For Yao Zhang, the news came as a shock.
Sexually explicit, deepfake images of her were circulating widely online — an attack that Ottawa blamed on the Chinese government.
It wasn’t the first time Zhang had been targeted by China. Shortly after the Quebec-based accountant-turned-influencer travelled to Taiwan in January 2024 to support its independence, China’s national police paid a visit to her aunt in Chifeng, in mainland China.
Zhang was also doxxed — private information about her and members of her family was posted to a website listing people who weren’t loyal to China — information only the Chinese government would know. False rumours began to spread online designed to discredit her, alleging that she had an affair with her stepbrother, that she was being paid by the U.S. government.
Zhang isn’t alone. CBC News spoke with several other Canadian activists who have spoken out against the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all of whom described similar attacks: Family members in China questioned by police. Dissidents followed and surveilled in Canada. Threatening phone calls. Online attacks like spamouflage, using a bot network to push spam-like content and propaganda across multiple social media platforms.
Yao Zhang describes what happened after she travelled to Taiwan to defend Taiwan’s independence and what happened to her family.
While Zhang says she still feels physically safe in Canada, the attacks take a mental toll.
“I mean, they can reach you, of course, online or through your relatives in China. I don’t think there’s anything the Canadian government can do.”
An investigation by CBC News, in conjunction with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), has found attacks by the Chinese government on dissidents living in Canada — and around the world — are on the rise.
It’s a trend that worries experts on China, who say the attacks damage democracy and national security in Canada.
“You’ve got a foreign government that is causing Canadian citizens and permanent residents to not feel safe in Canada, to not feel they can exercise their own rights and freedoms and speak out,” said Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat and expert on Asia who was detained by China for more than 1,000 days.
“By undermining those communities, they are ultimately undermining Canadian society and politics and ultimately national security.”
In June 2024, Parliament adopted Bill C-70 which was supposed to counter the rising threat of transnational repression and foreign interference in Canada by giving government departments and agencies more powers to fight it and by creating a foreign agent registry and a foreign interference transparency commissioner.
However, nearly a year later, as reports indicate China has become more brazen, little has been done to put those measures in place, leaving it to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government to implement.
In many cases, dissidents are targeted for expressing opinions contrary to the Chinese government’s positions on what it calls “the five poisons”: democracy in Hong Kong, treatment of Uyghurs, Tibetan freedom, the Falun Gong and Taiwanese independence.
“[China] believes that a lot of the main threats to their dominance emanate from overseas,” said Dan Stanton, a former CSIS intelligence officer who ran its China desk for four years. “So they need to go abroad to basically neutralize them.”
The ICIJ’s “China Targets” investigation, in which 43 media organizations in 30 countries interviewed more than 100 victims, also documented how the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies have used international organizations such as Interpoland the United Nations to go after its critics and how little some countries have done to stop China’s attacks on people living within their borders.
After reviewing Chinese government guidelines, the investigation found that “tactics recently deployed against the subjects mirrored the guidelines on how to control individuals labeled as domestic security threats,” the ICIJ wrote.
The Chinese Embassy in Canada has yet to respond to questions from CBC News.
A ‘genuine scourge’
Most of those interviewed didn’t report the incidents to authorities in the countries where they were living, the ICIJ found, because they either feared retaliation or doubted the ability of local authorities to help.
A number of victims in Canada declined interview requests from CBC News, saying they feared repercussions on themselves or their families.
The ICIJ and CBC News found similar tactics being used against critics.
In Canada, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference heard from a number of witnesses — some in public and others behind closed doors — who described incidents of China targeting Canadian residents on Canadian soil.
Hogue’s conclusion — transnational repression in Canada was a “genuine scourge” and the PRC was the “most active perpetrator of foreign interference targeting Canadian democratic institutions.”
“What I have learned about it is sufficient for me to sound the alarm that the government must take this seriously and consider ways to address it, Hogue wrote in her final report in January.
Hogue said assessing the extent of transnational repression in Canada by China and other countries is difficult because those targeted “may fear reprisals.”
China uses “a wide range of tradecraft… including using a person’s family and friends in China as leverage against them,” she wrote. “The PRC uses its diplomatic missions, PRC international students, community organizations and private individuals, among others, to carry out its transnational repression activities.”
Uyghur advocate stalked
Mehmet Tohti, an Ottawa-based advocate for China’s minority Uyghur community in Canada, knows what it is like to be under surveillance.
Shortly after the House of Commons adopted a motion recognizing that China was carrying out genocide of Uyghurs in the province of Xinjiang, Tohti was leaving a dinner in Montreal when one of the other diners, who worked with Global Affairs, warned him two cars with covered licence plates were following him that evening.
“It was the kind of moment that deeply affected my daily program,” said Tohti. “Since then, even if sometimes it takes a little longer, every day I take a different route to my office and a different route from my office to my home.”
Uyghur activist Mehmet Tohti describes how being followed in Montreal by cars with their licence plates covered has changed his life and the steps he takes to stay safe.
This April, Tohti’s three cellphones and his laptop were attacked. After reporting it to the RCMP and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, he learned that the attack originated in mainland China.
Tohti said many Uyghurs living in Canada are cut off from their families back in Chinabut are also afraid to travel to some other countries for fear that China will use Interpol red notices to have local authorities arrest them and extradite them to China.
Uyghur rights advocate Huseyin Celil, was arrested 19 years ago while visiting family in Uzbekistan and handed over to Chinese authorities, who refuse to recognize his Canadian citizenship. He was tried and convicted on what human rights groups have described as trumped-up terrorism charges.
It is not known if Cecil is alive or dead.
Canadian MPs, candidates targeted
While China has gone after sitting members of Parliament, like Conservative Michael Chong and New Democrat Jenny Kwan, one of its highest profile attacks in recent months was on Joe Tay, a Toronto-area resident who has advocated for democracy in his birthplace of Hong Kong. In December, the Hong Kong Police Force issued a reward of $1 million HK ($177,111 Cdn) for information leading to his arrest for alleged national security violations.
During the federal election, as Tay was running as the Conservative candidate in the riding of Don Valley North, the Canadian government’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force reported a transnational repression operation on Chinese-language social media platforms, amplifying posts related to the bounty and arrest warrant against Tay and suppressing search results on platforms based in the PRC.
“The search engine only returns information about the bounty,” the task force wrote. “This is not about a single incident with high levels of engagement. It is a series of deliberate and persistent activity across multiple platforms — those in which Chinese-speaking users in Canada are active, including: Facebook, WeChat, TikTok, RedNote and Douyin, a sister-app of TikTok for the Chinese market.”
At one point during the campaign, police advised that Tay stop campaigning door to door for his own safety, he confirmed.
Shortly after the federal election, on May 8, news reports in Hong Kong said Tay’s cousin and his wife were brought to a police station from their home in Hong Kong’s Fo Tan district to “assist in an investigation” relating to Tay.
Tay declined an interview request from CBC News.
“I will need a much longer time to reflect on a lot of things still,” he wrote in a text.
Hugh Yu campaigned for Tay and leads a pro-democracy group in Toronto. He said his members are often reluctant to grant interviews or openly participate in his organization.
“They walk away … a lot of people come and say, ‘I’m sorry, Hugh, because I have a lot of pressure from family,'” he said, describing how “almost all” of their families in China would have their jobs or pensions threatened because of their public opposition to the Chinese government.
Yu said when his group holds pro-democracy demonstrations at Toronto City Hall or at the Chinese consulate, they are watched, with people taking photos and videos.
“I think at this point the CCP is very, very successful [at] controlling all of the community, the Chinese community in Canada.”
Gloria Fung is past president of Canada-Hong Kong Link and has lobbied for Canada to have a registry of foreign agents. She has also received phone calls warning her to stop interfering with Hong Kong’s and China’s affairs and notices from Google about attempts by state-level hackers to get into her computer systems.
‘Trying to censor and silence’
Kovrig says China tries to influence how it is perceived and control the message. If influence doesn’t work, it resorts to transnational repression.
“You’re either trying to incentivize people to be supportive of the PRC… or you’re trying to censor and silence and coerce potential critics and dissidents to be afraid to speak out,” he said. “And that’s the repression part.”
Kovrig says the PRC tends to target Chinese diaspora communities more because it is easier to intimidate people who have relatives back in China or who belong to a community where many people are sympathetic to the CCP. It’s also harder for police or intelligence agencies to get inside those communities and understand what is going on.
Michael Kovrig, an expert on Asia who was imprisoned by China for more than 1,000 days, describes how China has become more brazen when it comes to transnational repression as it has become more powerful.
Kovrig has also observed how the PRC has become more aggressive over time.
“Whereas previously, Chinese actors might have been relatively reluctant to be more heavy-handed or coercive for fear of negative consequences, increasingly, as China has become more powerful as a state, it’s become increasingly brazen about what it’s willing to do.”
Stanton, the former CSIS officer, says where once China might have tried to bring a dissident back to China, now the surveillance and the tactics are more sophisticated.
“They may approach extended family members in the PRC, starting with a subtle message, and then it gets a little graver that their relative or counterpart over in Canada is doing anti-state activity.… Maybe someone will lose a job in China to get the message to that person in Canada that they can’t speak freely.”
Stanton, who would like to see a public inquiry on transnational repression, said the government needs a more cohesive approach to dealing with it.
“You can’t deal with that if the community is not prepared to come forward and talk about it,” he said, adding that they’re reticent about talking about it because, generally speaking, there’s never any action from Canadian officials. “They’re left speaking out about it and nothing’s done about it from their perception.”
Former CSIS officer Dan Stanton describes some of the tactics the Chinese government and its proxies use to silence dissidents in Canada.
In their responses to the ICIJ and other media organizations, other Chinese embassies dismissed reports China was engaging in transnational repression.
“There is no such thing as ‘reaching beyond borders’ to target so-called dissidents and overseas Chinese… the Chinese government strictly abides by international law and the sovereignty of other countries,” Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the United States, told the ICIJ. “The notion of ‘transnational repression’ is a groundless accusation, fabricated by a handful of countries and organizations to slander China.”
As for affairs related to Hong Kong, Tibetans and Uyghurs, they “are entirely China’s internal matters,” Pengyu wrote. “China firmly opposes the politicization, instrumentalization, or weaponization of human rights issues, as well as foreign interference under the pretext of human rights.”
Activists ‘dismayed’ at lack of protection
Dennis Molinaro, of Ontario Tech University, who recently wrote Under Siege, a book on foreign interference by China in Canadian society, said other countries like Australia and the United States have taken more steps to curb transnational repression.
“A lot of activists are particularly dismayed and upset by how little has been done to protect people in Canada and Canadian citizens,” he said.
“There’s sometimes this view that this is akin to community infighting, and it’s not.
“This is an aggressive state that is targeting Canadian citizens within Canada. These are citizens that are a part of Canada. They shouldn’t be ignored,” said Molinaro.
While direct attacks and threatening phone calls have been largely confined to more active members of the Chinese diaspora in Canada, Fung said transnational repression has had a chilling effect on the entire community.
“There’s a very famous idiom in China that you kill the chicken to scare all the monkeys.”
Fung said by delaying the implementation of the foreign agent registry provided for in Bill C-70, the government is giving “a green light” to foreign agents to continue to operate on Canadian soil without any consequences.
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s office has yet to respond to requests from CBC News for an interview.
Max Watson, spokesperson for the ministry said the government has been actively responding to transnational repression, working with communities and with international partners to address the threat.
However, Watson said several steps are still required to implement the provisions of C-70, such as drafting regulations, setting up the office, appointing the commissioner and building the IT infrastructure for a registry.
But advocates like Tohti and Yu say their sense of safety and security in Canada has deteriorated.
Unlike 20 years ago, when he first arrived here, Yu says he doesn’t feel safe in Canada.
Zhang, however, has no plans to stop speaking out — even if what she says angers the Chinese government.
“At the end of the day, Canadians will protect me from the Chinese government’s hand. I truly believe that.”
