One of the strategies of foreign interference by the Chinese is to infiltrate a community and influence or even bully the community into acting or working with a certain perspective. With the avenue of social media, a great exploitation has been started to simply launch negative campaigns against certain individuals, which will eventually influence the community.
The Canadian Chinese community has been well educated for decades on how much reach the Chinese government has had in the community. They know they are under observation. They have not been able to report it to the authorities, and when they did, the authorities in the past were not able to investigate adequately, so they felt totally alone.
They adapted to the situation, and unfortunately what we have is a community that very often reads Chinese newspapers, which are affected or manipulated by the state and deliver their own message. At the end of the day, they know that within the community there are agents of influence—Canadians acting on behalf of the Chinese government—reporting on individuals. Now, if that was not enough, we recently discovered there were secret Chinese police stations in the community.
That form of supervision, intimidation and bullying has basically controlled many in the Chinese community, who, in great numbers, have relatives back in homeland China.