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From manufacturing fentanyl precursors, to operating unofficial Chinese police stations on Western soil, to recruiting academics abroad to gain access to foreign technologies needed to advance Beijing’s goals, China’s infiltration of North America runs “deep,” says a Canadian investigative journalist.
The problem of China’s operations in Canada drew renewed attention last month when FBI Director Kash Patel
said Beijing is among the hostile regimes working with cartels to smuggle fentanyl into the United States through Canada.
But this issue has long been simmering, investigative journalist Sam Cooper said in a recent interview with Jan Jekielek, host of The Epoch Times
program “American Thought Leaders.”
Cooper said Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members and its proxies have for years been involved in “dark alliances” with global Chinese triad actors, some of them “strongly set up” in cities like Toronto, Vancouver, as well as Markham and Richmond, part of the Greater Toronto Area and Metro Vancouver respectively.
“I’ve been following China’s deep infiltration of North America for years,” Cooper said.
“The CCP is involved in fentanyl trafficking. As I know, and as my elite experts in North America and the West say, no one is like the Chinese Communist Party in terms of the inseparable integration with transnational organized crime.”
A U.S. government report published last year found the CCP to be significantly involved in producing and trafficking illicit fentanyl materials. It said the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “directly subsidizes” the manufacturing and export of these substances through tax rebates, provides monetary grants and awards to companies “openly” trafficking them, and “strategically and economically” benefits from the fentanyl crisis.
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Investigative journalist Sam Cooper arrives to appear before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 20, 2023. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang
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“The fentanyl crisis has helped CCP-tied Chinese organized criminal groups become the world’s premier money launderers, enriched the PRC’s chemical industry, and had a devastating impact on Americans,” the document reads.
Cooper is author of the book “Willful Blindness,” which he says exposes a criminal network of narcos, tycoons, and CCP agents working to infiltrate the West.
He says that beyond its role in the fentanyl trade, Beijing has engaged in other activities that conflict with Western interests, including recruiting students and academics at Western universities to acquire sensitive technologies, establishing unofficial police stations, and carrying out transnational repression while targeting critics abroad.
Using Western Facilities for Sensitive Research
Cooper says one of the tactics the Beijing regime employs is engaging Chinese nationals in “potential bioweapon research” using North American facilities clandestinely. He says that the purpose is to send that biotechnology back to China to further the regime’s objectives.
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He cited the recent case of two Chinese nationals
charged for allegedly smuggling a pathogen,
described in scientific literature as a “potential agroterrorism weapon” into the United States. The two—one of whom works at the University of Michigan and is alleged to have pledged loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party—were charged on June 2 with visa fraud, conspiracy, making false statements, and smuggling goods.
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The accused affiliated with the University of Michigan allegedly
received Chinese government funding for her work on the pathogen in China.
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“What really struck me from the findings [was that] on the young woman’s phone was her pledge of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, which included ties to her research grant funding,” Cooper said.
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FBI Director Patel
described the incident in a June 3 statement as a “sobering reminder that the CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply, which would have grave consequences ... putting American lives and our economy at serious risk.”
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More recently, a Ph.D. candidate from Wuhan, in central China, was
arrested by the FBI on June 8 for allegedly smuggling biological materials into the United States and lying about it, marking the third case in a week involving a Chinese national charged with similar offences. The accused, Chengxuan Han, is said to be a Chinese Communist Party member who has shown loyalty to the Party, according to the criminal complaint.
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Cooper argues a similar situation played out in the case of the two scientists who were fired from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg in 2021. Canadian intelligence officials
assessed that the couple
—Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng
—failed to disclose links with Chinese entities and did not protect sensitive information and assets.
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The FBI logo is seen outside the headquarters building in Washington in a file photo. Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images
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“Evidence shows they have been working, at least the woman, Dr. Qiu, [with] the highest levels of the People’s Liberation Army bioweapon program,” Cooper said.
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The People’s Liberation Army is the military of the Chinese regime.
While still working at the Winnipeg lab, Qiu sent samples of Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in March 2019. Lab officials said the shipment was approved after assurances it wasn’t linked to gain-of-function research. However, a U.S. scientist
told a Senate hearing in 2022 that, based on his findings, the Wuhan lab has conducted gain-of-function research on the Henipah virus.
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Canadian intelligence documents
indicate that Qiu helped China build its lethal pathogens program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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Cooper says the recent cases of biological material smuggling into the United States raise concerns about Chinese research grants tied to the country’s talent recruitment programs. These programs have been flagged by the U.S. government, which
states that they “all incentivize its members to steal foreign technologies needed to advance China’s national, military, and economic goals.”
Canadian intelligence has also raised concerns about Beijing’s so-called Thousand Talents Plan (TTP), describing it as a “non-traditional” way of collecting intelligence from other nations.
“The PRC’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) seeks to exploit the collaborative, transparent, and open nature of Canada’s private sector, universities and colleges using scholarships, sponsored trips and visiting professorships to recruit individuals to advance PRC objectives,”
says a 2023 briefing note from Canadian intelligence officials to a parliamentary committee.
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Cooper argues that such strategies may have contributed to the rise of Chinese tech giant Huawei and to what he describes as the company’s “clandestine takedown of Nortel,” formerly Canada’s leading telecommunications company. He also says the Winnipeg lab case and the recent episodes of Chinese nationals allegedly smuggling biological materials into the United States may be linked to Beijing’s talent recruitment programs.
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Influence Operations, Organized Crime
Cooper also raised the issue of China’s United Front Work Department, an agency tasked with overseeing Beijing’s influence activities in China and abroad. The organization has been
identified as a primary foreign interference tool of the Chinese regime.
“It’s hard to believe that the CCP has such an active, functioning party involved in our democratic systems, but that is what the United Front is,” Cooper said. “It is there to surround our politicians, our business leaders, our police officers, with clandestine operatives from Beijing under the cover of purported community associations.”
Cooper says his
research suggests some actors linked to the United Front are involved in criminal activities, including money laundering.
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A Chinese soldier stands guard in Beijing on April 23, 2013. Andy Wong/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
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“My recent reporting at the Bureau has shown that the United Front Work Department and its leaders are literally architecting underground banking and money laundering systems,” he said.
“They are architecting drug collection brokerage houses, cash laundering brokerage systems for the Mexican cartels that are on the front end [of] dealing fentanyl that is, of course, ultimately sourced from precursors in China.”
To illustrate how United Front-linked actors operate in Canada, Cooper cited the case of an individual in Markham, Ont., who he says is “at the highest levels of trade and organized crime activity with connectivity at the highest levels of the United Front.”
The individual, whose identity Cooper did not disclose and who is reportedly under investigation in connection with Chinese police station activity in Canada, was seen shaking hands with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a United Front meeting in Beijing a few years ago and has also been pictured at a Thousand Talent Station in Markham.
“I think this concerns certainly some of the experts I talk to, because the individuals that my sourcing indicates are under investigation are frequently pictured with the elite Canadian politicians, and as I have said, associated to the Thousand Talents Program,” Cooper said.
Chinese Police Stations, Transnational Repression
Cooper says Beijing’s efforts to silence dissent abroad is often facilitated by “illegal Chinese police stations on our Western soil.”
The issue of illegal overseas Chinese police stations became public in 2022, when Spanish NGO Safeguard Defenders published
a report detailing how at least 102 such stations existed across 53 countries at the time, including three in the Greater Toronto Area and one in Vancouver.
The report found that some of these organizations stated their role was to persuade fraud suspects to return to China for prosecution, while in reality many of those targeted were Chinese dissidents who had fled religious or ethnic persecution by the Beijing regime. The RCMP began an investigation and reported in 2023 that it had dismantled illegal operations linked to Chinese police stations in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia.
Cooper cited instances where critics of Beijing living abroad have had their families in China threatened as part of efforts by the regime to silence dissent.
“And then, the other end of the ministry of public security [uses] proxies in these illegal Chinese police stations on our Western soil to enforce that threat into the community on the ground, and as I say, using the most feared organized crime thugs in the communities and enriching them in their criminality,” he said.
Cooper cited the case of Conservative candidate Joe Tay, whose relatives in Hong Kong were
reportedly taken in for questioning by Hong Kong national security police on May 8. Tay, who ran as a Conservative candidate in this year’s federal election, is one of several outspoken pro-democracy activists targeted by Hong Kong authorities, which have issued international bounties for Tay and several other activists.
Tay was also
targeted by a Beijing-linked transnational repression operation during the election campaign, according to Canadian intelligence officials.
“Mr. Tay was warned by the RCMP. They thought it wasn’t safe for him to go knock on doors,” Cooper said.
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Joe Tay, a singer and actor who moved from Hong Kong to Canada, is seen in a file photo. He was running for the Conservative Party in the Ontario riding of Don Valley North Courtesy of Joe Tay
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He says Beijing’s transnational repression could take the form of bodily harm, forced repatriations, and kidnapping in some countries.
“People in the community have been telling me about this as a journalist for a long time. The threats are real,” he said.
He adds that he himself has faced threats due to his journalistic work. He recalls that in 2023, two days after he testified before Parliament about how Beijing is “threatening” Canadian politicians, “an RCMP National Security Unit knocked on my door and said they had legal authorization to warn me that they had learned about a credible threat against myself as a journalist.”
“I’m not stepping forward to share this sensitive information with you today as a victim,” he said. “I’m saying that I have the capacity and connections to protect and to expose, but people in the community, perhaps, have been living for a long time under the same serious threats.”
He says it’s important that more people are aware of the threat posed by foreign actors.
“The United States and Canada and other Western powers cannot ignore what China is doing on our soil, and in other nations around the world,” he said. “We need to stand together.”
Eva Fu contributed to this report.
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