Communist China’s long surveillance arm thrusts into Canada
March 8, 2019
State intimidation,electronic surveillance and acoustic weaponry can be highly effective. It's affecting China's 180,000 students in Canada, as well as journalists
..and that was 2008!!
China now openly mocks Canada-this is Vancouver
Real Estate in PEI is off the map everything going for a song
Allegedly Real Estate and Chinese Money Laundering are going hand in hand in PEI with scores of shady deals...
Chinese 'entrepreneur' Frank Zhou embraces Prince Edward Island for many reasons: the culture, the beauty of the place, the friendliness of the people and the opportunities for business, to name a prominent few.
The attachment has grown strong since the 35-year-old Zhou and his wife Sherry Huang first moved here in 2004.
Now the pair has further cemented their tie to the province with the arrival of their first child, a healthy baby boy named Jayden that weighed into the world last week at a solid 10 pounds and three ounces.
“Very blessed,’’ says the proud poppa during an interview in his large, stylish office located above the Anne of Green Gables Chocolates store on Queen Street in Charlottetown.
“Since this true Islander was born definitely I think we are more anchored in this province no doubt. P.E.I. is such a great place to raise a kid.’’
As for Zhou, his grandparents raised him in China - a commonplace practice in this state with a strictly enforced one-child policy.
While being an only child was often lonely, Zhou learned quickly to be independent. He was also taught to be sincere, honest, true and nice - the latter quality being one he considers key in enjoying ongoing business success.
Zhou started painting at age four and won silver as a teenager in a national competition of traditional Chinese painting. He aspired to be an artist or an architect.
Still holding a passion for painting, he is building an art studio in his large Stratford home that houses a number of attractive items imported from China including a beautiful wooden table intricately crafted specifically for the purpose of serving tea.
Zhou was a top student throughout high school in China. He came to Canada at age 20 to study at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver where he earned a degree in mathematics and met his future wife.
The couple went back to China together before settling in P.E.I. a decade ago when Huang was put in charge of a consulting company.
A couple years later, the pair started their own consulting company called Sunrise Group in both P.E.I. and China.
The business has blossomed to include a software development and graphic design company, a business development and management consulting firm, an English as a second language program, and a business called Anne in China that translated Anne of Green Gables into mandarin, selling 35,000 copies to date.
Most recently, Zhou decided to take a big dip into ice cream, helping bring the first Cows Creamery store to China.
The bold move to open close to 5,000 square feet of business space to sell Cows ice cream and merchandise (carefully tweaked to the tastes and fashion senses of the Chinese market) may seem to some like a nervy roll of the dice.
Zhou insists the move was in keeping with his cautious approach to business. He spent seven months doing in depth analyses of trends and data before moving ahead on the business venture.
“I’m not a risk taker and everything I do I need to prepare well,’’ he says.
He and his wife have steadily grown Sunrise Group into a successful collage of companies that employ close to 100 people split evenly between operations in P.E.I. and China.
Although he is CEO and president of Sunrise Group, Zhou considers his wife an equal partner in the business.
“We consider husband and wife life partner,’’ he notes.
“Life partner means you are partnering on everything...if you can partner on the business and you can get along well, that is a bonus - and we have that bonus. Very, very lucky that I have that bonus.’’
Zhou says he and Huang have different skill sets that blend well in partnering in Sunrise Group.
He is certainly more on the move than his wife, splitting his time between China and P.E.I.
Zhou, who has participated in several trade missions to China including acting as the logistics service provider to the Council of Federation Premiers’ Mission to China, hops on a plane every second month for a flight that sees him needing to adjust to the 12-hour time zone difference between China and P.E.I.
“It’s very tiring,’’ he says.
“So jetlag is the hardest thing that you deal with.’’
Despite his impressive business success to date, Zhou feels - and hopes — he has only scratched the surface.
He leans on advice from business mentors worldwide. Some of them, he notes, are very famous businessmen, but he would rather not name them.
“I think (age) 35 is a time to be ready to be more mature and more successful,’’ he says.
“I have my goals but whether we can achieve it or not depends on how hard you work at it. There are no free lunches.’’
Chinese entrepreneur Frank Zhou embraces Prince Edward Island for many reasons: the culture, the beauty of the place, the friendliness of the people and the opportunities for business, to name a prominent few.
The attachment has grown strong since the 35-year-old Zhou and his wife Sherry Huang first moved here in 2004.
Now the pair has further cemented their tie to the province with the arrival of their first child, a healthy baby boy named Jayden that weighed into the world last week at a solid 10 pounds and three ounces.
“Very blessed,’’ says the proud poppa during an interview in his large, stylish office located above the Anne of Green Gables Chocolates store on Queen Street in Charlottetown.
“Since this true Islander was born definitely I think we are more anchored in this province no doubt. P.E.I. is such a great place to raise a kid.’’
As for Zhou, his grandparents raised him in China - a commonplace practice in this state with a strictly enforced one-child policy.
While being an only child was often lonely, Zhou learned quickly to be independent. He was also taught to be sincere, honest, true and nice - the latter quality being one he considers key in enjoying ongoing business success.
Zhou started painting at age four and won silver as a teenager in a national competition of traditional Chinese painting. He aspired to be an artist or an architect.
Still holding a passion for painting, he is building an art studio in his large Stratford home that houses a number of attractive items imported from China including a beautiful wooden table intricately crafted specifically for the purpose of serving tea.
Zhou was a top student throughout high school in China. He came to Canada at age 20 to study at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver where he earned a degree in mathematics and met his future wife.
The couple went back to China together before settling in P.E.I. a decade ago when Huang was put in charge of a consulting company.
A couple years later, the pair started their own consulting company called Sunrise Group in both P.E.I. and China.
The business has blossomed to include a software development and graphic design company, a business development and management consulting firm, an English as a second language program, and a business called Anne in China that translated Anne of Green Gables into mandarin, selling 35,000 copies to date.
Most recently, Zhou decided to take a big dip into ice cream, helping bring the first Cows Creamery store to China.
The bold move to open close to 5,000 square feet of business space to sell Cows ice cream and merchandise (carefully tweaked to the tastes and fashion senses of the Chinese market) may seem to some like a nervy roll of the dice.
Zhou insists the move was in keeping with his cautious approach to business. He spent seven months doing in depth analyses of trends and data before moving ahead on the business venture.
“I’m not a risk taker and everything I do I need to prepare well,’’ he says.
He and his wife have steadily grown Sunrise Group into a successful collage of companies that employ close to 100 people split evenly between operations in P.E.I. and China.
Although he is CEO and president of Sunrise Group, Zhou considers his wife an equal partner in the business.
“We consider husband and wife life partner,’’ he notes.
“Life partner means you are partnering on everything...if you can partner on the business and you can get along well, that is a bonus - and we have that bonus. Very, very lucky that I have that bonus.’’
Zhou says he and Huang have different skill sets that blend well in partnering in Sunrise Group.
He is certainly more on the move than his wife, splitting his time between China and P.E.I.
Zhou, who has participated in several trade missions to China including acting as the logistics service provider to the Council of Federation Premiers’ Mission to China, hops on a plane every second month for a flight that sees him needing to adjust to the 12-hour time zone difference between China and P.E.I.
“It’s very tiring,’’ he says.
“So jetlag is the hardest thing that you deal with.’’
Despite his impressive business success to date, Zhou feels - and hopes — he has only scratched the surface.
He leans on advice from business mentors worldwide. Some of them, he notes, are very famous businessmen, but he would rather not name them.
“I think (age) 35 is a time to be ready to be more mature and more successful,’’ he says.
“I have my goals but whether we can achieve it or not depends on how hard you work at it. There are no free lunches.’’
Here is a quick look at the man behind businessman Frank Zhou:
• He loves cooking. Steaks, Italian cuisine, lobster and clams are among his favored food.
• He relishes extensive traveling with his wife Sherry Huang to experience different cultures.
• An avid golfer, he plays many rounds in both P.E.I. and China, swinging to a 10 handicap.
• Zhou likes listening blues, pop and country music. Or, as he notes: “Anything that sounds good...I do like beautiful rhythms.’’
• He is a stylish dresser, once being proclaimed as Prince Edward Island’s most dapperly attired man in a piece by former Guardian columnist Shane Ross.
• He wears a Buddhist bracelet of large wooden beads, but is not flaunting a religious preference. “I don’t have a specific religion for myself but I respect Buddhism and Christianity a lot,’’ he says.
What does a superpower do when pandas, private persuasion at the highest echelons and trumpeting the value of “harmony” are no longer winning global friends?
If you’re the leaders of increasingly autocratic China, you clamp down, especially on your own people. You spread an evermore elaborate system of surveillance, monitoring and pressure on citizens in your home country and in foreign lands.
You press your overseas contingent, including Chinese students you have in Canada, to attack disapproving speakers. You suddenly toss two Canadians in secret isolation cells in China and, this week, accuse them of spying. And then you dismiss Canadians as “white supremacists” if they get riled or defend the lawful arrest and bail of a Huawai executive in Vancouver.
Back home, you develop an invasive mobile phone app and make sure its downloaded by most of the 90 million members of your ruling Communist party. You take DNA samples from millions of the Uyghur Muslims in China, because genetics can be used to track their moves. You bully Chinese journalists at home and abroad.
And it works.
State intimidation and electronic surveillance can be highly effective, no matter which regime brings it into oppressive play.
It’s not just China. Often times in Canada it is global agents of Iran’s regime, who spy on the anxious Persian diaspora in this country. And this year Saudi Arabia expanded its watching game with a high-tech app by which male guardians could track the movement of Saudi women abroad.
When people know, or fear, they are being watched through technology or by clandestine agents of the state, they understandably grow nervous — and compliant.
The only hope is this culture of watchfulness doesn’t always work. A University of B.C. professor who specializes in Asia tells me how an apparent culture of subjugation is playing out on campus.
The majority of the many students from China that the professor comes across are self-censoring.
They don’t go to possibly contentious events about China. They don’t speak out in classes. A few patriotic ones feel it’s their duty to criticize the professor for exposing them to material that does not hold the world’s most populous country in a positive light. A few very privately offer the faculty member their thanks for the chance to hear the truth.
“Mostly, however, I find my undergrads in particular to be profoundly uninterested in politics and proud of their country’s rise,” said the professor, who, like many academic specialists on China these days, spoke on condition of anonymity. Metro Vancouver campuses host almost 50,000 of the more than 180,000 students from China in Canada.
Mandarin-language students in Canada are “the major beneficiaries of the rise” of China, said the professor. “They don’t want to rock the boat and the more aware ones are discreet about their critiques. They have decided to tread carefully, which suggests a consciousness that they could be under surveillance.”
Related
If that is the look-over-your-shoulder reality for students from China in B.C., imagine how it is for those on some American and Ontario campuses, which have had high-profile outbreaks of angry pro-China activism.
National Post reporter Tom Blackwell has covered China’s recent interferencein Canadian affairs. He’s dug into how University of Toronto student president Chemi Lhamo was barraged with a 11,000-name petition from people with Chinese names, demanding she be removed. A Canadian citizen with origins in Tibet, which China dominates, Lhamo was also targeted by hundreds of nasty texts, which Toronto police are investigating as possibly criminal threats.
A similar confrontation occurred in February at McMaster University in Hamilton, where five Chinese student groups protested the university’s decision to give a platform to a Canadian citizen of Muslim Uyghur background. Rukiye Turdush had described China’s well-documented human-rights abuses against more than a million Uyghurs in the vast province of Xinjiang in China.
The animosity and harassment is escalating. Even longtime champions of trade and investment in Canada from China and its well-off migrants are taken aback. Ng Weng Hoong, a commentator on the Asian-Pacific energy industry, is normally a vociferous critic of B.C.’s foreign house buyer tax and other manifestations of Canadian sovereignty.
But Ng admitted in a recent piece in SupChina, a digital media outlet, that Chinese protesters’ in Ontario “could shift Canadians’ attitude toward China to one of outright disdain and anger at what they see is the growing threat of Chinese influence in their country.”
It certainly didn’t help, Ng notes, that the Chinese embassy in Ottawa supported the aggressive protesters. “The story of Chinese students’ silencing free speech and undermining democracy in Canada,” Ng said, “will only fuel this explosive mix of accusations.”
Some of the growing mistrust among Canadians and others has emerged from multiplying reports of propaganda and surveillance in China.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, is attempting to control followers through a dazzling new app, with which China’s Communist Party members are expected to actively engage. The New York Times is reporting China has been swabbing millions of Uyghur Muslims for their DNA, with human rights activists maintaining the genetic samples could be used to track down those not already sent to “re-education” camps.
China’s pressure tactics are also coming down on journalists. The Economist reports students from China trying to enrol in Hong Kong’s journalism school are being warned against it by their fearful parents. They’re cowardly begging their siblings to shun a truth-seeking career that would lead to exposing wrongdoing in China, which could result in grim reprisals against the entire family.
Within the Canadian media realm there are also growing private reports that Mandarin-speaking Chinese journalists at various news outlets across this country are being called into meetings with China’s officials, leading some Chinese reporters to ask editors to remove their bylines from stories about the People’s Republic of China and its many overseas investors.
It’s always wise to be wary of superpowers. But China’s actions are cranking suspicion up to new levels. Compared to the flawed United States, which somehow still manages to win grudging admirers around the world, China’s surveillance tactics are making it almost impossible for that country to develop soft power with any appeal at all.
While some observers foolishly say many of the people of China are primed for more reform, openness and media freedom, it’s shockingly clear the leaders of China have, in the past year, have been actually going backwards, intent on more scrutiny, fascism, tyranny and repression.
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