There have been developments. . .

In China, and in the murky world of Beijing's friends in high places in Canada, and maybe even in Canada's long-overdue and much hinted-at and officially imminent China policy.

It’s really kicking off in China.

This is the big story. It’s bigger than anything since Tiananmen. I’ve been up most of the night following underground livestreams from Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. Netizens have overwhelmed the censors. Protests have erupted at more than 50 universities across the country.

Here’s Josh Chin, deputy China editor for the Wall Street Journal and co-author of the just-published Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control: “Others have expressed this idea already, but for posterity: I spent close to 15 years in China between 1999 and 2020 and never witnessed anything remotely like this.”

The linguist Simon Moser, author of A Billion Voices: “I've lived in China for 30 years, and I've never seen such a brazenly open and sustained expression of rage against the PRC govt. WeChat is exploding with protest videos and furious vitriol, and civil disobedience is becoming rampant.”

This photo from Eva Rammeloo (@eefjerammeloo), China correspondent with the Dutch daily Trouw, shows protesters in Shanghai at Wulumuqi (Urumqi) Road, holding white sheets of paper. “We don’t need to write anything on it. It is a symbol of the revolution of the people.”

There’s only scant conventional news coverage owing to Beijing’s near-total control of the news media in the country, foreign and domestic, and the regime’s censorship and manipulation of social-media platforms.

It’s really kicking off, and it’s not just about the regime’s brutal totalitarian Covid restrictions. It’s the way those restrictions are being used to test the regime’s ability to control every aspect of the everyday lives of the people.

It’s about a mounting disaffection with Xi Jinping that broke into the open with Bridge Man, the protester who hung banners from the Sitong Bridge in Beijing last month. “We want freedom, not lockdowns; elections, not rulers. We want dignity, not lies. Be citizens, not slaves.” What a hero. His name is Peng Lifa (彭立发), and his online handle is, or was, Peng Zaizhou (彭载舟),

At the massive and pretty well permanently locked-down Foxconn iPhone factory in Zhengzhou last week it was meagre rations, filthy dormitories and rumours about a pay cut that finally drew hundreds of workers into violent confrontations with security forces.

The Apple iPhone supplier ended up offering the protesters the equivalent of $1,400 to quit and leave Zhengzhou. On Friday, the authorities locked down most of the city of six million people, forcing people to stay inside their apartments.

The China-wide protests are also about the way Covid-19 restrictions, checkpoints and shutdowns are targeting minorities. In Urumqi, capital of the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” where China’s Muslim minorities are subjected to forced labour, internment and other forms of vicious persecution aimed at their cutural obliteration, a catastrophic fire last Wednesday has accelerated the waves of rage sweeping China.

Much of the city of four million people had already been locked down for 100 days - residents are not allowed to leave their homes - when fire engulfed an apartment tower. The building’s fire-escape doors were reportedly locked from the outside and fire crews were delayed in getting to the building owing to quarantine rules. At least ten people were killed in the blaze.

How to keep up? On Instagram follow China Uncensored, Northern Square or Shanghai Observed. On Twitter, follow the Wall Street Journal’s chief China correspondent Lingling Wei or the WSJ’s Stella Yifan Xie, Fan Wenxin and Cao Li, and Deutsche Welle’s East Asia correspondent William Yang has been doing amazing work. Also Songpinganq, who monitors Chinese TikTok posts that the censors can’t keep up with and transmits them via a VPN that burrows under Xi Jinping’s Great Firewall, formally known as the Golden Shield Project.

Also, Freedom House has just established a China Dissent Monitor. Not a moment too soon.

Poignantly, the posts on Weibo about the Xinjiang fire were put up under the last post from Li Wenliang, the whistleblowing doctor whose death from Covid three years ago set off an avalanche of online fury. The authorities had punished Li for trying to get the word out about the origins of the worldwide Covid outbreak, in Wuhan.

Intermission:

No paywall today.

Not Covid, I’m happy to report, but wow. I bailed from both my Ottawa Citizen & National Post column this past week, and from the newsletter I’d hoped to have out by Thursday, and it didn’t help that an Iran-related story I’ve been working on hadn’t exactly gestated in time anyway.

Well on the mend now though. I think I managed to sound sufficiently coherent on the National Post podcast about Beijing’s interference operations in this country, so have a listen if you like, here, or on Spotify here.

Also percolating: More federal cash for the anti-Israel lobby; there have been developments in the case of that terror-group affiliate that was granted safe haven and fundraising ability by Ottawa, and apparently no "rule of law" binds the Trudeau government in its invocation of the Emergencies Act. I’d hoped to have these items ready and out in this newsletter by now. They’re coming soon, so stay tuned.

Is Ottawa ever going to wise up?

Out of the blue, after years of promises, Canada’s new China policy is being unveiled this weekend, maybe, or sort of. The media advisory arrived on Friday afternoon - a choice of time of day and day of the week that isn’t auspicious for government candour or clarity about anything.

By the time you read this, perhaps, a press conference will be underway in Vancouver.

My newsletter this past Tuesday (National Security In A "Post-National" State) was pretty much a history of what we know about Beijing’s influence-peddling in Canada. So keep it for your files, along with Smoke, Mirrors and Baloney in Bali and Dominic Barton & the Damage Done, Part 1 & Part 2, for the specifics about the Chinese Communist Party’s friends in high places, and the backstory on the reasons why we haven’t had a “China policy” the Trudeau government would dare admit to publicly.

We’ve been waiting for years. This was my take two years ago, almost to the very day. when the new policy was said to be imminent even then: The point is to give the impression that something is being done, some new action is being taken, or some policy is under close consideration and will be imminently revealed, when in fact nothing is being done, and there’s nothing new, and nothing is in the offing – at least nothing you want anybody to know about.

As you might imagine, I’ll be watching things closely today.

On the subject of Beijing’s perfectly-legal influence peddling:

Do remember: In Canada, the CSIS Act defines foreign-influenced activities as “activities within or relating to Canada that are detrimental to the interests of Canada and are clandestine or deceptive or involve a threat to any person.” So, if the Trudeau government doesn’t consider Beijing’s well-documented influence-pedding racket to be “detrimental” to Canadian interests - and in fact encourages and participates in those operations, and does so in plain sight, and continues to block the “small but important step” of a foreign-influence registry - it’s all perfectly legal.

Following Sam Cooper’s scoops for Global News about Beijing-directed election interference, and after I recorded that podcast, the latest comes from the Post’s Tom Blackwell. It’s about an elections intervention group just established in Mississauga, Ontario with direct lines into and out of Xi Jinping’s “magic weapon” overseas strongarm agency, the United Front Work Department.

Founded last Sunday, the new group’s intention is the work of “incubating Chinese ethnic candidates” to contest Canadian elections. That’s not just some “allegation” contained in CSIS briefings the prime minister says he didn’t see but some journalist got ahold of. It’s how the “Chinese Council for Western Ontario Elections” describes itself.

The candidate-incubation council is headed by Guo Baozhang, who is also executive president of the Canada Toronto Fuqing Business Association (CTFBA). It’s not some unverified allegation that the CTFBA was established under the guidance of Xi Jinping’s United Front. That’s what the CTFBA says about itself.

It’s not just an international human rights organization that has identified the CTFBA-owned property in Markham, Ontario as the location of one of those Chinese “police stations” the RCMP is investigating at the moment. It’s the CTFBA’s headquarters, and the CTFBA is the station’s landlord.

Another CTFBA bigshot on hand for last Sunday’s convocation is Wei Chengyi, the purported “intermediary” for the $250,000 Beijing’s Toronto consulate is reported to have disbursed to a network active in the 2019 federal elections. which Prime Minister Trudeau says CSIS never told him about.

Paying subscribers will remember Wei from my last newsletter, National Security in a ‘Post-National’ State. He’s the guy in all those pictures with cabinet ministers, MPs and MPPs. Wei is a former overseas delegate to the Chinese government’s National People's Congress and also “Permanent Honorary Chairman” of the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations. The CTCCO’s president, Xinyong Lin, is a former delegate to the Beijing regime’s Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference.

Yet another CTFBA bigshot is Weng Guoning, who was another prominent figure at last Sunday’s meeting. Weng was also the founding director of the Chinese Council for Canadian Elections when it registered under the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act in 2019.

Weng is also the CTCCO’s regular chairman, the guy Real Story’s paying subscribers (serious tip of the hat again to Found In Translation researchers) may recall boasting about his several meetings with Wan Lijun, head of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (ACFROC), a “peak” organization in the United Front’s overseas operations. And for the hell of it and for all subscribers this time, here’s Weng smiling for the camera with Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau: “Really nice to see you, Guoning. You’re not interfering in Canadian elections are you?” Weng Guoning: “Well, nothing illegal of course. And thanks for keeping it that way.”

See, that’s why you should subscribe if you don’t already, and take out a paying sub if you feel guilty I’m working for you for free on a weekend because I feel guilty about not getting my usual column in and a second newsletter out this past week. Go on, you’ll feel better about yourself. One click. Or if you already get the big picture with a paid sub, you can give the gift of one for somebody who’d find the Real Story useful.

Anyway a couple weeks ago I noted in the National Post, What's it going to take for the Liberals to crack down on Chinese subterfuge?, that Trudeau had claimed this: “There are already significant laws and measures that our intelligence and security officials have to go against foreign actors operating on Canadian soil.” And the House Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs had heard just days earlier from the horse’s mouth, which is to say the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, that Canada’s intelligence agencies don’t even have “the tools to understand the threat” foreign actors pose.

Well, last Tuesday the Post’s Blackwell got his hands on speaking notes for CSIS director David Vigneault, 'Weak link' Canada urgently needs new law to face modern security threats: spy agency, pointing out that Canadian law requires this country’s primary intelligence agency to bumble along with protocols and tools from the days of “fax machines and phone books.”