After Judy Wang left China, she thought she had found a safe haven in Canada. But she soon realized her family members back home are basically hostages being used as leverage by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“Even though I’ve left China, my family is still constantly fearful for me, since the CCP’s long arm stretches overseas,” said Toronto-based Wang, who is using an alias to protect herself and her family from being further targeted.
Conservative member of Parliament Michael Chong speaks to reporters on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on May 3, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)
Since moving to Canada Wang has worked as a journalist, often writing about the CCP’s human rights abuses and other topics censored in China. But this brought retaliation against her family back home.
Her father was arrested in 2012 when he tried to visit her abroad, and was slapped with a false charge of attempting to incite subversion. The police demanded 30,000 yuan (C$5,800) in return for his release, and prohibited him from travelling overseas. He had a stroke soon afterwards that left him paralyzed.
Wang said the police launched renewed threats against her family as a result of her reporting on CCP corruption and the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in China—issues the authorities deem sensitive. They threatened her mother by saying they could easily kidnap Wang in Canada and bring her back to China. They put so much pressure on Wang’s mother to try to force her to stop reporting negatively on the regime and retract the articles she had already written that Wang decided to cut all ties with her parents.
“The threats put my family under a lot of pressure, especially my mother. She couldn’t see me, her only child, for so many years,” Wang said.
The CCP’s coercion tactic of threatening, and actually harming, the families of Chinese-Canadians targeted by the regime was recently spotlighted after the case of Conservative MP Michael Chong came to light. Chong’s family in Hong Kong was reportedly threatened after he sponsored a motion in the House of Commons in February 2021, declaring the CCP’s mistreatment of Uyghurs a genocide, reported The Globe and Mail. The report was later confirmed by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Although Ottawa declared Chinese consul Zhao Wei, who was involved in the threat against Chong’s family, persona non grata on May 8, the MP noted that his case is not unique. The CCP has long been “targeting the families of Canadians in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to coerce and intimidate Canadians here on Canadian soil,” he said in the House of Commons on May 4.
Wang’s experience is just one of several similar stories recounted to The Epoch Times through interviews with Chinese expatriates in Canada.
Coercing a Canadian to Spy
Toronto-based Michael Xu, a Canadian citizen who acted in a 2009 made-in-Canada TV series critical of the Chinese regime, said his brothers back in China faced repeated threats from the police shortly after. By harassing his family, Xu said, the police’s aim was to coerce him into spying covertly for the regime.
“The police showed my brothers the films in which my father and I had acted in; afterwards, they tried to get us to ‘cooperate with them’ in some works here overseas,” Xu said, adding that the police even promised them money for spying.
They turned down the offer, and the authorities continued to threaten Xu’s brothers, demanding money or gifts as a form of appeasement, he said.
Another Toronto resident, Will Hu, had a similar experience of the police calling his father back in China over his role as an extra in a 2019 film that exposed the CCP’s repression of religious freedom. Hu said the threat against his family was less severe, which he attributed to the relatively small role he played in the film.
Vancouver resident Anna Liang said her family members in China were harassed by local police in the summer of 2021. Liang believes the harassment is connected to her daughter’s work as a journalist in Canada.
She said her daughter, Sabrina, who then also lived in Vancouver, was stalked by Chinese agents and her information was passed on to the Public Security Bureau in China. Local police subsequently contacted Liang’s mother, sister, and ex-husband (Sabrina’s father) back in China asking for an interview in order to interrogate them about Hu and Sabrina’s situation in Canada.
“This behaviour from the local police has seriously threatened the safety of my family,” Liang said. “It also made my family worried about our safety in Canada.”
‘You Will Always Lose’
The CCP’s campaign of intimidation extends beyond just dissidents. According to several Chinese Canadians who spoke with The Epoch Times, even those who simply hold beliefs that are subject to repression by the regime in China have reported harassment of their families back home.
Sonia Qiu, a practitioner of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong now living in Toronto, was detained by the Chinese authorities in 2009 and subjected to surveillance even at her workplace after her release. She eventually fled to Canada as a refugee, but the harassment didn’t end there. The CCP continued its intimidation tactics abroad by threatening her family back home, she said.
Qiu’s daughter, who also lives in Canada, learned that her father had received at least two calls from the police in China inquiring about them. Qiu said that out of fear for each other’s safety, the family has cut all forms of contact.
“I am afraid. I was hesitant to speak out because I fear that my family and friends in China will face greater threats,” she said, adding that she finds it incredulous that the regime continues harassing her when she has been living outside of China for more than a decade.
Meanwhile, her friends and former colleagues in China have also distanced themselves from Qiu out of fear.
“Even if [the CCP] didn’t make direct threats, they have achieved their goal of intimidation,” Qiu said, noting that a single threat is enough to force compliance with the CCP’s wishes, after decades of hard lessons that the Chinese people have learned as to what the regime will do if one doesn’t cooperate.
Huang Hua, a Falun Gong adherent, speaks at a rally outside of the Chinese Consulate in Toronto, on April 25, 2023. Huang said family members in China face continued harassment and intimidation from the communist authorities. (Andrew Chen/The Epoch Times)
Toronto resident Huang Hua told The Epoch Times in a recent interview that her family suffered financial consequences for not toeing the line in the face of the CCP’s intimidation tactics.
Huang, also a Falun Gong practitioner, fled to Canada as a refugee to escape persecution in China, as Falun Gong adherents have been subjected to a severe campaign of repression by the regime since 1999. But her father and sister still live in China, and local police have repeatedly harassed them as part of their intimidation tactics against Huang.
Her father, who lives in Zhejiang Province, has received warnings from local police for trying to contact her. In October 2019, police raided his home, which Huang believes was to search for evidence to convict him for practising Falun Gong.
When Huang’s father moved to Sichuan Province to stay with her sister during the COVID-19 pandemic, local police continued to harass the family to try and force them to renounce their beliefs, she said. In September 2022, when Huang decided to bring her father to Canada, they discovered that his life savings of 700,000 Chinese yuan (C$138,000) had mysteriously disappeared from his bank account.
“As an individual [in China], it’s impossible to get away when the government targets you. You will always lose,” Huang said, noting that the family gave up trying to secure a lawyer.
“In China, the rule of law does not exist.”