As someone who is Asian, who is a dissident of the CCP and who is a Canadian, I have often been asked to choose sides and told that I can only do one and not the other.
I think, first and foremost, that we need to draw a difference between the Chinese communities, the ethnic Chinese communities, versus Hong Kongers, Tibetans, Uighurs and so on. They have often been conflated as one, and it's really harmful.
Put a difference between these communities and the CCP. In fact, the Chinese people are victims of the CCP regime. We are living such a horror because of the CCP, so holding the CCP accountable needs to be a separate discussion from conflating it as an anti-Asian racism issue.
This geopolitical tension has definitely triggered a rise in anti-Asian racism, and this why we have to be very careful in the terminologies that we use and the intentions, but also know that intention is not everything. Sometimes the action itself will be enough to hurt the community, and that's why always [Technical difficulty—Editor] centre the communities' needs, centre the dissident communities' needs in all of your policy decision-making, because we're the ones who have been bearing the brunt of these kinds of attacks, harassment and influence.