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Business

One of the emerging debates in Canada concerns the future of China’s telecom giant, Huawei, which is widely believed to have links with China’s People’s Liberation Army. Huawei has little significant business in the United States and was recently banned from participating in Australia’s 5G wireless network project. Now Canada is debating that issue, despite the fact that the firm has established a vast network of relationships with all of Canada’s major telecom carriers and Canada’s leading research universities. Two former directors of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service—Richard Fadden and Ward Elcock—as well as John Adams, the former head of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), told the Globe and Mail in August that Canada should also ban Huawei from supplying equipment for a 5G network.14

Universities

An example from academia suggests the efficacy of Canadian efforts to combat China’s influence operations. At one West Coast Canadian university with large numbers of students from the PRC in undergraduate humanities and social science courses, where potentially divergent views of China and Chinese political behavior regularly form part of the curriculum, there has been no observation of the pressures documented in Australia, where professors are often openly criticized by Chinese students for proposing less flattering ways of looking at China. However, at that university’s for-profit “international transition program,” which offers international students who did not qualify for admission the chance (for a fee) to prepare to meet entrance requirements, university administrators have generally failed to integrate the students who are overwhelmingly PRC Chinese with poor English ability into the broader campus community. The result is that, even without PRC consular pressure, there is a strong pro-PRC culture of “political correctness” that conforms to United Front goals without the effort to promote it. It appears that social isolation is the driving factor in this case.

Conclusion

Much of China’s influence activities in Canada are a legitimate extension of the public diplomacy in which all nations engage. The pressing issue is when and where China crosses the line between influence and interference. Canadian experience so far suggests more influence work than interference. However, there are clear examples where such influence has become interference. So far, it would appear that the key variable for the relatively low impact of Chinese state efforts (or proxies) turns out to be Canadian practice more than Chinese state efforts. That is, the internal diversity of the Canadian Chinese community blunts political efforts by any one political party (including the CCP). More generally, Canadian practices of multiculturalism,

Appendix 2

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