The concept of racism is being Shanghaied as soft-on-China individuals, from Canada’s Prime Minister to a young influencer on TikTok, deploy the idea against critics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These politicians, a professor, and an influencer, all acting in an ideological capacity, tend not to use actual examples of real individuals who they claim are racist. Rather, they discredit classes of criticism, for example of “China” by young people who use the term as shorthand for China’s government, or of China’s political influence in democratic politics in the West.
“As an Asian woman, there is a bigger target on my back, and conflating the idea of anti-CCP with anti-Asian is actually a much bigger disrespect,” Lhamo said at a Commons special committee this summer.
“I think our prime minister is really confused,” Uyghur activist Rukiye Turdush told the committee. “If we’re against the CCP, it doesn’t mean we’re against the Chinese people. It has nothing to do with anti-Asian racism. I really didn’t get why he said that.”
“Two facts stand out: Anti-China sentiment is rising across the country, and so is anti-Asian hate. How are the two connected?” write Professor Paul Evans and Senator Yuen Pau Woo said in one of Canada’s leading newspapers, The Globe and Mail. The two Canadians, one of whom is a political science professor, do not mention that the correlation of two data points do not even imply, much less prove, causation. Yet the two hype the public discussion on China as toxic, racist, and McCarthyist in tone.
Professor Evans and Senator Woo both declined requests for comment.
Effect on Young People of Racism Claims
But “toxic” claims of racism might just scare the naive from talking with each other about China’s growing influence among elites in Canada, the United States, India, Japan, and other countries globally. Using scare words like “racism” has a chilling effect on efforts to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its genocide and other human rights abuse, including against minority groups in China such as Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong, Christians, and Hongkongers (yes, Hong Kong is now a de facto part of China).
An American high school teacher and activist in Japan recently wrote to me that two young people he knows were concerned about the conflation of criticism of China and racism.
“When the Stop Asian Hate movement took off ... a college student at Temple University in Japan, told me to stop pushing my petition [to let Taiwan be Taiwan, instead of Chinese Taipei, at the Tokyo Olympics] for awhile and forget trying to get any media attention,” wrote Lindell Lucy on June 25. “He thought I would get tarred as racist. He had a bad experience at Temple, himself getting unjustly accused of racism. He is half white [and] half Japanese.”
The Smith video opens with a banner stating, “Stop the Sinophobia.” Smith then says, “The US Empire always weaponizes xenophobia and racism, fear of the other. This was the war on terror. ‘Ahh, Americans, you need to be terrified of Muslim people, they’re terrorists.’” Here Smith uses superlatives and false statements that create a sense of anger among his listeners. In fact the war on terror included extensive participation by Muslim countries and supporters, and the United States is in no way an “empire.”
Smith’s target audience is the young left. Prominent in the video background is a banner reading “Bernie.” The Marxist influencer states, “And now [Americans are] doing the same thing [weaponizing racism] with China, and I feel like a lot of people on the left don’t even realize it. If you look at any of the corporate media’s coverage of China, there’s nothing besides portraying this country as evil supervillains.” Again, Smith uses falsehoods and superlatives when in fact mainstream media frequently lauded the supposed efficiency of China’s measures to contain COVID-19, for example.
Smith then conflates criticism of the CCP with “hate” of the Chinese people. He says, “And now it’s become really trendy on the left to hate China. ‘Yeah I’m a socialist but F*** China, bro. Really? F*** an entire country of 1.4 billion people?”
He then draws a connection between criticism of “China” with hate crimes against Asian-Americans, but does not clarify what the connection might be. “You’re really comfortable saying [F*** China] as hate crimes against Asian-Americans happen all over?” Smith tells his 280,000 followers.
“I don’t hate a country of 1.4 billion people. And [holding up Xi Jinping’s book] I choose to read about their country from people who actually live in their country. Because I know western media is lying to me,” he says.
Supposed lies by the western media is another CCP talking point. Nowhere does Smith acknowledge that there is little freedom of speech in China, so only reading authors who live there is likely to yield an analysis that is biased towards the CCP perspective. Reading Xi Jinping is “not worshiping China, that’s taking the time to research China so I don’t spread sinophobic nonsense,” he ends.
Russian and Chinese Disinformation Against the Elite Capture Thesis
Many of the same themes are found in the Evans and Woo article, and proliferate through the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) groups that operate globally.MLI frequently covers Russian disinformation, and draws a parallel with the Globe opinion article. “Accusing the critics of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of racism was pioneered during the Soviet era and is a tactic that has been deployed with prolific zeal by the government of Vladimir Putin,” the MLI authors write. “The accusation of prejudice against Russians—or ‘Russophobia’—is leveled at those who criticize the Kremlin’s repression of human rights activists .... The goal of this tactic is to discredit dissidents and critics, and to deflect attention away from Russian government abuses.”
MLI notes that the authors’ derogatory use of a “1950s McCarthy era” reference follows Kremlin and Beijing talking points. “This is a tactic frequently employed by authoritarian regimes who seek to discredit critics of their policies by accusing them of irrationality,” according to the MLI analysis. “The Kremlin started using the label in earnest when Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election became a concern.”
The Globe authors single-out the “elite capture” thesis for criticism. They call questioning the loyalty of people with pro-Beijing views “extreme.” But Charles Burton, a Senior Fellow at MLI, explains that “‘elite capture’ by the PRC’s integrated party-state-military-security-industrial complex is a disturbing reality in Canada. There is a cohort of influential Canadians who directly or indirectly receive benefits from the PRC because they receive income from the Chinese régime by board memberships or other paid associations such as consultancies, or they receive income from Canadian companies who do business with the Chinese régime, or they are associated with law firms who represent Chinese firms or Canadian firms who do business with the Chinese régime, or they receive income from policy think tanks in Canada who receive funding from China-associated sources such as Canadian companies who do business with the Chinese régime.”
Dr. Burton wrote that, “A correlation can be established showing that such persons have exerted influence over Canada’s China policy formulation in ways that support the PRC’s geopolitical interests.”
Context for Claims of Racism
Professor Evans, who is the HSBC Chair in Asian Research at the University of British Columbia (UBC), appears in the final book. Given what we know about Professor Evans and Senator Woo, the two at times appear to be arguing in self-defense. So, it is odd that the Globe published their article without providing editorial context to the reader.Some of that necessary context is supplied here.
The other Globe author, Senator Woo, was appointed to his position by Prime Minister Trudeau, who himself has links to China. According to Cooper’s book, Trudeau met with individuals linked to China’s government at “cash-for-access” events, and his family foundation received $1 million from a Chinese official in 2016. In connection to the donation, Trudeau met twice with a real estate tycoon who runs Canada’s largest ever illegal casino.
According to Dr. Burton, the phrasing of Evans’ role “suggests a lobbying function.” Shouldn’t students, parents, and newspaper readers insist that their professors and opinion article writers, especially those with links to a totalitarian state, be unbiased teachers and researchers, rather than have any appearance of impropriety or bias as lobbyists?
HQ Vancouver touted Canada’s federal and provincial tax credits to which Chinese companies could apply. However, Canadian taxpayers were not made privy to which companies, if any, won such credits. Some of the companies that HQ Vancouver brought had technical or military links, making them perfect vehicles for the transfer of sensitive military technologies to China. China Poly, a massive state-owned defense contractor, opened an office of the linked Poly Culture Group in Vancouver. China Poly’s governance and ownership are shadowy. China Poly Group was sanctioned from 2013 to 2015 by the United States for alleged violations of the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act. The Poly Culture Group planned to use Vancouver for “two-way cultural exchanges.”
According to the document, the panel discussion was “Co-sponsored by Liberal MP Joyce Murray, NDP MP Don Davies, Conservative Senator Victor Oh, and Independent Senator Yuen Pau Woo.” The event appeared to be biased in Beijing’s favor from the start as it was described as being “designed to advance parliamentarians’ understanding of the issues in order to minimize the risk of politicization and public over-reaction to concerns about Chinese influence and interference. By learning from the US and Australian experience, Canada can avoid missteps taken in those countries and instead chart a response that is appropriate to our circumstances, needs, and priorities.” Emphases are my own.
The event appears to have been geared towards influencing influential parliamentarians and staffers in Canada under secretive Chatham House rules that allow the conveyance of information anonymously. “Following presentations by the four panelists, Senator Yuen Pau Woo moderated a discussion with members of the audience, which consisted of parliamentarians and Hill staffers, as well as Ottawa-based China policy and intelligence/security analysts,” according to the summary. “The meeting was conducted under Chatham House rules.” By conducting the event secretively, and only releasing the summary of the event, rather than a recording, Senator Woo’s office controlled the narrative.
The document “was on the Senator’s site for some time with a brief hiatus but came back after a journalist asked why it was not there,” according to Dr. Burton. “When it was finally removed again is unclear.”
No examples are given for fears of UFWD infiltration of the “Canadian Chinese community.” No other western commentators on China’s political and economic influence abroad, that I know of, single out Canadian citizens of Chinese ancestry as “susceptible to foreign influence.” But here Senator Woo’s document appears to make not only this incorrect case, but the incorrect case that suspicion of this community would “only make it … more susceptible to foreign influence.” The author of this document found on Senator Woo’s website is apparently inventing the very racism of which the Senator accuses others.
The only other entity I know of that does appear to believe that the Chinese diaspora is possibly more susceptible to China’s influence is the CCP or its intelligence agencies, which reportedly targets those of Chinese ancestry for compromise. However, there is no evidence that those of Chinese ancestry are in fact any more susceptible to compromise than those of any other ancestry. It is not ethnicity that determines affinity with the CCP, according to my intelligence sources, but ideology, money, and other human weaknesses.
Professor Evans was also on the 2018 panel that by Senator Woo’s own document, was designed to counter opinion in favor of U.S. and Australian-style foreign agent registration laws. Evans mentored the infamous Cameron Ortis on his China-related doctoral thesis in approximately 2006, according to Cooper’s book and other reporting. The thesis addressed “compromised nodes” and the “digital black market” of transnational organized crime in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. It propelled Ortis’s career, which ended abruptly as a high-level Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intelligence official who allegedly shared RCMP plans with Hong Kong and Iran-linked criminal entities starting in 2015.
The Evans and Woo Claims of Racism
The two Globe authors protest that those who do not support a “harder stance against Beijing … are often seen as not just naïve and wrong in their support for engagement, but also as lacking integrity because of ties to China that generate financial or other rewards. In its extreme form, academics, community leaders, businesspeople, and politicians with so-called ‘pro-Beijing’ views are insinuated to be disloyal to Canada and agents of the Chinese Communist Party—an eerie throwback to the 1950s McCarthy era in the U.S.”Insinuation is exactly what Evans and Woo do when they associate racism with anti-CCP views. And, the authors all-but-admit that some pro-Beijing writers have financial links to China. Registered foreign agents in the United States, for example, can easily make $300,000 per year promoting their foreign patrons, with some foreign agents getting much more.
Academics and politicians, even in the United States where there are long-established foreign agent registration laws, typically don’t disclose their foreign income as they take advantage of legal exemptions for academia, or, in the case of politicians, hope to get away with it given admitting it publicly would be a blow to their careers. In the United States, the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 is rarely enforced, except against alleged spies that law enforcement cannot prosecute in any other way.
Links to democratic countries, which are less risky, elicit less public concern. Similar foreign influence from Japan and Taiwan for example, raises little to no public debate or law enforcement attention. There is little to no anti-Asian racism in these examples, or in concern about China’s political influence. Public concern is a rightly heightened mitigation of the risk of authoritarian foreign influence at the head of state and other elite levels from powerful adversary states.
The bridges built with the Chinese state over the years have not been limited to Canadians of Chinese descent. Prime Minister Trudeau is not Chinese. Hunter Biden is not Chinese. Billionaires like Mike Bloomberg and Stephen Schwarzman, who have extensive and lucrative “bridges” with China, are not Chinese. The concern about elite capture gets more concerning, the closer it gets to real power. Most billionaires and politicians in the United States and Canada who are suspected of being overly influenced by the CCP are not Chinese.
Evans and Woo complain about legitimate concerns of Beijing’s capture of elites through financial incentives, defeating their own argument by implying that this scrutiny could put an end to the gravy train. “University connections to China are under increasing scrutiny,” they worry. “Safeguarding research integrity and maintaining our principles of academic freedom are essential if we aim to keep the doors open to large-scale student recruitment from China, as well as to research partnerships and other forms of collaboration.” The emphasis is mine, and the conflation of academic freedom with attracting Chinese money is theirs. Actually, the attempt to attract Chinese money contradicts academic freedom, because it distracts academics from following their own research priorities.
“Since the early 1980s, Canadian universities have been building bridges with China,” they write. “Many of these bridges have been built by Canadians of Chinese descent. The chill and fear they are now feeling is palpable. The fear is magnified when the definition of an inappropriate partner includes all those with links to the Chinese state.” But Canadians of Chinese descent are not the only ones with links to the Chinese state. As noted above, Paul Evans has his own. Again, this is not about race, but about avenues of influence, and conduits of cash.
The two Globe authors do not discuss how the Chinese state targets Canadians of Chinese descent who are publicly critical of the CCP, nor how the Canadian state fails to fully protect them. If the Chinese state is indeed committing a genocide, shouldn’t we limit links to the Chinese state, including through the mildest of measures: public exposure and social pressure against its advocates? The same measures were used against slaveholders in the 19th century to excellent effect. Today, the CCP are the world’s biggest slaveholders given their utilization of forced Uyghur labor.
Racism and CCP Influence
The Globe authors imply that sensationalizing China’s actions and stigmatizing individuals or groups with China links “crosses a threshold” of racism. Here they trivialize, politicize, misuse, and expand the notion of racism well beyond prejudice, antagonism, differential treatment, or discrimination against a race or ethnicity, which is a universally valued definition of the term broadly accepted to address a universally denounced societal problem found across cultures and nations. By diluting the idea of racism to fit their political purposes, authors such as Evans and Woo do a real injustice to all those suffering the worst forms of racism, including that which leads to genocide.The authors themselves slip into racism when they advocate differential treatment of people of Chinese descent by saying that criticism “crosses the threshold when it demands loyalty statements, especially from people of Chinese descent [my emphasis], or imposes litmus tests based on the groups they associate with, the electronic devices they use and the social media apps on their devices.”
In what appears to in part be an implied swipe at Sam Cooper’s reporting from Vancouver, the authors write that criticism “crosses the threshold when it assigns broad responsibility for the problems of housing unaffordability, money laundering, and fentanyl deaths—in British Columbia, for example—to Canadians of Chinese descent.” However, the authors offer no actual examples of an individual engaged in this ostensible racism. If one reads Cooper’s book, it is evident that he applies an even hand against all who engage in illegal gambling, money laundering, and fentanyl deaths, including the many non-Chinese (such as Prime Minister Trudeau) who he covers in a critical manner. Racism is nowhere to be found in his writing, and having corresponded with him privately, I can attest that he is the opposite of racist. Indeed, he lauds those who uphold Canadian values, including specifically Chinese-Canadians, as heros and models for us all.
Is Professor Evans here acting, in an insinuating and underhanded manner, as HSBC’s hatchet man against a Canadian journalist, and Chinese Canadian, who are threatening one of HSBC’s revenue streams? How could the Globe have been so negligent as not to have printed a conflict-of-interest statement along with Evans’ opinion article?
“From my experience, people should be asking questions regarding those attempting to downplay the threat from China,” wrote Calvin Chrustie, a Senior Associate with the Critical Risk Team, which specializes in Canadian security issues. “For instance have they or do they play significant roles for ‘business development for Canadian-Chinese connected corporations?”
When asked about Evans and Woo, Chrustie wrote to me,
“The concern one should always look for in the 21st Century, is someone masking business development, political or financial gain using ethnic or social issues, and racism, as a weapon versus a shield? When talking about racism, one would hope the spirit would be to protect persons, versus potentially as we see it being used by state actors and their proxies as a weapon for influence. A famous Canadian judge once said the law is designed to be a shield, not a sword.”
Chrustie pointed out that “the same could be said when states and their proxies use racism as [a] weapon, it’s one of the new ways states de-stabilize other states and Canadians need to be wary of these tactics and not fall prey to them.”
Chrustie made the additional point that academics and business leaders often lack all the information about China’s influence operations because they don’t have access to classified information. This is arguably why former intelligence professionals are often the first and strongest proponents of stronger laws against China’s malign influence in our democracies. They aren’t being racist. They simply have access to more data about China and its institutionalized influence operations, including most powerfully through non-Chinese individuals, than does the average citizen.
Data Omission and Disinformation Tactics
The MLI report notes that the Globe “authors make no mention of the Chinese government’s well documented transnational repression against its own people and human rights activists living in Canada. Canada’s National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians has clearly outlined the threat of Chinese government influence and intimidation operations in Canada. Activists have received threats of violence, murder and even rape.”
Evans and Woo also conflate the hostage-taking of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, with Meng Wanzhou’s lawful arrest and trial, according to DisinfoWatch.org. “By failing to provide the necessary context to the situation facing both Meng and the Two Michaels, the authors obfuscate an important distinction that serves the interests of the Chinese government and bears similarities to regime narratives about them,” according to the MLI. “It also coincides with the authors’ apparent unwillingness to place any blame on China’s actions for this ‘toxic’ public discussion. It can even be seen in how they seem to blame FBI and US Department of Justice prosecutions of academics on the grounds of espionage for the ‘toxic atmosphere,’ as opposed to the actions of the people who committed the espionage in the first place.”
The same is true of the Globe authors’ claim that “criticism crosses a threshold [into racism, by implication] when it sensationalizes Chinese action.”
According to the MLI authors, “our analysis demonstrates that the accusation of ‘sensationalism’ is regularly levelled against activists, governments and media that are critical of the Chinese government.” They note that a search of China’s hyper-nationalist Global Times state media site returns “over 20 pages of results where western governments, media, elected officials and critics are directly accused of ’sensationalizing' issues related to China.”
“What Evans and Woo seemingly fail to appreciate or acknowledge is that the very same Chinese diaspora community targeted by anti-Asian hate is not a monolithic group,” according to the MLI authors. “Many of the Chinese government’s actions, of which Evans and Woo have tried to characterize criticism of as being ’sensational,' have the most profound impact on the Chinese diaspora and dissidents.”
According to MLI, Chinese “dissidents face online harassment, death and sexual violence threats, doxxing and even physical assaults. Evans and Woo, though ostensibly concerned about racism, have neglected to mention these real challenges facing the Chinese diaspora and dissidents.”
Effect of Accusations of Racism on Discourse Regarding CCP
Noting that “The chilling nature of accusations of ‘racism’ in the context of legitimate criticism of totalitarian and autocratic regimes is a serious threat to civil discourse in all liberal western democracies,” the MLI authors advocate foreign interference and disinformation training for government officials in Canada. The same should be provided to government officials globally, at least for states that value their independence and sovereignty. Academics at universities dependent on Chinese student tuition and research funding, and those that allow professors to take lucrative foreign and corporate consulting contracts, should also be offered counter-disinformation training.The global professoriate, especially at elite universities, has sometimes lost touch with its role of unbiased research and teaching. Some are instead following money rather than lack of bias, and ought to be steered back by legislation and academic administrations, towards their primary functions.
Need for Stronger Foreign Agent Registration Laws
Unless we act with greater alacrity and decision against the CCP and its influential beneficiaries today, that kind of racism could in time come to Canada, the United States, or any other allied country. Our failure to act for what is right because of disinformational narratives and fake political correctness that serves authoritarian interests, and our own greed for cheap foreign goods despite evidence of forced labor and genocide, is a strategic and ethical lapse that must soon be fixed for the protection of our future freedoms.Conservative Minister of parliament Michael Chong told iPolitics on June 23 that it’s “long past due” for the Canadian government to address the China threat to Canadian research. MP Chong said that Canada should ban funding for sensitive research partnerships with China in areas such as biotechnology, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and nanotechnologies. Perhaps that ban should be extended to professors who act in a manner consistent with political lobbying as well. What is more sensitive to Beijing’s money, than our own democratic political processes?
Concern and transparency about allegations of Beijing’s influence is not racism, but an attempt to maintain the independence, transparency, integrity, and ultimately the sovereignty, of Canadian, and other democratic, governments. There’s a big difference between racism, which is antipathy towards an entire ethnicity, and concern about possible elite corruption, which affects every ethnicity. The folks who dislike the Chinese Communist Party and the gangs with which it associates, typically love Hong Kong democracy protesters and spunky Taiwan independence advocates. They are very often Chinese-Americans or Chinese-Canadians themselves. The split is ideological, not racial.
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