Allegations of Chinese meddling in domestic politics have sparked a crisis in Canada involving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s family and his ruling Liberal party, while again raising questions about the flow of Chinese money into Western democratic processes. Few, though, see any easy answers.
The turmoil in Canada has sprung from a series of intelligence leaks in March to the Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, with one report focusing on a $103,000 (C$140,000) donation made in 2014 to a foundation established in honor of Trudeau’s late father, Pierre — who served twice as the country’s prime minister.
Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents cited by the Globe suggest one of the donors — Zhang Bin — had close ties to China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), a Communist Party organ that for decades has sought to advance China’s interests abroad. Last week, the entire board of the Trudeau Foundation resigned. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s refusal to greenlight a broader public inquiry into Chinese influence has incensed opposition parties.
Canada isn’t alone in wrestling with the right response to foreign — and particularly Chinese — interference in its politics. For decades, Western nations forged closer ties with China through business, while often providing a welcome to wealthy Chinese people looking to move abroad. Now, they face a delicate balancing act between cracking down on illicit meddling without sweeping up well-meaning citizens exercising their democratic rights in the process.
This is a hard space to operate in. Organizations need someone to guide them effectively, but I don’t think there’s an appetite among governments to be involved.
Dakota Cary, a consultant at Krebs Stamos Group
“This is a hard space to operate in,” says Dakota Cary, a consultant at Krebs Stamos Group, an American security-focused consultancy. Civil society groups with stretched resources can find it hard to vet the affiliations of their supporters and donors thoroughly, he says. Meanwhile, rules to determine who has a legitimate voice in the political process can run up against free speech protections.
“Organizations need someone to guide them effectively, but I don’t think there’s an appetite among governments to be involved,” Cary says.
In Canada, the political rancor has forced the government to fast track discussions about setting up a register of foreign interests in politics, similar to those in countries such as the U.S. or Australia.
“The point is it’s not illegal [to declare influence work for a foreign interest],” says Daniel Ward, a former senior advisor to Malcolm Turnbull, the ex-Australian prime minister who introduced the country’s foreign influence legislation in 2018. “You can affiliate with a Chinese Communist Party-linked organization if you want, but you need to be transparent about it.”
Such registries have their limits, partly because compliance is left to individuals. No one in Australia has formally registered ties with the UFWD since the country’s registry was created, for example — to the dismay even of Turnbull, who spearheaded the legislation following scandals such as revelations of close interactions between a powerful Labor Party senator, Sam Dastyari, and Chinese donors.
“It’s not a secret organization. Xi Jinping has described it as the magic weapon,” Turnbull said in testimony in February before a parliamentary committee. “That’s very well documented and yet, apparently, nobody is declaring any connection with it in Australia. That beggars belief.”
“The challenge is that the worst kinds of foreign influence are deceptive and clandestine,” says Wesley Wark, a senior fellow specializing in intelligence and national security at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a Canadian think tank. “If you only go after the public, non-deceptive kind, you’re not really tackling the problem. In other words, it’s mostly political theater.”
Some experts believe Australia’s registry may not be working as intended because it’s casting too wide a net for regulators to enforce. Rather than singling out countries of concern, lawmakers adopted a ‘country agnostic’ approach when drafting the legislation.
“[Such an] approach appears to have been rigidly applied by the Attorney General’s department, suggesting they are in theory just as worried about British and American influence as the Chinese Communist Party,” Ward says. “It spreads your enforcement resources very thin, leading the relevant enforcement agencies to expend vast resources on matters that are of very low priority.”
Nobody is suggesting people should register if they have had connections in the past to the CCP. But if they continue to engage in influence organizations on behalf of that foreign political organization, then yes, I would say that should be made transparent.
Daniel Ward, a former senior advisor to Malcolm Turnbull
Yet focusing on China and the Communist Party in any legislation would both run the risk of drawing Beijing’s ire and retaliation, and could also draw accusations of racial discrimination and fueling anti-Chinese sentiment.
“It’s an argument the public safety minister and prime minister have made on a number of occasions,” says CIGI’s Wark. “Canada has a history we have to be aware of when it comes to registering foreigners and foreign-based activity… It’s not a pretty history, and it reinforces the understanding that if you’re going to create a registry you’ve got to do it in a very careful way.”
The Canadian case illustrates another conundrum for governments: How to deal with wealthy Chinese people who have made homes in their countries, but whose affiliations to the CCP are unclear.
One of the two donors to the Trudeau Foundation is Niu Gensheng, the multimillionaire founder of Mengniu Dairy, the Inner Mongolian dairy giant that is a mainstay of Chinese grocery stores. The other, Zhang Bin, is the president of China Cultural Industry Association, a government-backed group established to promote Chinese soft power. Together, they have previously donated to other charitable causes in Canada, including a $730,000 (C$800,000) donation to the University of Toronto in 2014 and another donation of equal amount to the University of Montreal in 2016 — payments that attracted little criticism at the time.
Corporate documents list both as having residential addresses in Canada, although The Wire was unable to verify whether the two men are now Canadian citizens. Non-citizens are barred from donating to political campaigns, but face few restrictions on giving to nonprofits and civil society groups. Still, critics say that the Trudeau Foundation should have been more cautious about taking money from Niu and Zhang. That raises the question of what kind of disclosure newcomers to Western countries should be required to make in order to participate in civil society.
“Nobody is suggesting people should register if they have had connections in the past to the CCP,” says Ward. “But if they continue to engage in influence organizations on behalf of that foreign political organization, then yes, I would say that should be made transparent.”
The most dangerous forms of interference come in forms that we’re not talking as much about: espionage and the harassment and intimidation of diaspora communities.
Wesley Wark, a senior fellow specializing in intelligence and national security at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)
For CIGI’s Wark, the biggest pitfall of the debate about solutions such as foreign influence registries is that they should not be treated as a panacea.
“The most dangerous forms of interference come in forms that we’re not talking as much about: espionage and the harassment and intimidation of diaspora communities,” he says. The latter threat was underscored this week, after American law enforcement arrested two men for allegedly helping the Chinese government run an unauthorized police outpost in New York City and track down a U.S.-based dissident.
“The media reporting that has captivated everybody since last fall, in my view, is distracting us from the worst problems,” Wark adds.
Eliot Chen is a Toronto-based staff writer at The Wire. Previously, he was a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Human Rights Initiative and MacroPolo. @eliotcxchen