‘YOU WILL FACE TROUBLE’
Beijing’s monitoring of its nationals abroad, and other people of Chinese origin, has implications for western democracies
In her new book “China Unbound: A New World Disorder,” the Star’s Joanna Chiu explores China’s growing influence around the world, including how its surveillance and human rights abuses extend far beyond its borders.
In “China Unbound: A New World Disorder,” Toronto Star reporter Joanna Chiu examines China’s growing influence around the world, including in western countries, and its surveillance and human rights abuses that increasingly extend beyond its borders.
Dear Joanna Chiu,
I am (Dan). I am from China. I just graduated from (a Quebec university). I hesitated for a whole night before deciding to write this email …
Now I am living in Canada, but I am living with fear from the Chinese government.
Dan, whose name I’ve changed to protect his identity, hails from one of China’s picturesque and relatively laidback southwestern provinces. He studied English diligently and was elated when a top Canadian university accepted his application to study law.
About a month before the start of the September 2017 session, when Dan was still in China, the university issued his student credentials, and with them he received access to a virtual private network (VPN). The tool allowed him — for the first time in his life — to scale the “Great Firewall of China” and access an uncensored internet.
Curious, the 21-year-old thought he might check out some overseas social media sites, connect with future classmates, and read world news; that way, he wouldn’t seem so out of touch once he arrived.
He would be joining a cohort of Chinese international students in Canada totalling around 140,000 that year.
He decided to take a few basic precautions, since he hadn’t left China yet. He signed up for Twitter using a fake name and fake location, and even set his gender to female.
To his amazement, the platform was already full of Chinese-language users. A whole network of bloggers, artists, independent journalists and scholars were engaging in a level of dialogue on Chinese politics he had never seen.
Once Dan arrived in Canada and began adjusting to a new city and a new university, he continued to browse Twitter in his dorm room.
He was too nervous to actually join in any conversations. He retweeted only three posts: the news that Nobel laureate and Chinese democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo had died, a short satirical video about President Xi Jinping, and a chart on levels of Chinese government corruption.
With only two followers, he wasn’t making a splash — but sharing those posts still gave him a thrill. His undergraduate studies did offer some opportunities to discuss international political systems, and the problem of lower-level government corruption wasn’t a completely taboo topic, but virtually all Chinese people know that publicly supporting high-profile dissidents or satirizing top leaders is strictly forbidden.
Months passed. Life got busy, and Dan didn’t have time to keep up his exploration of social media. He never got involved in any political activities on campus either.
Rather, he focused on learning about the Canadian legal system in hopes of staying and working in the country.
Then his father called him out of the blue, clearly disturbed. “Son, did you say something about the Chinese government on the internet? The public security bureau called us twice.”
China’s public security bureaus are police stations that also oversee some migration matters.