Make the sacrifice of ethical consumption. Refuse to support companies that are in the business of selling technology, weapons and other tools of subjugation to the party or allies of the party.
The best possible interpretation of this comment is that you are warning of influence from people who have ties to the CCP. The worst possible interpretation, however comes from:
> Wherever the Mainland Chinese are expanding influence and power, resist. Do not trust them.
> If you are in Canada, and especially if you are in Vancouver or Toronto and any other areas where there's a major recent Mainland Chinese immigrant population, keep a very close eye on your neighbors as they, as required by Chinese laws and CCP's modus operandi, likely have set up local CCP branches wherever there are more than a dozen of them.
This is flat-out unsubstantiated, and reads like a vitriolic smearing of a broad class of minorities. You are asking for the impossible task of somehow knowing who to trust. What of second or third-generation immigrants? Are you going to judge people's recency by their accents, or perhaps just that they look Chinese? In the absence of that knowledge, what you are actually advocating for is broad discrimination and paranoia against 17% of the world's population, and the very small percentage of that who decided to start a life in another nation.
I understand this is a fairly extensive claim, and possibly very hard to swallow from a liberal, treat-everyone-as-an-individual tradition, so allow me to substantiate it.
In 2017, a group of Chinese scholars visiting UC Davis were discovered to have set up a CCP cell[1] that was later dissolved due to FARA. The South China Morning Post article says the CCP charter[2] requires any organization where people work that has three or more full party members to establish a party branch. It is also said that this practice has been going on since at least the 80s, when there were very very few Mainland Chinese working overseas, with a brief interruption after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
That same year, the Australian Secretary of the Department of Foreign and Affairs and Trade has delivered as speech addressing the then recent revelation of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association's suppression of foreign Chinese international student's dissent[3] by reporting them to the Chinese embassy. This is the same CSSA that exists in every sizable university around the world, in which many believe it's a part of the United Front branch of the CCP that infiltrates foreign universities[4]. Similarly, an institute called the Confucius Institute is also attached to many universities worldwide, conducting so-called cultural exchange programs, which are in fact subversive influence operations[5].
Given that the CCP has almost 90 million members[6], that exerting "soft-power" has been an explicit goal for at least the past 15 years[7], that not every democratic country has an equivalent of FARA or the Communist Control Act, that Mainland Chinese students are the most numerous foreign student makeup by a wide margin in every major higher education institution around[8] the[9] world[10], that the Chinese has had a history of converting immigrants to voters for candidates favorable to the CCP[11], and their extensive surveillance and control methods inside and outside of China, I conclude that the CCP's tentacles has substantial worldwide reach, and that we are in fact dealing with the world's most extensive espionage and subversion network in history. This is not paranoia.
You are right, if you don't speak Mandarin, it's very hard to tell who's a Mainlander. But if you are in a hiring position, you will know their national origin, and I would urge you to keep a closer eye on your Mainland Chinese colleagues while not stepping outside the boundaries of any anti-discrimination law. If you are lucky, (or unlucky), you will have caught them stealing corporate secrets or IP, or breaching coworkers privacy before any damage is done. If you are unable to distinguish them, I would urge you to err on the side of caution in your personal and political life. A regular Mainland Chinese, despite their best intentions, are often unwilling to give up their Chinese citizenship due to family ties. The CCP is known to use that as leverage to turn them into agents when needed. As a person growing up in Hong Kong, from personal experience I know how the underground communists conduct their business very well. If you are able, you can attempt to free them from the CCP's control, but you will most likely be unsuccessful and pay a heavy price along the way. Therefore, I believe the best course of action right now is to contain the CCP while giving support to your governments' response to their new found realization of the not always clear, but certainly present danger of the CCP. Using state power to exert pressure on the CCP to free the Chinese seems to me the most effective way of creating a more honest and cohesive global society.
But the sum of members, sponsors, and even half-hearted supporters of these and similar organizations does not add up to 1.3 billion or so nationals, no? I don't think it's a liberal or conservative stance to practice arithmetic. You can say that some Mainland Chinese are not trustworthy, but you just cannot conclude that most or all have nefarious intent.
Insisting that all Chinese immigrants (or is it only nationals now?) are likely CCP agents does seem to fit the definition of paranoia. Acting fully on paranoia of this magnitude will just bring about more extreme thoughts--and not to mention expressions of racism given the ambiguity between what being Chinese means in the west. What exactly is the containment and liberation strategy? A repeat of the US's Chinese Exclusion Act, internment camps, and a return to the good ol' "Better dead than red" days?
Every working-age Chinese national I've gotten to know in the US would jump at the chance to get a green card, get citizenship, and get their aging parents over. There's a separate debate to be had there, but my anecdotal experience has shown that most immigrants are motivated by hard work and seeking a better life for them and their family, and not by surreptitious and opportunistic exploitation of their new home.
On soft power for those few that try to project it, they don't seem to be doing well as your links readily show controversies and suspicion. If anything we should be more concerned about soft power projection into Africa and the cheap UN votes it buys.
Let's only consider Chinese Communist Party members, which is still a deeply Leninist organization. My rough math is 90mil/1.3b ~ 7% chance that any Chinese from the mainland I encounter belong in an organization that has enacted laws that turned the entire population into informants, an army that will literally crush your scull with a tank if you participate in any protests, an organization that thinks shipping millions of Uyghurs to gulags is an education and jobs training program, an organization that thinks exterminating languages and cultures are okay in the 21st century, an organization that is at the helm of a totalitarian police state.
While 7% isn't even close to the majority, it's a little higher percentage of democidal, genocidal, dictatorial co-conspirators, or would be co-conspirators than I would have liked. Mind you, this is only considering CCP members.
You probably think I'm evoking McCarthyism, no, I'm simply evoking vigilance. In a mature and democratic society like the US, there is a spirit to give everyone a fair chance to succeed, this spirit is embedded into laws that ensure equal opportunities and strengthen civil rights, and I believe this is admirable values that are worth protecting. On the other hand, it is exactly for the protection of these rights and freedoms, mechanism needs to be put in place to prevent their destruction, and they do exist already in the forms of the Constitution, FARA and the various anti-sedition/treason/espionage acts in the US.
In a controlocratic police state like the PRC, where all the sticks and carrots steer people away from basic human decency and morality[1] their entire lives, there's no reason to believe a majority of them will suddenly become decent and moral once they leave the border, especially not if many of their expat friends still have ties with the CCP's foreign branches. They are either too scared to do the right thing or worse, still don't know what the right thing is. The good thing is, democratic institutions have all kinds of defense mechanism against behavior against the host's national interests and freedoms, I'm simply suggesting you use them. In the UK, the Tube broadcasts "see it, say it, sort it" every 10 minutes or so to alert passengers to report any suspicious activity, possibly as a defense against terrorism. I believe the US and elsewhere should also practice this when it comes to CCP infiltration operations.
As to containment and liberation (the political and foreign affairs circles use the term liberalization) strategy, this Wikipedia article[2] isn't a very good start but it's a start. If you google the term, you'll dig up at least 30 years of articles and papers from publications like Foreign Affairs and the DoD's archives. Also, see TPP and neo-liberalism.
The recent anti-Chinese drumbeat has been a long time coming. Anybody who's been paying attention on the ground in Hong Kong since the handover knows the mainlander are only there to encroach and erode "western" ideals and institutions to advance the CCP's interests of staying in power forever. Hong Kong has suffered quite a number of substantial blows in recent years, this extradition bill on the table is the last straw, I really hope other nations don't have to bow to such regime anywhere in their territories.
Please don't use HN for political or nationalistic battle. When people start importing pre-existing political cases into the threads, with long lists of links and talking points, curiosity has been left far behind. This site exists for curious conversation, not agendas.
I think I've made some points not often made here on HN, as I find most thread on many similar threads since years ago rather superficial. I was hoping they will be educational.
2) share news like this and other examples about how China treats dissidents on channels like LinkedIn which are frequented by Chinese and those doing business with China pretending it's all good.
3) protest outside a Chinese embassy (don't forget your umbrella)
4) if you're in the loop and aware of such things then call out those Western politicians pandering to Chinese bureaucrats (I'm aware of infrastructure projects in SE Europe and Africa where plenty of dark money flows ... hello Croatia Tourism board, BiH, Serbia, Montenegro ...)
