New investigation identifies 575 pro-Beijing organizations embedded in eight separate fields of 'soft power' opportunity

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A disturbing new investigation detailing the expansion of Beijing’s overseas influence infrastructure reveals there are now more than 2,000 organizations in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany that the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing to advance its agenda.

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Put that together with the new “strategic partnership” Prime Minister Mark Carney entered into with Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping last month and it’s probably too late to expect that Ottawa will take any effective measures to curb the growing reach of China’s strong-arming operations in this country’s diaspora communities, the former national security analyst Dennis Molinaro, told me.

“It’s the government that sets the intelligence agenda,” said Molinaro, author of the book Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada. “And we know which way this government has decided to go.”

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The new report, prepared by the Jamestown Foundation and released in Ottawa Wednesday by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, is titled Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States. It’s an investigation of the Chinese Communist Party’s global network of individuals and organizations with documented links to what Xi Jinping has called China’s “secret weapon” against resistance from the democratic West — the United Front Work Department.

The network is the product of a concerted effort in “protracted co-optation........

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