cash for access’ scandals since 2016.
But she is arguably better known in the English-speaking world by way of her daughter Lucy who, in February 2021, fled the country immediately after a murder for which she was charged.
The mother often goes in English by the name Winnie Hong Wei Liao, helps the Liberal Party of Canada bring in up to $120,000 an event, and in this 2011 self-published interview refers to her husband Leo Li Hong (李洪) as a ganbu (干部), or Chinese Communist Party member.
YANG Hengjun, meanwhile, was detained in Guangzhou in January 2019 by his former employer, later formally charged with espionage.
His life and travels have the Escher print complexity one would expect of a spy working under media cover. Did he get flipped by ASIO while living in Australia, or go off on an entrepreneurial tangent with insufficiently patriotic underworld figures, and anger the wrong people in Beijing? We don’t know.
What we do know, is that YANG Hengjun’s INMCO deputy Zhang Hui, was also held for several months by the MSS in Guangzhou around January 2019, before eventually returning to Vancouver.
This is all publicly available information.
I will suggest again, this information – in combination with some of the connections I have outlined – the RCMP should be using, for investigations into CCP political warfare efforts.
Hundreds of Canadian Chinese-language media workers have travelled to China over the past two decades for propaganda indoctrination at meetings led and funded by the CCP. These meetings included attendees like YANG Hengjun.
One of these Chinese Canadian media persons is former BC Liberal Minister Teresa Wat (屈洁冰) who, as president and CEO of Mainstream Broadcasting Corporation, attended the 4th Forum on the Global Chinese Language Media in 2007, as well as the the 5th Forum (alongside INMCO co-founder Zhang Hui) in Shanghai in 2009, and the 6th Forum in Chongqing in 2011.
Why does this matter? The Forum is convened by the CCP's United Front Work Department.
Wat went on in 2013 to serve as BC’s Minister of International Trade and Minister Responsible for the Asia Pacific Strategy and Multiculturalism (and is now Shadow Minister for Multiculturalism, Anti-Racism Initiatives.)
This followed her time as news director for Channel M Television — since rebranded as OMNI BC.
OMNI also employed Vancouver pro-CCP circle thought leader DING Guo (丁果), who is currently a close advisor to Premier David Eby.
DING Guo attended the 2nd, 3rd and — along with Wat — the 5th and 6th annual Global Chinese Language Media Forum, as well as the 7th alongside MA Zaixin, the MSS-linked news editor mentioned above.
I’m suggesting the activity of this CCP-run global propaganda Forum, under a new Foreign Agent Registry Act, could arguably spur dozens of investigations involving hundreds of past attendees that are active in Canadian media and politics.
With respect to individuals examined here and what this has to do with Canada: Wat in 2014 formed B.C.’s instrumental Legacy Initiatives Advisory Council; DING Guo, as part of his larger body of work explicitly following Xi Jinping’s call to tell the China story well, was later appointed to the board of Vancouver’s Chinese Canadian Museum.
Wat, who remains an officeholder in British Columbia, has enacted Xi’s propaganda directive in numerous ways best represented by the March 2019 press conference in Vancouver for a marathon to drum up support for the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Between these two select Forum veterans — DING Guo and Teresa Wat — one gains a clear view of what this CCP media initiative’s long-term outcomes are.
And where their activities in Canada become CCP propaganda, Wat and DING’s OMNI BC alma mater is among the various CCP-aligned Forum media that assist.
An eye on Wat also leads to RCMP criminal investigation facesThe Bureau’s readers will recognize from key events like the opening of the China Hui club in Vancouver and at least one event at the Warrior Fighting Dream boxing gym in Richmond, B.C.
And DING Guo, prolific and conspicuous in his CCP links, intersects with INMCO — by way of its co-founder Zhang Hui — in a way that introduces event sponsor Shenglin Financial (咸氏金融) and its founder Xian Shenglin (咸生林).
MSS-linked media and Trudeau Cash-for-Access
The INMCO circle really expands on May 3, 2015, when YANG Hengjun, with citizenship in Australia and a daigou racket in New York City, hands his MSS legacy network over to funder Xian Shenglin — who, with Respon’s Winnie Liao, was introduced to English-readers in Canada, in relation to the 2016 cash-for-access scandal.
Operating now as Xian Clan International Forum (XCIF, 咸氏国际论坛), the MSS legacy network at this point centres on Xian Shenglin, YANG Hengjun, Zhang Hui, Kevin Zu Keqin, Edward Ye Hongtao and DING Guo.
Xian Clan International Forum’s key May 3, 2015, Vancouver event had Maoists in the room and PRC democrats refused entry at the door, one of whom likened the gathering to the Feast at Swan Goose Gate, a third century Chinese version of the Red Wedding from the TV series Game of Thrones.
Xian dropped $80,000 on food, accommodation and flights to and from the event. The event’s itinerary remains a mystery even to Chinese-speaking Canada to this day.
For some inkling of what may have been discussed, see an English translation of DING Guo’s 2011 conversation with YANG Hengjun, on the subject of how Canada fits into “the China model.”
The only real glimpse inside YANG’s handover to Xian comes by way of neoliberal economist He Qinglian (何清涟)’s speech at the event.
She opens by thanking the PRC consulate in Vancouver before focussing on the 15% decrease in foreign trade growth in China’s Q1 2015 economic downturn, China’s simultaneous acute unemployment, and the explicit role of Canada, with all our natural resources and China’s severe water, land and air pollution, in underwriting that country’s food security.
He Qinglian closed her speech to XCIF with a line that approximates the earlier DING-YANG conversation above:
Canada is a resource-rich country, rich in resources of every sort, water resources, above all. Those from the business community in the audience should prepare for a rainy day and invest in these industries, China will one day need to import these resources (“加拿大是个资源大国,有种类丰富的各种资源,水资源特别丰富。在座的商界人士可以未雨绸缪,投资这些产业,中国总有一天会需要进口这些资源。”).
Canada of course comes after Taiwan in terms of the CCP’s expansionist priorities, and Taiwan remains core to MSS work as Xi prepares to annex the Island state.
And more recent information from DING Guo’s main platform in Canada Rise Weekly – the site DING used to promote Premier David Eby’s leadership bid for the BC NDP in 2022 – shows that shortly before the MSS legacy network handover in Vancouver, through INCMO and in direct partnership with various CCP and UFWD entities, YANG Hengjun and others in the circle designed and later that summer executed a clumsy plan to travel to 28 World War II memorial sites in eleven countries around the world to spread CCP English-language propaganda materials.
With the MSS pieces set out already here, it seems prudent to say the CCP had Trudeau’s back in 2015 as well.
In his political greed and inverted approach to domestic politics, Trudeau has from the get-go been – as Chantal Kreviazuk once sang – surrounded.
The Circle
As shown below, traced far enough the roots of this network lead back to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. The meat, however, lies in the financial details. Xian’s ‘success’ with Wealth One Bank came shortly after Xian inherited YANG Hengjun’s MSS legacy network.
To further fine the point, the CCP’s UFWD sent Xian a congratulatory note in advance of the Wealth One charter, CCP member and then president of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese Lin Jun (林军) travelled to Toronto for it, and all of this was reported with no overnight delay by the Reference News service CCP members rely on for reality-based information.
Xian, it’s worth noting, joined insurance services provider London Life back in 1991, launching Shenglin Financial in Toronto in 1999, the same year the Canada China Business Council brought Xian on board to welcome former PRC premier Zhu Rongji to Canada.
Two years later, as then PM Jean Chrétien forced through corrosive trade with the CCP, Xian was again selected to represent Chrétien’s Team Canada in China.
We gain further insight into Xian’s thinking by way of a 2011 interview he published, and a narrative similar to what He Qinglian had to say when Xian took over the MSS legacy network: “世界大同” is a reference to CCP plans to annex Taiwan, “外化内生” translates corporate jargon into a strategy of learning from public mistakes to optimize private practices, rounded out by the line ‘what’s foreign today is China’s tomorrow’ (国外的今天就是国内的明天).
Like Xian, you may know worldwide income in China is taxed; among anti-money laundering professionals it remains a running debate whether tax evasion counts as a predicate offense; here on his firm website, Xian advises:
Holes have always existed in Canada’s tax system ... if a tax resident of Canada invests in China, proof of tax paid in China can offset taxes in Canada, there is no need to pay tax twice. (加拿大的税务制度存在一定的漏洞...如果加拿大税务居民在中国投资,在中国交税的凭据可以冲销加拿大交税份额,不需要再度补税)
In another article, Xian notes in passing the core benefits of the insurance products he represents, but focuses instead on the highly unusual earning potential therein: “...there is also appreciation on investments, [ways to] write off and avoid tax, and transfer inheritance ... with respect to the many high net worth clients in the Chinese community, he wants to teach them how to properly and legally avoid taxes.” (“还有投资增值、减税避税、遗产转移……针对华社许多高资产客户,他要教会他们合理合法地规避税收”).
Even after the 2016 Globe and Mail report that threw up a few red flags on his operation, Xian still leads with the instruction on avoiding both tax and risk, the main difference now being he has younger staff to do the heavy lifting.
Recall the centrality of Chinese-language media coordination to the CCP’s desired outcomes?
Back in 2007 in their shared London Life days, both Xian Shenglin and Winnie Liao as sponsors joined an early iteration of the CCP’s global Chinese-language media coordination effort.
To underscore the circularity in this, Winnie Liao (as both co-organizer and top sponsor), DING Guo, YANG Hengjun, Zhang Hui, Kevin Zu Keqin and others from INMCO were involved in this September 2016 cultural event, comparable to this 2017 Chinese New Year party sponsored by Xian and his newly-chartered Wealth One Bank.
Presided over by the PRC consulate in Vancouver, and attended by CCP proxies and B.C. politicians alike, among them Teresa Wat and Guo Taicheng (郭泰诚).
Winnie Liao, MA Zaixin— the former China Daily editor mentioned throughout this piece — and Shenglin Financial’s Wang Hua (王化) have all held office with Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations (CACA), and in 2018 the three rang in Chinese New Year with the PRC Vancouver consulate’s then UFWD team head, Hu Qiquan (胡启全), with those and others from INMCO squeezing in for a selfie with new Consul General TONG Xiaoling (佟晓玲).
When TONG’s replacement Yang Shu was onboarded for the 2023 Lantern Festival, “fully-funded” by Winnie Liao’s Respon, all three were again on hand.
To close with the circle metaphor, in late 2017 YANG Hengjun teamed up with Winnie Liao, Zhang, DING Guo and BC’s best-known alleged gangster — CCP proxy scene regular Paul King Jin (贾世宝) — to produce a documentary that never materialized about the history of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Canada over the past hundred years.
The CCP in recent years has embraced Traditional Chinese Medicine more for its domestic propaganda than curative value.
As Canada struggles to form a meaningful political response to the CCP’s sprawling efforts to make Canada a more solid stepping stone for Beijing’s domination of the United States, our inertia only benefits their objectives.
CCP political warfare circles overlap by design, shifting and reforming between strong spheres of influence flowing between Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.
Better financial intelligence and proportionally enhanced state powers may save Canada in the end. But an equally long article could be written right now looking only at Canadian-born enablers, of everything articulated here.
In the years it took to surface information presented here, an underlying theme has been Canada’s uncompromising resistance to honest self-reflection on this point.
The idea of where we want Canada to be in relation to CCP ambitions stands as a cruel taunt when compared to today’s state of affairs. Attributable bad decisions aside, what landed Canada in today’s predicament is a system behaving precisely as Beijing calculated: where does a PRC newcomer end and a CCP asset begin?
Exaggerated fears of repeating past mistakes have been mercilessly weaponized to forestall Canada’s counteroffensive, blurring what could otherwise be a clear view of the situation. Though able, we remain kept from forming a measured response.
That is our fatal weakness.
John Kennedy is a graduate of Port Hardy Secondary School.
Great article. Great information. That’s exactly why we need a foreign registry.
The current Canadian government is too compromised to fully and fairly investigate and assess Chinese government influence, control and corruption in Canada.