Sam Cooper

‘Our superiors … want to get rid of him’

Radio-Canada, drawing on digital records first disclosed to Australian media in 2024 by an alleged Chinese spy, has reported new evidence suggesting that a Chinese dissident who died in a mysterious kayaking accident near Vancouver was being targeted for elimination by Chinese secret police and agents embedded in a Chinese conglomerate that the U.S. Treasury now accuses of running a multibillion-dollar organized-crime, money-laundering and modern-slavery empire out of Cambodia.

The new reporting focuses on a man identified only as “Eric,” a former undercover agent for Office No. 1 of China’s Ministry of Public Security — the police ministry at the core of so-called “CCP police stations” in global and Canadian cities, and reportedly tasked with hunting dissidents abroad.

Australia’s Four Corners revealed Eric’s story in May 2024, reporting that he had fled China in 2023 and walked into the headquarters of Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, carrying a phone loaded with years of internal messages and records.

It also reported that Eric had been invited to testify in Canada’s Foreign Interference Commission, known as the Hogue Commission, about Beijing’s operations on Canadian soil.

“In an August 2024 report, ABC Investigations wrote: ‘Eric told ABC Investigations he had been invited to testify as a witness in the next round of hearings, scheduled to start in September.’”

But there is no public sign that his evidence was ever examined in open hearings or mentioned in the Commission’s final reports, suggesting that any material he supplied was handled entirely behind closed doors, if at all.

According to Radio-Canada’s Enquête program, reporters travelled to Australia to interview Eric and forensically review the contents of his phone: thousands of text and voice messages between 2016 and 2023, as well as financial records and internal documents that he says came from Office No. 1 and its corporate covers.

The archives reportedly include detailed exchanges with his superiors, evidence of clandestine money transfers and the names of individuals allegedly involved in overseas espionage and repression.

One sequence, labelled “The target,” captures the moment Eric is ordered to focus on a dissident painter named Hua Yong, who had already become notorious in China for blood-marked Tiananmen commemorations and for documenting mass evictions in Beijing.

Citing the exchange, which has not been independently reviewed by The Bureau, Radio-Canada quotes:

Office No. 1: Our future communications must be encrypted.
Eric: What are the orders?
Office No. 1: Listen carefully to my request. It concerns Hua Yong. Our superiors find him troublesome and want to get rid of him.

Those messages set the tone for what follows: a multi-year manhunt that begins in Thailand and ends with Hua dead off Canada’s Sunshine Coast. Eric says Hua was formally designated a high-value target, and the same phone records, as summarized by Enquête and earlier Four Corners reporting, show that a bounty was placed on Hua’s head — roughly the equivalent of US$20,000 if he were captured and repatriated.

To win Hua’s trust, Eric reportedly constructed an elaborate false persona. On social media and encrypted apps, he posed as a radical anti-Communist militant, proposing the creation of a jungle “armed camp” and a band of revolutionaries. He then invented “Brigade V,” a fake guerrilla group he promoted online while appearing in videos in camouflage and a balaclava. Hua, in exile and under pressure, was impressed. “This is brilliant,” he reportedly wrote privately, according to the message logs, and the two men soon met in person in Bangkok, drinking wine and plotting what Hua believed was resistance — all while Eric quietly fed reports back to the political-security police.

It is this kind of mix of covert state targeting and deniable intermediaries that is now worrying Western security officials.

In November, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess used a major speech to warn that some authoritarian regimes are showing a “growing willingness” to mount “high-harm operations” abroad. Without naming specific countries, and not referring to Eric’s alleged evidence, he said his service believes “at least three nations” are willing and capable of carrying out lethal attacks in Australia, and may try to hide their involvement by contracting criminal “cut-outs.”

Canada’s own oversight bodies have been tracking a similar threat pattern.

In a 2024 report, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) described a fully redacted 12-paragraph case study of what it called the “most egregious” People’s Republic of China proxy identified by Canadian intelligence. The public summary says CSIS assessed that one aspect of the proxy’s behaviour posed a “high-risk, high-harm” threat to some Canadians and permanent residents, and that CSIS shared information on the proxy with the RCMP.

The same report notes that intelligence from CSIS and the Communications Security Establishment showed foreign states covertly attempting to buy influence with candidates and elected officials — a backdrop that makes the Hua Yong file, and the allegations of lethal targeting orders and corporate covers around Eric, especially sensitive.

Eric’s phone records, as described by Enquête, show that companies tied to his work gave him the freedom and cover to travel across Southeast Asia, build false identities and infiltrate exile networks, while maintaining his status as an MPS officer. One cover in particular stands out: a vast conglomerate in Cambodia that, on paper, dealt in real estate and finance and handled billions of dollars. Enquête identifies it as Prince Group and says Eric worked under its umbrella in 2016–2017 — a claim the company reportedly did not answer when approached by Radio-Canada.

That corporate name now has much wider resonance, and alleged connectivity to China’s United Front Work Department.

In October, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi with orchestrating a forced-labour “pig-butchering” scam empire from compounds in Cambodia, while the U.S. Treasury and its U.K. counterpart simultaneously designated the “Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization,” sanctioning Chen and 146 linked individuals and entities. Officials allege the network ran industrial-scale cyber-fraud centres staffed by trafficked workers, laundered billions in criminal proceeds and used shell companies and high-end real estate — including London properties — to wash illicit funds.

U.S. material also ties Prince Group into the orbit of Chinese state-aligned figures. Sanctions filings link Chen Zhi to Wan Kuok-koi, the Macau Triad boss known as “Broken Tooth,” whose modern Hongmen association has been described by U.S. officials as directly connected to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. They further allege that Prince Group worked with Palau-based businesswoman Rose Wang, a former vice-president of Palau’s Overseas Chinese Federation, who helped broker access and casino licences while acting as a facilitator for the scam network — a role analysts say dovetails with informal diplomacy and influence work on Beijing’s behalf.

Against that background, Eric’s description of Prince Group as one of his covers fits with The Bureau’s source material tying alleged Chinese police-station networks in Canada to underground casino and Chinese mafia structures entangled with United Front-aligned political figures.

In Eric’s interview with Radio-Canada, he portrays the Prince Group conglomerate as part of a broader ecosystem of ostensibly legitimate companies that quietly cooperate with Chinese security services — providing salaries, visas, office space and a glossy façade for officers like him to operate overseas. The digital trail Enquête reconstructed links that ecosystem to the micro-level surveillance of Hua Yong: reports on his movements, photographs of his residence in Canada, and continual updates to superiors who had bluntly said they wanted to “get rid of him.”

By April 2021, Hua had slipped out of Southeast Asia and arrived in Halifax on a humanitarian protection visa. From there, he moved west, eventually settling in the coastal community of Gibsons, British Columbia. Enquête reports that Eric continued to track him remotely, sending situation reports back to Office No. 1 even after Hua appeared to have found a measure of safety in Canada.

In November 2022, Hua reportedly set out alone in a bright yellow kayak and never returned. His body was later found on an island off the Sunshine Coast. The RCMP concluded that he had drowned and said they found no evidence of foul play; officers were not aware, at the time, that he was the subject of a Chinese police operation. According to Radio-Canada, three years later the case is still not fully closed: the British Columbia coroner has yet to issue a final report — an unusually long delay in a province where such inquests typically take around 16 months. In an email cited by Enquête, the Coroners Service said factors such as the complexity of a file and “investigations conducted by other agencies” can prolong a case.

According to Radio-Canada, Eric himself is ambivalent about what happened on the water that day. He told Enquête he had wondered whether Hua was murdered and recalled Hua’s own suspicion, during a severe illness in Canada, that he might have been poisoned. But he also pointed to later online information suggesting the death might have been an accident, and emphasized that he has no definitive proof either way. What he does insist on is that Hua was a live target of a Chinese operation at the time he died — and that, based on standard MPS tradecraft, there were “certainly other teams” beyond him monitoring the dissident in Canada.

Eric also reportedly says he has never been contacted by RCMP about Hua’s death. Instead, he told Enquête that he has provided documents from his phone archive to Canada’s Commission of Inquiry into Foreign Interference in confidential channels. From his vantage point — as the officer who received the “get rid of him” order, posed as Hua’s ally and then watched him restart his life in Canada — he argues there are “strange aspects” to the case that demand further scrutiny.

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

“Ten years ago it was sexting and nudes causing havoc in classrooms,” writes Sally Weale in a chilling new report at the Guardian. “Today, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have made it child’s play to generate deepfake nude images or videos, featuring what appear to be your friends, your classmates, even your teachers. This may involve removing clothes, getting an image to move suggestively or pasting someone’s head on to a pornographic image.”

I have been covering the rise of the next horrific manifestation of our collective porn crisis here at LifeSiteNews since 2019, when I warned that the rise of “deepfakes” would inevitably result in people making artificial pornography of their peers. Just a few years later, I reported on stories of middle-schoolers making deepfake pornography of kids they attended class with; last year, I reported on the rise of “nudify” apps that can digitally undress people in photographs, and the trauma, bullying, and inevitable sexual blackmail that has resulted.

The Guardian report reveals how swiftly this crisis is escalating. One teacher described an incident in which a teenage boy took out his phone, chose a social media image of a girl from a neighboring school, and used the “nudify” app to digitally remove her clothes. The teacher was shocked to see that the boy wasn’t even hiding his actions, because he didn’t see what he was doing as shocking, or even shameful. “It worries me that it’s so normalized,” she said. Other students reported the boy, his parents were contacted, and the police were called. The victimized girl was not even told.

The crisis is global. “In Spain last year, 15 boys in the south-western region of Extremadura were sentenced to a year’s probation after being convicted of using AI to produce fake naked images of their female schoolmates, which they shared on WhatsApp groups,” Weale writes. “About 20 girls were affected, most of them aged 14, while the youngest was 11.”

A similar situation unfolded in Australia, where 50 high school students had deepfake images distributed; in the United States, 30 female students in New Jersey discovered that “pornographic images of them had been shared among their male classmates on Snapchat.”

The mother of one student in Australia said that “her daughter was so horrified by the sexually explicit images that she vomited.” In the United Kingdom, the problem has exploded overnight:

A new poll of 4,300 secondary school teachers in England, carried out by Teacher Tapp on behalf of the Guardian, found that about one in 10 were aware of students at their school creating “deepfake, sexually explicit videos” in the last academic year. Three-quarters of these incidents involved children aged 14 or younger, while one in 10 incidents involved 11-year-olds, and 3% were younger still, illustrating just how easy the technology is to access and use. Among participating teachers, 7% said they were aware of a single incident, and 1% said it had happened twice, while a similar proportion said it had happened three times or more in the last academic year. Earlier this year, a Girlguiding survey found that one in four respondents aged 13 to 18 had seen a sexually explicit deepfake image of a celebrity, a friend, a teacher or themselves.

Predictably, teachers are also being targeted. Girls and women are left shattered by this victimization. Laura Bates, author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny, writes: “It feels like someone has taken you and done something to you and there is nothing you can do about it. Watching a video of yourself being violated without your consent is an almost out-of-body experience.” Boys, meanwhile, are engaging in criminal behavior often without even knowing it. In the world they have grown up in, pornography is normal – and this is merely the next step.

The experts that Weale interviews are, as usual, at a loss of what can be done about this crisis. They emphasize education, while admitting that this is the equivalent of taking a water pistol to a raging forest fire. They are skeptical that guidelines or bans around technology at school will help. Understandably, educators are demoralized and even despairing. Pornography and sexting have already transformed schools. Deepfake pornography is now making an already ugly crisis far more personal, and there is no indication that the problem can be stopped without dramatic action.

The only genuine solution was put forward by Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England. She has advocated that “nudification apps such as ClothOff” be simply banned. “Children have told me they are frightened by the very idea of this technology even being available, let alone used,” de Souza stated. De Souza is correct. The solution to the porn crisis is both tremendously difficult, but extraordinarily simple: we must simply make this content – and these apps – illegal.

The good news is that the first step in this direction has already been taken in the U.K. On November 3, the government  tabled the Crime and Policing Bill in Parliament. It includes an amendment criminalizing pornography featuring strangulation or suffocation – usually referred to as “choking” – with legal requirements for tech platforms to block this content from U.K. users.

This is the first time a genre of pornography has been criminalized on the basis that even if it is consensual, it genuinely harms society. That is an encouraging precedent, because it applies to virtually all hardcore pornography – and certainly to the “nudification” apps that are set to make middle school a hyper-sexualized hell for women and girls.

The porn industry is destroying society. We must destroy it first.

Jonathon Van Maren

Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.