A street in Chinatown in Vancouver, Canada, May 28, 2020. CHINA NEWS SERVICE/GETTY IMAGES
Hours before the 34th anniversary commemoration of the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square student movement, held June 4 at a park on Vancouver Bay, Kay (his first name has been changed at his request), 28, announced an anonymous message received call. “You’d better not go there,” his interlocutor advised him, it’s getting hot and we’re never safe from incidents that could break out…”
The young woman, administrative assistant, is originally from Shanghai and has been living in Canada for four years. She hasn’t given up coming here. To be on the safe side, she adorned herself with a hat and a black mask that took up half her face, but specified: “I’m under no illusions. They already have my photo on their computers. She is used to such intimidation, she says: “They don’t forbid us anything, they just want to impress us. It is me who fights for freedoms in Canada, but it is my relatives who remain in the country who risk reprisals,” she laments.
Behind the indefinite “she” that Kay uses is the invisible hand of Beijing; the pressure exerted by Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on one of its key diasporas outside Asia. Of the 2.6 million residents of the Vancouver metro area, one in five is of Chinese descent.
Suspicion of China’s interference in federal elections
Located on the Pacific Ocean, with the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop, Vancouver resembles its American counterpart, San Francisco, California. The city has been shaped by several waves of migration from China. The workers who came to build the Canada-Pacific railroad line joined the first adventurers drawn by the gold rush in the 1880s.
A century later, opponents of Chinese “normalization” of Hong Kong succeeded wealthy businessmen of the former British colony, who in a few years sent “Hongcouver’s” real estate prices skyrocketing. Today one of the most expensive cities in the world. In addition, the daughter of Huawei founder Meng Wanzhou lived for almost three years in one of her luxurious residences in the posh Shaughnessy district, where she was placed under house arrest, as required by the American judiciary. The affair had sparked an unprecedented diplomatic crisis between Canada and China.
Also read: Article reserved for our subscribers Between Canada and China, new diplomatic tensions
Tensions between the two countries have flared up again since Canadian media (Global Television Network and The Globe and Mail) revealed in November 2022 that Canadian intelligence agencies suspected the Chinese government of multiple meddling to influence the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
You have 74.77% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.