I do not have a lot of information about this. A lot of times, the groups that the United Front Work Department works with are community-based organizations. They could disguise themselves as a restaurant, a community organization, a family association, a school association or a student association; they are so infiltrated. They will implant their people into each organization as a way to surveil the activities happening within those groups and to influence their thoughts and control what they are doing.
I will speak about the case of the person who was indicted by the DOJ in the U.S. He was the founder of an overseas Chinese association in Boston. Apparently, he used the organization to participate in events that were organized by the United Front. He was a kind of leader of the Chinese community in Boston. He obviously had networks with other Chinese associations in Boston and New York. That is how he was able to pull together the counterprotest in August 2019.
Their strategy is quite similar to what you described. They will use these local groups that look very innocent to carry out their acts of repression. Often these things are a higher risk than we thought, because of lot of people migrate to the U.S. from China, but they continue to live under the surveillance of China. It's hard to tell whether they are targeted until they go back to China, where they are intimidated by state officials with arrests or threats.
This could also happen in Canada. When ordinary Canadians find something absurd and they want to share it on social media, the censors of the Chinese government are going to detect all the content online. We wouldn't know whether we are targeted. For an ordinary Canadian citizen who has criticized the government, if they ever travel to China, they would perhaps receive that level of intimidation as well.