Beijing's Ministry of State Security media links in British Columbia

Former RCMP analyst unspools media web spawned by charismatic Chinese spy

MSS officer YANG Hengjun appeared to go undercover as a democracy blogger in Guangzhou before setting up a media network in Vancouver, a former RCMP analyst alleges. (Photo from ABC News story)

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”).