‘I love Canada’: B.C. NDP candidate denies accusation he is an ‘underground member’ of Chinese communist party

Brian Hutchinson | 13/05/07 | Last Updated: 13/05/07 10:01 PM ET

Darryl Dyck/The Canadian PressB.C. NDP candidate Frank Huang says his his Chinese Communist Party affiliation was pragmatic and ended a dozen years ago.

VANCOUVER — Frank Huang was a Chinese communist. He joined the Communist Party of China voluntarily in 1991 after being assigned a government job in Guangdong that had him arranging visits and tours for Chinese expatriates. Mr. Huang is now the B.C. NDP candidate in Richmond Centre, a suburban Vancouver riding with a large Asian population. He says he decided to compete in the B.C. election to better serve his adopted country and province. “I love Canada,” says the 49-year-old.

He insists his Communist Party affiliation was merely pragmatic and it ended a dozen years ago after he left mainland China for B.C. and began a career in journalism. Others aren’t so sure about that. Concerns were first raised publicly in late April, when the co-chairman of something called the Premier’s Chinese Community Advisory Committee challenged Mr. Huang’s integrity during a candidates forum in Richmond.

Kenneth Fung is a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia and has sat on various volunteer advisory committees in B.C. for decades, under six different  provincial premiers. He served as the Chinese Community committee chairman until the election writ was dropped last month and the group was dissolved. He does not work for Premier Christy Clark and he is not a B.C. Liberal member, according to party staff.

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But last month, Dr. Fung contacted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the national spy agency, asking it to look closely at Mr. Huang. “So far I have received nothing, not even confirmation of my request,” Dr. Fung said in email he sent to the National Post on Tuesday.

He also spread word around Vancouver’s Chinese-language media: Mainland Chinese communists may have infiltrated B.C. politics, he suggested. He didn’t stop there. A few days ago, Dr. Fung emailed the mainstream press. “The people of B.C. deserves [sic] to be informed about this dangerously flawed candidate background checking by the NDP,” he wrote.

“I am concerned that Frank Huang is hiding his background,”;Dr. Fung told the National Post in an email he sent Tuesday. (Dr. Fung said that he is in Lourdes, France, “doing volunteer medical work” and could only be interviewed by email rather than telephone.)

The Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityKenneth Fung: "I am concerned that Frank Huang is hiding his background,"

“I am concerned that if indeed  the NDP becomes the next B.C. government, a [sic] MLA like Frank Huang would have access to many government confidential data and policy,” he wrote. “He can secretly rejoin (if indeed he is no longer as he claims) the Chinese Communist party anytime and I suspect he is presently an underground member.”

Dr. Fung has also taken to local talk radio, slagging Mr. Huang’s language skills. “I’ve got news for you,” he told CKNW radio host Sean Leslie late last month. “Did you know that the NDP is running a candidate in Richmond Centre by the name of Frank Huang who can’t really communicate in English?”

That was petty and it is false. Worse, Dr. Fung made the CKNW call under an assumed name, referring to himself as “Mike in Vancouver.”

Why would an esteemed, purportedly apolitical UBC professor who helps the infirm in Lourdes pull such a stunt? “When I call in to CKNW Leslie show, I was nobody,” Dr. Fung struggled to explain via email on Tuesday. “I did not want to use my real name because I do not want any reprisal. But now I know the NDP is monitoring  everything!”

Dr. Fung’s more serious allegations about candidate Huang are apparently based on “people well-connected with the Chinese government,” whom he refuses to name, and on exchanges he’s had with the B.C. Conservative Party’s candidate in Richmond Centre, Lawrence Chen.

Mr. Chen, who also immigrated to Canada from mainland China, is founder of the Nation Alliance Party, an obscure, B.C-based political organization that ran candidates in the 2008 federal election and in the 2009 provincial election.

In 2007, says Mr. Chen, he was interviewed in his Richmond home by none other than Frank Huang. “He told me that he was working on behalf of the People’s Daily, which is China’s Communist Party newspaper,” Mr. Chen recalls. “He said he wanted to visit with me in secret and he would write a story about the Nation Alliance. He said he was still a Communist Party member.”

Mr. Huang said in an interview Tuesday that he was merely a freelancer writing from Canada and that the People’s Daily “thought a story about the Nation Alliance would be interesting to readers.”

He did not tell Mr. Chen that he was a communist, he says. He only joined the party to improve his employment prospects in China and it worked, he says, adding that his membership simply expired when he moved to Canada. The B.C. NDP was made aware of all that when he won the party’s nomination in Richmond Centre. “They said it’s not a problem because I’m now a Canadian citizen,” he says.

National Post