www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

CSIS has long-standing concern about Chinese spies operating here
孔学院是中共间谍战一部分

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/CSIS...7475/story.html

Technical advances, manipulating public opinion seen as main objectives

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun June 27, 2010

CSIS has been concerned about Chinese espionage for more than a decade.

Photograph by: Reuters, Vancouver Sun

Beijing's efforts at espionage and recruiting agents of influence in Canada has been a preoccupation of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) for many years.

There has been no clearer indication of how large the issue looms for CSIS than when the former director, Jim Judd, appeared before a Senate committee in April 2007, and said fully half of his organization's work involved monitoring Chinese government espionage efforts in Canada.

So there is a long heritage to the statement by the current CSIS director, Richard Fadden, that his organization has evidence that a few provincial and municipal politicians and officials have become "agents of influence" for foreign governments, with the clear inference that he meant primarily China.

Indeed, CSIS has always been quite open that it believes Canada is an inevitable target of the Beijing government's determination to activate susceptible Canadians to gather both useful secrets -- especially involving technological advances -- and to influence Canadian public policy in China's favour.

One of the first reports dealing with Chinese efforts to exert influence on other countries and governments was made public by CSIS in 1998. It is an examination of how Beijing used what is called "The United Front" to try to affect public opinion in Hong Kong ahead of the handover to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and minimize fears of repression.

The United Front, now a department of the Chinese government since it was resuscitated by former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978, has a long history -- starting with the war against Japan in the 1930s and 1940s -- of seeking to play on and use the natural patriotism of non-communist Chinese toward the Communist party's objectives.

"Because they are international in scope and occasionally coercive, activities associated with this work can amount to interference in the internal affairs of other nations," says the 1998 CSIS paper. "In this context, Canada cannot claim disassociation from the phenomenon, if only because of the sheer size of its Chinese community."

The report goes on to document the role played by the New China news agency, Xinhua, in United Front activities and it points out that the main targets for recruitment as agents of influence are not leftists sympathetic to communism. The main targets are business people who can be suborned by the inducements of contracts in China, and people who may rise to political or other positions of influence within Canadian society.

The CSIS report is careful to say, however, that "ethnic Chinese who have settled abroad should not be viewed as a fifth column." The number of people within the Chinese diaspora who are susceptible to Beijing's blandishments are relatively few, the report says.

The CSIS interest in Beijing's efforts to recruit agents of influence was refreshed in 2004 with the start of the Chinese government's worldwide program to place Confucius Institutes in academic and other institutions. The official Beijing line was that these institutes, paid for by the Chinese government, are only an attempt to win friends and calm fears about China's rise by spreading knowledge about Chinese culture and language.

Institutions in scores of countries have taken Beijing up on the offer, including at least seven colleges and universities in Canada, among them the British Columbia Institute of Technology. But some jurisdictions such as Sweden, and some states in Australia and the United States, have been wary of accepting the institutes, seeing them as another effort by Beijing to recruit agents of influence and perhaps acquire technical secrets from academic institutions.

Read more: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/CSIS...l#ixzz0t354SlOF

www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

Has BCIT sold out to Chinese propaganda?

The Confucius Institute presents itself as a goodwill gesture by Beijing to foster a cultural exchange on campus, but critics say it's really a tool for spying, infiltration and silencing opposition.

Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun

Published: Wednesday, April 02, 2008

There are deeply divided views about the Confucius Institute in Vancouver: Some say it's a goodwill gesture by Beijing to teach Chinese language and culture, while others believe it's part of a plot by an emerging superpower to infiltrate and influence foreign citizens and their governments.

Controlled and mostly funded by Beijing, the institute operates in partnership with the B.C. Institute of Technology. BCIT subscribes to the goodwill theory, but some human-rights lawyers say the Confucius Institute is a sophisticated attempt to persuade a world hungry for the Chinese goods and markets to ignore China's human-rights abuses.

A report from Canada's spy agency CSIS tends toward the latter view more than the former.

BCIT's Lawrence Gu, dean of the Confucius Institute, estimates 250 students have been involved with the institute part-time since it opened -- from workshops to evening classes to a one-day course in Mandarin.

Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun

Font:****"I'm surprised people are that naive about China," David Matas, a prominent Winnipeg lawyer, said in an interview. "On the other hand, the need for money is endless and bottomless and China's got lots of it. People are very easily persuaded by money to delude themselves."

BCIT officials scoff at suggestions that China has ulterior motives for setting up five Confucius Institutes in Canada and more than 100 around the world. Many operate in partnership with post-secondary schools, but the most recent deal China has signed in Canada is with the Edmonton public school board.

"The real purpose of the Confucius Institute is to build bridges between the host country, the host institution and China," said Jim Reichert, BCIT vice-president, research and international. "It creates a mechanism whereby people can learn about China -- the culture, the basics of language, the business structures and other things that make building that bridge easier."

The Confucius Institute occupies the top floor in BCIT's Vancouver campus. It has kept a low profile since it opened with a flourish more than two years ago as the first in Canada. That ceremony was attended by 200 guests, including senior officials from federal, provincial and municipal governments, a newsletter said at the time.

Deputy B.C. Premier Shirley Bond and Chen Zhili, a senior Chinese Communist Party official, unveiled the inaugural plaque.

The institute has received little attention since then, except for a flurry of media reports last year after a declassified intelligence report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service suggested China was using the institutes as a form of "soft power" to gain influence and stature abroad.

The Confucius Institute at BCIT offers only a handful of courses, has few students and has little obvious presence in the Seymour Street building. Its website, which is not kept up-to-date, says its mandate is to promote cultural exchanges, economic and business development, international trade, Chinese language and commercial cooperation.

While BCIT runs the day-to-day operations, it is required by Chinese bylaws to report to Beijing, which sets the rules and contributes undisclosed amounts to cover costs. Receipts leaked to The Vancouver Sun show that China has wired several hundred thousand dollars to its BCIT Confucius Institute.

CSIS director deserves praise, not criticism
中共已成功影响了西方的政策与政治文化

By Online Friday, July 2, 2010
- David B. Harris, For The Calgary Herald July 1, 2010

To intelligence officers, it is called “foreign influenced activity”—FIA. The law books call it manipulation that is “detrimental to the interests of Canada and . . . clandestine or deceptive or involve(s) a threat to any person.”

Either way, it is a direct threat to the constitutional order of Canada, and Canadians should be grateful to CSIS Director Richard Fadden for saying as much in his recent televised warning.

Those who find his portrayal that Canadian politicians are being used as pawns by foreign government agents of “influence activity” overblown may not understand its insidious possibilities. Or why Parliament specifically named FIA in the CSIS Act as one of only four defined threats to the security of Canada.

Fadden’s alert came to this: there may be Canadian municipal politicians, provincial cabinet ministers and perhaps some bureaucrats operating under the influence and control of foreign countries.

Fadden is worried because FIA is the jujitsu of intelligence assaults. “Influence ops” use a country’s own system of governance against it. Such operations enable foreign operators to secretly mould Canadian policy and decision-making to accommodate alien and possibly hostile interests. In the process, this activity menaces the principle of national sovereignty, democratic accountability and, in an age of strategic threats and mass terror, public safety.

Yet FIA can be among the most subtle and versatile of ventures known to the clandestine realm.

Foreign governments and entities launch influence operations for many reasons: to bend trading partners’ policies in their favour, or undermine opponents’ security and defence, for example. This manipulation classically involves an elected or appointed Canadian official knowingly working to the advantage of another country for a variety of reasons. East bloc intelligence defector Stanislav Levchenko enumerated those reasons long ago, in his famous acronym MICE: money, ideology, compromise and ego.

None of this is new to Canada. Think of the Soviet KGB handler’s ecstatic message to his agent, Laval University professor Hugh Hambleton, when the latter’s big Canadian International Development Agency job came through: “Your reports are appreciated. In your new position for the Canadian government you can perform a great service as a policy-maker.” Needless to say, the contemplated policy-making “service” wasn’t to Canada’s benefit.

No wonder the Russians reportedly pressed the prof to get a job at the Department of External Affairs and run for Parliament, where the policy-making prospects would have been up Moscow’s alley.

The vistas of FIA are endless. Take the hypothetical 20-something special assistant to a federal cabinet minister responsible for, say, trade relations. A foreign intelligence service might, through friendship or otherwise, encourage the assistant to lobby the minister for trade concessions running contrary to Canadian workers’ interest. Or, with the right access, a direct relationship might be struck with the minister, the better for him to represent the foreign country’s views in cabinet. Jobs and balance of trade could be jeopardized.

Imagine a nuclear specialist with a remit for Iran in Canada’s atomic regulatory sector. The specialist could advise technically-unsophisticated policy-makers about technology transfers that could safely be made to nuclearweaponizing Iran.

And then there is China. Fadden rightly signalled that China is a major problem in the foreign-influence department. In Canada, Beijing spies, bullies recalcitrant Canadian Chinese, funds “spontaneous” pro-Chinese demonstrations, and otherwise interferes in our democracy. It seduces politicians, public servants, academics, lawyers and other professionals with ego-boosting, expense-paid China tours and free—albeit wired—accommodation. All this, to buy access and influence. And there are indications that they’re getting it.

Some current and past Department of Foreign Affairs’ officials sit happily on the board of a major China-connected trade organization, their internationalist consciences un-niggled by China’s harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs. Given current benefits and future considerations, we should ask how such extracurricular involvement translates when bureaucrats and politicians go back to the office, build policy and hire future bureaucrats. The fact that some prominent beneficiaries of these networking systems graduate seamlessly into “consulting” in China, should be a big concern to the citizens they supposedly serve.

Then there was the former member of Parliament and earnest defender of democratic Taiwan’s independence. After a few too many Mainland boondoggles and hostesses, the MP suddenly embraced Beijing’s Taiwan-destroying “One China” policy, pressing this on Canadian ministers and officials.

Does Canada have the equivalent of the cashiered Afghan official who allegedly accepted multi-millions to—as Christopher Hitchens put it—“steer an enormous copper-extraction deal to China, a country whose resource imperialism is already a disgrace everywhere from North Korea to Darfur?” Hard to guess. But it will be worth watching the future career paths of Canadian ministers, officials and lobbyists who secured exceptional approvals from Ottawa for recently-announced extraction deals with Beijing-backed companies.

Fadden’s initiative has been followed by confusion about its timing and prime ministerial support. Sensing weakness, several politicians and opinion-makers—including a noticeable complement of Chineseconnected ones—have burst into hysterical ferocity, defending what they are pleased to regard as their honour. And perhaps other interests.

Even the diversity racket pitches in. Playing the “racism” trump, a voice or two from at least one publicly-supported immigrant settlement organization that is heavily dependent on Chinese immigration, claims absurdly that Fadden’s remarks interfere with “integration.” Guiltifying spectres are conjured from wartime Japanese-Canadian internment, plus generations-old images of Chinese immigrants without voting rights. “This type of allegation, then, true or untrue, is just not helpful,” a settlement lobbyist told the appreciative Vancouver Sun.

“True or untrue?”

Someone missed the memo from Han Guansheng, the Chinese Security Bureau defector who pinpointed Canada as the country most riddled with Chinese spies.

Will the pleading backfire and encourage more questions about how our elites govern, and what they do in their spare time? One thing is certain. Where our country’s self-determination is at stake, Canadians must not allow shrill, hurting—and possibly heavily vested—individuals to bury what has taken so long to bring to light.

Kudos to Fadden.

A lawyer with 30 years in intelligence affairs, David Harris is director of INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc, has consulted with intelligence organizations in Canada and abroad , and served with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 1988-90.

陈凯一语：

中国专制文化对世界的渗透与伤害常常不是通过强制，而是通过对人的“原弊”的发掘，开采与利用。 这有如一个花枝招展的、浸满爱滋与梅毒的妓女召唤着整个世界与她上床做爱一样。 其结果是极其致命的。 绝望的人们总是向往把他人也拉下水。 宦奴娼们也都奢望阉割所有的人。

Kai Chen's Words:

The fatal damage today by the Chinese despotic cultural infiltration and contamination onto the world is often not through coercion but through deception, moral corrosion, exploration/exploitation of human weaknesses and his negative traits. It is as if a very skilled prostitute, with the most modern make-ups, yet infected mortally with AIDS and syphilis, is trying to entice the entire world to go to bed with her. The result is just as fatal as any murder. The desperate often wants to drag others with them down the drain. The Eunuslawhores always want to castrate all others in the world.

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陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

Friday, July 09, 2010

Confucius Institutes, nothing but a nest of spies
孔学院 - 中共间谍渗透巢穴

[size=18]Are Chinese language centres in Canada culture clubs or spy outposts? [/size]

http://ahdu88.blogspot.com/2010/07/confu...g-but-nest.html

Adam McDowell, National Post · Friday, Jul. 9, 2010

Before McMaster University art history professor Angela Sheng leads a journalist on a tour of the year-old school of Chinese language and culture within the Hamilton, Ont., university, she invites him to sit for a cup of Kuan Yin tea, a Fujian Province specialty. After the tour, she suggests, they should catch lunch at one of her favourite local Chinese restaurants; in the meantime, would he like a Chinese calendar, or a VIP pass to the Institute’s spring gala? Between her chummy demeanour and the shock of fuschia through her hair, the director of the Confucius Institute at McMaster is more outgoing (and probably hipper) than the visiting-from-China faculty who work for her, but all are unfailingly polite and gracious.

Officially, Confucius Institutes are the Chinese equivalent of the Alliance Française or Goethe-Institut — the flourishing power’s catch-up response to European countries’ subsidized overseas language schools. At McMaster, students take courses in Chinese language and culture for credit; the Institute also organizes cultural events.

Last month, Brock University, based in St. Catharines, Ont., announced that this fall it will establish the third Confucius Institute in Ontario and the seventh in Canada, all established in the last five years. To China observers and counter-intelligence agents, the runaway expansion of Confucius Institutes represents a threat, both as an arm of Chinese “soft power” abroad and as a potential vehicle for intelligence gathering.

“I think there’s a concern from an intelligence point of view, definitely,” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a retired CSIS agent who served as Asia bureau chief during the 1990s and published a book last fall about foreign espionage in Canada.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya, who last year co-authored Nest of Spies with Fabrice de Pierrebourg (which discusses the Confucius Institute), says he suspects the schools may have been in the mind of CSIS head Richard Fadden when he warned television viewers last month of the need to be wary of foreign agents cozying up to Canadians with an interest in China.

“These Confucius organizations have not come out of philanthropic ideals,’’ Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said in an interview. ‘‘They are part of a strategy. And they are funded and run by organizations that are linked to Chinese intelligence services.”

Confucius Institutes have spread spectacularly, with hundreds sprouting around the world since the program began in 2004. In an interview with the state-run newspaper People’s Daily in March 2009, worldwide Confucius Institute chief Xu Lin said he expects the 500th centre to open this year. Even the governing Office of Chinese Language Council International, also known as Hanban, seems taken aback by its own success.

The typical arrangement works like this: Hanban provides the funding, primarily in the form of sending Chinese nationals qualified as language teachers. Demand for Mandarin instruction at all education levels far exceeds what Canadian schools and universities can provide, making the instructors the keystone of the equation.

The Chinese government agency may also furnish the program with textbooks and online versions of courses for distance learning. Some Confucius Institutes organize educational trips to China. For its part, the host institution provides facilities, Canadian students eager to learn Mandarin, and the institute director — Ms. Sheng, for example, remains a McMaster professor. Ordinarily, the host institution is a college or university, but there are exceptions: In Edmonton, the program has partnered with the public school board to offer Mandarin lessons for elementary and high school students.

Unlike some other Confucius Institutes, the program at McMaster is integrated with the host university such that students receive credit for courses taken.

“The Confucius Institute at McMaster is like other Confucius Institutes worldwide. The number one objective is to provide instruction in Chinese language as a second or foreign language. And, concurrent with this program, to help students understand and better absorb the language, [we] provide cultural activities,” Ms. Sheng says. (She shares the Chinese government’s habit of referring to Mandarin, China’s majority dialect as “Chinese.”)

Ms. Sheng is grateful to senior administrators at McMaster for plugging the Confucius courses into the degree-granting system. “For the CI at Mac to be here, at an academic university, offering for-credit courses, is an enviable position,” she says.

Although the specifics of arrangements between China and host institutions are often not revealed, Brock disclosed that Hanban will provide US$150,000 in startup cash and up to US$100,000 in annual project funds to support the Institute there. It will focus on allowing teachers to certify as Mandarin instructors in Ontario schools, thus establishing a qualification program where none existed previously. Like many such documents, the Brock University press release portrays the arrangement as a prestigious coup for the Canadian institution.

Greg Finn, a Brock vice-provost and associate vice-president who was involved in bringing the Institute and the university together, recalls the suggestion coming both from a faculty member and the head of a visiting delegation from Brock’s Chinese partner, Minjiang University.

“They both happened fairly close to each other, actually, in terms of the suggestions coming forward both from the Chinese government official and the faculty member here at the university — independently of each other,” he says.

David Matas, a Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize this year for his work investigating abuses in China, cautions that universities may get more than they bargain for after partnering with Hanban, suggesting Chinese consular officials lean on the universities to silence speakers whom that government considers nuisances.

“The Confucius Institutes are a problem of course because of money. The money becomes a dependency and the dependency is used for leverage in trying to get what [China] wants,” he says.

Mr. Matas says that when he and co-author David Kilgour travel for speaking engagements, “more or less wherever we go, the Chinese government tries to shut us up in various ways.”

He suspects universities with Confucius Institutes are especially susceptible to pressure. “In some places where we’ve gone, we’ve had last-minute cancellations at universities where they have Confucius Institutes … with no plausible explanation,” he says.

Last year, an Israeli judge found that a Tel Aviv University administrator had cancelled a show of artwork by Falun Gong members after the Chinese embassy asked him. The ruling said the administrator feared losing Confucius Institute classes, travel scholarships and conferences.

China has another stick to shake at Canadian universities, namely the threat of delisting them as recommended institutions for Chinese students heading abroad. In February, a few months after the University of Calgary awarded the Dalai Lama an honorary degree, the Chinese Ministry of Education started warning Chinese degree-seekers they could “face risks” if they decided to study there.

It is not known how many universities and educational bodies have been approached by Hanban and declined the opportunity to host a Confucius Institute. The University of British Columbia turned down an offer. Somewhat conspicuously, there is no Institute in Toronto, which has more residents of Chinese background than any other Canadian city.

Meanwhile, CSIS intelligence briefs on the Confucius Institute, produced between 2006 and 2009, obtained by the National Post through an Access to Information request (and arriving in a heavily redacted form), are short on specifics. But they exhibit the agency’s concern for the growth of China’s “soft power” and prestige among Canadians, and observe that “for China to achieve its goals, people must admire China to some degree.”

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya, the former CSIS agent, says the Chinese government’s espionage efforts abroad rely citizens of the target country who are, in Lenin’s words, “useful idiots.”

“The useful idiots are people who are so in love with China and so taken with Chinese culture, and so hungry to make friends, that they’re ready to do almost anything. And they will close their eyes to so many different things,” he says.

He says Chinese visitors will often not be enlisted as spies per se. They’re just people who might feed useful information to the government back home on occasion. Mr. Juneau-Katsuya imagines lucrative information as a beach’s worth of sand. Other intelligence services — the Russians, say — send around a man with a shovel under cover of night to dig up as much as he can.

The Chinese intelligence services, by contrast, “They will be sending 1,000 people to sunbathe all day. They’re going to play and have fun. At the end of the day, everybody will bring their towel back and shake off the sand in the same corner. It’s a very different way to collect information.”

Except instead of grains of sand, the retired spy says, China is interested in industrial information and intellectual property, and the identities of expatriates involved in the Falun Gong and other activities the Chinese government regards as “poisonous.”

According to the 2008 testimony of Chinese defector Chen Yonglin in a Vancouver courtroom, Chinese missions abroad can expend half their energy reporting back to the mother country about who among expats is involved with the Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) spiritual movement. A Falun Dafa Canada spokesman tells the Post his organization has nothing to report about the Confucius Institute.

McMaster’s Ms. Sheng, whose program comes across as anything but a den of spies, says she is aware that CSIS has monitored Confucius Institutes in Canada.

“Well, why not? If they want to, what’s the problem? This is a free country. If they want to keep a file, that’s up to them,” she says.

She says Canadian counter-intelligence officials will not uncover anything of interest. Indeed, there is no documented evidence to show that Confucius Institutes are anything other than what they appear and claim to be.

“The CI is in an academic institution. What we do is teach the Chinese language, Chinese culture. We’re not doing espionage. We’re not touching politics.” She refers to an introductory language class in which this reporter was allowed to sit in: “In that class today, they were teaching about renting an apartment, right?”

Asked if she has concerns about China’s human rights record, Ms. Sheng deflects the conversation back to Canada: What about our prisons? What about treatment of aboriginal Canadians?

“There are problems in every society. Just pointing a finger is very easy. But it doesn’t really help to move forward. If we want to move forward, it requires engagement and better education. And it requires an open mind,” she says.

“I can imagine for people who don’t speak the lanuage, who don’t have the background, are not open-minded, as soon as they see a red [Chinese] flag, they’re going to react reflexively. That doesn’t help.”

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya says he understands why Canadians want to learn Mandarin and get more familiar with China.

“I’m the first one to say that Chinese culture is a fascinating. We’re talking thousands of years of phenomenal philosophy, art, music, you name it. I myself got seduced by Asia,” says Mr. Juneau-Katsuya. “What I’m saying is people should be aware. In the field of intelligence and espionage, the name of the game is the human being.”