Michel Juneau-Katsuya: Inside Communist China’s Network of Dormant Spies

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, I sit down with one of my personal heroes, Michel Juneau-Katsuya, the former Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Over two decades ago, he authored the classified report dubbed Sidewinder, which uncovered for the first time the true depths of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infiltration in the West and the workings of an unholy trinity—namely how Chinese intelligence, wealthy Chinese tycoons, and criminal triads work together.

But “it became obvious that nobody wanted to hear about it,” Mr. Juneau-Katsuya says. “We were ordered to destroy the report, destroy our research notes.”

The report never would have seen the light of day if it hadn’t been leaked to the public. Its findings, however, were soon overshadowed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

What Mr. Juneau-Katsuya discovered forms the basis of the new book, “The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard.”

In this episode, Mr. Juneau-Katsuya breaks down the inner workings of CCP intelligence operations in the West.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

If you enjoyed this interview, check out our interview with Scott McGregor, co-author of “The Mosaic Effect.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Michel Juneau-Katsuya, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Michel Juneau-Katsuya:
Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Welcome to Washington, D.C. You have been in the field of Canadian intelligence for a very long time. Way before most people, you were aware of the Chinese Communist Party infiltration of Canada and North America. We’re going to talk about the implications of that today. Before we go there, I want to talk about your career; who you are and where you came from.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
I started with the goal of serving my country right from the get-go to a certain extent. I started my career very early with the Army, but was rapidly chosen to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police [RCMP], our federal police. They are the equivalent of the FBI, but also have the mandate to work in the community in uniforms, like you would have state troopers here in the U.S.

I worked as a criminal investigator from 1979 to 1984 where I was called to work with the National Security Division. At that time I started to work counterintelligence. It was still the Cold War during that period of time, so I was working on the Soviet desk, specifically learning the craft of being a counterintelligence officer.

Unfortunately, the government of Canada decided to create CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service]. Friday night I was an RCMP officer and Monday morning I was a CSIS officer. I continued my work as a counterintelligence officer, and eventually I ended up leading the Asia-Pacific desk and I was the chief of Asia-Pacific. Our ranking system is very similar to the CIA, so I was the chief of Asia-Pacific for CSIS.

I eventually retired in 2000, and continued this work in the private sector. After 21 years of service I realized that there was a lack and a need in the private sector to help private companies defend themselves against economic espionage and terrorism. I continued doing this work for the private sector.

I also started to teach more. I had been teaching criminology at various universities for all those years. I also became a writer and wrote books on spy activities in Canada. I cannot count anymore the number of documentaries that I have participated in. I even created my own TV series at one point on historical cases of spy activities in Canada. I explained what they were, what happened, and what consequences they led to.

Mr. Jekielek:
There was a specific report that you wrote in 1997 called Sidewinder. Sidewinder got a lot of flack and nobody wanted to see your report. You had seen a significant level of Chinese Communist Party infiltration into Canada with something you called the unholy trinity, which you documented. What did you find out in 1997?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
I became head of Asia-Pacific in the mid ’90s, and at that period of time it was prior to Hong Kong returning to mainland China. There was a lot of preoccupation with Hong Kong because we had witnessed a lot of Hong Kongers coming to Canada. Their arrival was facilitated by new categories of immigration that were created by the previous Prime Minister, Mr. Mulroney. An entrepreneur had the opportunity to come to Canada if they paid $250,000 Canadian. Paying that amount, you were basically able to buy your Canadian citizenship, with the agreement that you were going to open a business.
At that time, Hong Kong was Canada’s second biggest trade partner after the U.S. Hong Kong was very important for us. A lot of Chinese Hong Kong people wanted to come to Canada and get citizenship just in case something went wrong after the return of Hong Kong to mainland China. It also opened the door to the triads, and a lot of triads started to come in. We were preoccupied about how easily they could enter and get Canadian citizenship and establish themselves within the community. That’s why we started to study this.

Then starting to appear on the radar were some very rich Hong Kongers, billionaires like Li Ka-shing and Stanley Ho of Macau, who would literally invest a lot of money in Canada to buy businesses and buy influence. I’m talking about buying a huge amount of businesses and having huge influence without necessarily being Canadian themselves. We could see the influence they had on local authorities at the municipal, provincial, and federal level, because of the clout they had with that money, that influence, and those businesses.

We were also seeing how much the Chinese intelligence service was getting quite active in our political scene as well. We discovered through records of Election Canada some donations that were made by the Chinese embassy to both political parties. Election Canada had to publicly report those donations, so we found them.

At that time, they were clumsy. Frankly, the Chinese were very clumsy because it was reported that they had given money to both the liberal party and the conservative party, which were at that time the most prominent political parties in Canada, and that preoccupied us.

The more we looked into this situation, we started to see a link between the Chinese intelligence service, the rich tycoons coming from Hong Kong, and the triads. There was a collaboration between those three elements, which we eventually called the unholy trinity. These people were collaborating with one another.

That was reinforced by the revelations received from a Chinese defector. There was a Chinese intelligence officer in 1992 that defected to the Australians. At that time the report was classified, but we had access to that information at CSIS. He told the Australians that in 1984 he was sent to Hong Kong under the cover of being a journalist in order to approach the triad leaders. He was to invite the triad leaders to collaborate with Beijing to make sure that in 1997 when the repatriation would take place that there would be a smooth transition.

If they helped in keeping things quiet, they could continue to do their business as usual and they wouldn’t be bothered as much. They could do whatever they wanted and continue to do their business, but they needed to make sure that everything was quiet. Eventually, Deng Xiaoping referred to them as patriotic triads. They all accepted the deal, except for one. Within a month that one was gone; he was dead.

The triads at that time were clearly collaborating with the Chinese intelligence services. We saw the rich tycoons become very close to power, particularly Li Ka-shing who was very close to Deng Xiaoping. We know the exact date and place of a meeting where Deng Xiaoping asked Li Ka-shing to help them boost their economy. At that time, Deng Xiaoping took power after the death of Mao Zedong, and continued to build China into the economic power it would eventually become.

Mr. Jekielek:
What was the reaction to the Sidewinder report?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
There was a lot of skepticism and a lot of resistance. But when we dug further in our research and explored the relationship that existed between those three organizations, we also discovered how they were able to get close to Canadian elected officials, and to the prime minister as well. We saw that prime ministers were literally on the take, and that didn’t go over too well.

But my job was not to protect the prime minister; my job was to protect Canadian society. My fidelity and my alliance was to the Canadian people. My job was to report that we had infiltration coming from the Chinese government that was affecting our decision-making process. We also saw major Canadian companies involved as well, because they could directly gain profit from this. They were not caring at all about national security, but just caring about the bottom line of their company. They were willing to become power brokers in order to be able to advance their own business. This revelation also didn’t fly well.

When we submitted our report to our masters and our boss, they immediately wanted to shut it down. Was it because somebody said, “This is not going to be good for my own career?” Was it simply because they couldn’t believe what we had found, despite the fact that we brought the evidence for every single line of the report. We produced a binder showing the evidence that we had collected; either confidential reports, source reports, and even open source reports. Everything was backed up, every single line. But despite that, they didn’t want to hear about it and it disappeared.

In the process of our research, we wanted to understand exactly what was going on and see if it was happening elsewhere. We went to our American counterparts and shared our hypothesis and the observations we were making in Canadian society. Like for example, having Chinese companies coming to buy Canadian companies just to get the Canadian flag on the lawn.

Then they didn’t have to spy anymore. Buying Canadian companies gave them access to intellectual property, gave them access to influence the local authorities, and also gave them access to profit. The money was going back to China, and they were leaving just a strict minimum to keep the business going. But at the same time, the amount of influence they gained on the political scene was tremendous and very efficient.

Our counterparts at the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service agreed with us . They understood and agreed with us, mainly the FBI with whom we were collaborating. They saw exactly the same phenomenon. What we discovered later is that they would go a bit further. They got inspired by our observations and started to verify on their own what was happening in the U.S. They realized it had implications for the U.S., and they eventually confirmed what was happening in Canada.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to stress that it is not even the year 2000 yet.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
That’s right.

Mr. Jekielek:
The U.S. intelligence services are looking at what you found, and they are basically corroborating what you found.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
Exactly.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yet, nobody wants to hear about it.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
Nobody wants to hear about it in Canada. The U.S services were just like us at the beginning of our research. We were the first ones to break the ice, if I may say. There is a lot of convincing, education, and explanation that needs to be provided when you are the first one to break big news of that nature. But in Canada, it quickly became obvious that nobody wanted to hear about it, to the point where we were ordered to destroy the report, to destroy our research notes, and to destroy any traces of the report as much as possible.

But we had worked with the Royal Canadian Mountain Police. We had sent a prior copy of the report to one of their analysts who had been with us for one year, and that analyst saved the information at the RCMP. The RCMP fought for over a year to have this report published as is, but eventually had to agree to have another report, sort of a compromise, being published. That report was saying probably one third of what we had originally been saying, but at least they were saying part of what we had been saying.

Mr. Jekielek:
The unofficial early version that was made public actually had a lot more information than the later official classified version. Is that right?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
Absolutely. It had much more information, and it was much more punchy. It disturbed my political masters to see what we were talking about. We were literally saying that certain powerful companies and the Chinese intelligence agents embedded in our government were able to influence high-level decision-making. These decisions would not necessarily help our national economy or our national security; they would actually benefit China and would benefit Beijing. That was alarming to us, but they didn’t want to hear about it.

I don’t have any evidence that the order came from either the prime minister or anyone outside of CSIS. When my boss saw what we were writing about, he probably concluded that this was something that he didn’t want to deal with. He thought, “It’s not going to be good for my career. I’m going to have too many questions to answer. I better kill that right now.”

Mr. Jekielek:
I reached out to you after you were on a CBC program discussing recent CCP infiltration in Canada. I’ll roll that clip in a moment so people can see it.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
The other element is that we definitely have evidence of being infiltrated by agents of influence, people working on behalf of the Chinese intelligence service. They are not necessarily spies, but people who have been recruited and are able to influence the powers that be. This has been going on for the last 40 years, from Mr. Mulroney all the way to Mr. Trudeau today. Every prime minister has been compromised at one point or another by those agents of influence.

Speaker 4:
You say that every prime minister has been compromised by those agents?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
Every prime minister, every government, and every office was compromised. When we brought the warning, nobody listened.

Mr. Jekielek:
The interviewer was stunned by what you said. The viewing audience was stunned. You said, “Every Canadian prime minister has been in some way compromised.”

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
Compromised.

Mr. Jekielek:
That is an astonishing statement. You don’t often hear statements like that.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
No. It’s certainly not good if you want to have a contract with your government, definitely. But my job was not to get a contract with the government; my job was to protect my country. That was my motivation, and it is still my motivation today. In Canada last spring, the problem with Chinese foreign interference came out into the open.

More than 350 witnesses came to testify in front of four different parliamentary committees investigating that issue, and basically everybody was singing from the same music sheet. We have been infiltrated for the last 30 years or more. Unfortunately, every prime minister has been compromised. Not only prime ministers, but every single political level in Canada; from municipal to provincial to federal. They’ve been able to work in a very holistic way.

This is a formidable opponent, and they have a lot of assets. For example, they have time. The communist party doesn’t have to return every five years for election day, so they know that they can plant something today that can be harvested in 5, 10 or 15 years. They work with the Central Committee which has a phenomenal chain of command. They can coordinate very well, and organize what they need from an intelligence space and what they need to accomplish.

Their intelligence services are part of their foreign policy. They collect information and turn it into intelligence that eventually makes them advance rapidly. They have a lot of people. They have many more people than us and they work in a totally different way than the Western world.

In the field of intelligence, the Western world is very eurocentric. We’ve studied the Cold War and how the KGB [Russian Committee for State Security] worked, how the GRU [Russian Main Intelligence Directorate] worked, how the MI6 [British Military Intelligence, Section 6] worked, and how the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] worked. They all basically went to the same school and they all worked the same way. But the Chinese work with a mass collection process where they are able to use everybody.

In the field of intelligence, we have a story to describe the difference between the eurocentric perspective vs. the Chinese perspective. We use this little parable. If a grain of sand on the beach is the information you need to collect, a Russian spy would go with a bucket and a shovel, try to fill up the bucket as fast as possible, and then run away before anybody catches them or the sun rises.

The Chinese are totally different. They will send 1,000 people to swim and to sun bathe all day and have fun. In the evening when they go home, they shake their towel at the exact same spot and give more information than the Russian spy could. That’s what we refer to as the mass collection process.

It’s also a very similar strategy to what was used by the Chinese during the Korean War. During the Korean War, the Chinese technology weaponry was not as sophisticated as the Western allies that were in Korea. But what they had was tons of people, so they sent wave after wave of humans during an assault. The first wave was probably mowed down. The second wave was probably half-mowed down. The third wave succeeded in overtaking the line of the allies, and that was successful for them.

They applied this same strategy with intelligence work. They simply overwhelm us in so many different fields. Because of their eurocentric perspective, it’s difficult for the Western agencies to understand that they could work in so many fields. The Chinese succeed very efficiently. They have time on their side, so they’re definitely going to win the war on that front. We do not understand how Chinese culture works, how they think, and how they operate.

Mr. Jekielek:
I took a look at Sidewinder again after a very long time. You actually included in the report a quote from Sun Tzu, “Be so subtle that you are invisible, be so mysterious that you are intangible, and then you will control your rival’s fate.”

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
Absolutely. I’m telling you, not only do they understand the concept of influence, they wrote the book on it 2000 years ago. To this day, Sun Tzu is extremely accurate and very contemporary in his understanding of human beings and understanding the challenge of conquering your opponent. They are good; they are really, really good. One of the strong aspects of a democracy is that we have to renew ourselves constantly, and that is why we have elections. Unfortunately, this could be a weakness in a sense.

Because we renew ourselves, we are also in the process of constantly seeking approval, seeking support, and seeking election votes. That’s exactly what the Chinese understand very, very well. They understand it so well that the Chinese intelligence service, through their diplomatic officers, are able to infiltrate the community and to use their power in the community as leverage with the politicians and other elected officials. They say, “Do you want my support? You’re going to need to do this and that for me, because I control the vote in that community.”

This is yet another aspect. In most cities, you will find a neighborhood where a certain ethnic group will get together, but the coherence that exists within the Chinatown is very unique to that culture. The Chinese are ethnocentric. They’re not necessarily racist, they are ethnocentric. They will gather together, work together, and stick together.

As an outside foreign intelligence group, if you succeed in infiltrating this group, you can control, you can spy, you can intimidate, and you can destroy the reputation of your political opponent. They have succeeded in doing so often by having an illegal police station, or literally having people recruited to work for the United Front Work Department, which is one of the five main intelligence services in China.

You have these people constantly reporting on others because they seek their own personal advancement or profit. Then you have control of that community. You can literally bargain for the support of the community, or that community can lose your support if they don’t do what they are supposed to.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned the United Front Work Department, and I will ask you to fill us in on that in a moment. But first, your work is a very important part of The Mosaic Effect, a new book that’s coming out. It’s astonishing to me that this unholy trinity is not better known as an aspect of Chinese infiltration into the West and into Africa. Please give me a quick overview of the Mosaic Effect.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
The Mosaic Effect is basically a way to describe how the Chinese intelligence service and the Chinese government have been able to infiltrate so many aspects of our society, and to rally each sector to favor them in their quest for either influence or the control of certain aspects. It can be political, economic, cultural, academic, or simply within the expat and the dissident community. The Mosaic Effect is the capability for the Chinese intelligence and the Chinese government to work in a very holistic way.

Again, the eurocentric intelligence organization will be very much compartmentalized. They will be very focused on their specific work and concentrate specifically on that effect. But sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and they’re not necessarily talking to one another.

Because of the Central Committee and its capability to direct and control and manage the information and the activities, there’s a coordination. In their case, they are able to know and to find out what the left hand is doing without necessarily the left and the right talking to each other. But somewhere, somehow, there’s management that knows what’s going on, and that has been an extremely powerful element.

There’s a historical reference that worked in the same way in Japan, The Ministry of International Trade and Industry [MITI]. Japan after the Second World War was a country literally on its knees. They had lost the war, lost a lot of people, and lost their industry. They had suffered two nuclear bombs. They were occupied by a foreign country and were literally on their knees. But it only took them about 20 years, from 1945 to 1965, to become a world economic leader.

During the ’60s and the ’70s, Japan was definitely a driving force economically. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry was able to receive information from the private sector, from the government, and from society in general. They were able to organize, plan, and redistribute the information back to the private sector. That’s why they went so fast, because there was this management that was able to help the country.

Then there was the cultural discipline of the Japanese, which we find in Asian cultures in general. There’s a certain cultural discipline in their education that we lack in the Western world. We are very individualistic. In Asian society, the individual is less important than family, community, province, and country. This knowledge and this hierarchy of importance is lost in Western society.

Mr. Jekielek:
The Chinese Communist Party made great efforts to destroy as much as possible of traditional Chinese culture. But one thing they chose not to destroy, probably for obvious reasons, is the military memory of Sun Tzu. Books like Outlaws from Marsh and many of these classical works talk about all these types of methodologies.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
If you want to understand the way the Chinese think, read and learn two things. You can read Sun Tzu’s, The Art of War, which is a very small book of 13 chapters. By the way, the last chapter is, “The Art of Using My Spy.” You can learn the game of Go, a game that has been around forever. In every generation, every court or emperor or general or minister had a master of Go teaching that game. Philosophically, it is a pure strategy game. If you learn it, you will understand a little more about how the Chinese government sees the world, and how Chinese intelligence works.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the United Front Work Department, and how does it function here in the West?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
The United Front Work Department is one of the top five intelligence organizations. They are, and they refer to themselves publicly, as soft power. Basically, they are an organization that receives billions and billions of dollars each year to be able to influence. They work on influencing people and harnessing the energy of people that work in the community to become their emissaries to collect information and bring back information. They want to identify the people that are either in favor or against the regime. You don’t necessarily have to be extremely favorable to Beijing, but just be interested in the culture, the language, and the art. That will suffice to identify you as a person to be recruited. They will exploit that element of interest that you have and slowly reel you in, then bring you in to collaborate.

The United Front Work Department is sending people all around the world to cultivate relationships within the community, within the school world, within academia, and within the political world, all in the name of friendship, collaboration, and exchange between people. But at the end of the day, it’s a Trojan horse. It’s a Trojan horse that basically has another purpose. That purpose might not be revealed to you immediately, but eventually will definitely be applied.

They are really good because they’re soft. It’s not like a very aggressive intelligence collection process and they’re not trying to have covert meetings. They will openly go to a meeting or celebration. But eventually, they will have those discussions and recruit these people that will work tirelessly to help the Chinese government and facilitate whatever policy they are trying to achieve.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m sure you’re familiar with Fang Fang, the alleged Chinese spy, who left the U. S. before she could be fully investigated. She had been cultivating relationships with politicians at all levels like mayors of small towns and state-level representatives. Her relationship with Congressman Swalwell happened early on. At the time when she started that relationship, it wasn’t clear that he would eventually become a congressional member. That’s a remarkable level of effort in areas which don’t necessarily seem that important, but may be important someday.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
One day they may be important, and one level serves the next. When people try to understand, “Who is that person?” They reply, “I know him, the mayor, and you can talk to him, and she’s been in touch with him.” Then you say, “Oh yes, I like her. She’s very, very good.” It is networking that can validate and constantly reinforce, “Yes, you should be doing business with that person.”

But again, I will return to what I was saying. They are very, very patient. They have time on their side, and they will take that time to do what they need to do. That can take years and years and years, but their determination and their focus is remarkable. That makes it extremely difficult for us.

The Chinese have a lot of very poetic names for certain things, like the sea turtles who lived abroad for many years and now are returning to China. Then there are the bottom fish feeders, people who are sent from China to do common work and live in the Western world. For the first years that they will be there, they will do absolutely nothing. They must be perfect citizens for five years to ten years. Then one day they receive a phone call and boom, they are activated.

But for five or ten years, they have done nothing, not even getting a parking ticket. They probably got their security clearance. They probably went up the ladder in their company or in the government, and suddenly they are activated. When the U. S. security services or police do a background check, they find absolutely nothing. They are extremely deep undercover agents from that perspective, and that makes it really difficult for us.

Again, it is mind-boggling for the Western intelligence agencies to understand why they would put so much effort and commitment in staying in the role of a double agent for so long. But they do.

Mr. Jekielek:
How did you establish that these people exist?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
Lots of information came from defectors. We had a Chinese intelligence officer who came to our side and shared with us their role, their training, what their function was about, what their purpose was about, and the methodology that was used. Sometimes we discovered things ourselves because they made mistakes and they basically revealed what they were doing. After we started to watch and pay attention, we concluded that, “Yes, these guys are actually agents.” We saw their past and what they had done.

Every time we find a spy, or we find somebody who has been collaborating with a foreign country, we try to analyze their behavior, their life, their modus operandi, their methodology, how they came to be where they are now, and how we can learn from that observation to catch the next guy.

Mr. Jekielek:
Where do you think the effort should be put right now in terms of understanding what the CCP is up to?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
I had the privilege to work in this field for over 30 years, specifically on the Chinese issue, and I’ve seen it change over time. Right from the beginning, I had to justify my work. I had to explain to my counterparts in my own organization why the Chinese were different. No, it was not a racist perspective of mine. It was intelligent spycraft trying to understand how they were operating, and trying to understand their methodology.

In the field of counterintelligence, you need to understand the operations of your opponent. You need to understand the way they operate that will potentially define their next move, and help you to discover that next spy. A lot of study and analysis is focused on the way they think and the way they act.

But now, as you pointed out, a shift has started to take place. Even if we were aware and informing our government, they were ignoring our things for a multitude of reasons. Some of the politicians were literally corrupted or brought in to work with the Chinese for either partisanships or for personal interests. But now it’s coming out more and more.

I’ve seen the work done by many American committees. Information was brought to them a long time ago and they were paying attention a long, long time ago, but it wasn’t necessarily serving the foreign policy of that administration at that time. It was not serving the commercial interests of the country at that time. Let’s remember one thing. The Chinese were very good at promoting the fact that they are a huge market, and they had become the manufacturer of the world.

For a long period of time when countries were going through economic hardship, we were very glad to go to China, to be able to have Chinese workers paid 25 cents an hour, rather than pay our workers several dollars an hour here. We built that monster, and we fed that monster. Now, that monster is well fed, bigger than us, and very well established with its tentacles everywhere in the world. Now, we have to try to undo this, and it is not an easy job.

There’s a certain level of consciousness that needs to come from collecting evidence, collecting stories, collecting testimonies from people within the business community and political sphere that shows exactly what’s going on. That is not always easy because some people don’t want to hear it, because again, it doesn’t necessarily serve them personally.

But what is different lately with the current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, is that he has been much more bold, much more audacious, and much more gambling than the previous leaders, who were much softer. They let themselves receive and seduce delegations from the Western world who were trying to gain access to that fantastic market, in hopes that it would benefit both the West and China.

Maybe the West had the idea, “If we’re nice enough, they will understand that they should change and become more like us.” In reality, they never intended to change, even if they were gentle, nice, polite, and receiving you with the red carpet and nice ceremonies. In the end, they didn’t intend to change anything.

With the current leadership, it’s different now. Xi Jinping says, “I don’t care. I’m going to be in your face and simply do what I want. I will impose myself the way I want to impose myself.” That is probably a mistake on his part. According to Sun Tzu who you quoted earlier, he’s not being subtle enough. He’s basically awakened the Western world.

The Western world is now realizing, “These guys have been quite good. They planted themself in Africa. They were able to conquer a great part of Africa, which has a lot of resources. They were able to go into the Western countries like Europe or North America because there’s a lot of technology, and research and development. They can steal that research. They are able to steal that intellectual property, and the return on investment will help them.

I hope this aggression that Xi Jinping is showing will awaken more consciousness. I hope more political leaders make the right response to the hegemony and the transnational repression that the CCP is trying to exercise.

But individually it will not work. A single country, even America, will never be able to curb them sufficiently. Curbing China needs to be a collective effort, which is possible, but not necessarily natural for the Western democracies. There’s an old English saying, “A country does not have friends, it only has interests.” If somebody leaves the table, it doesn’t take long before somebody will take their seat. That’s the challenge that we currently have. We need to be able to work together.

I witnessed something really interesting. You might be aware that at the request of the American government, Canada arrested the vice president of Huawei. In retaliation, the Chinese government arrested two Canadian citizens for absolutely no reason. It was a retaliation. The two gentlemen were named Michael, so we called it the two Michaels.

The VP of Huawei stayed in a very rich condo. She was free to come and go as she pleased, just not leave the country. Our two Michaels were arrested and kept in jail with no visitation allowed. Eventually, they went to trial and were processed for espionage activities, which was ludicrous and an absolutely fake accusation. The CCP controls the legal system, and they can do whatever they want.

Something really surprised and touched me at that time. The Canadian diplomats were not allowed to enter the courtroom when the trial took place. They were not able to either represent or assist the two Michaels when they went to trial. They stood outside of the courthouse in silence. They were joined by other Western diplomats that stood alongside the Canadian diplomats in silent protest.

That was a very moving image. If we could transpose that kind of collaboration and have the Western nations rally together, that would force the current Chinese government to change their attitude.

China is witnessing what is currently happening with Ukraine and Russia, and they are benefiting from that conflict. What could be dangerous is if Xi Jinping is audacious enough to go against Taiwan, and this is not something to underestimate. Currently, he is very confident about creating a certain power shift in international relations, because now the Western world is entangled in Ukraine.

That leaves room for China to create new alliances with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and a lot of countries that usually would not have been natural allies to China. That will be an interesting situation to watch in the months and years to come.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to direct people to an interview I did with Scott McGregor, one of the authors of The Mosaic Effect. As we finish up, what can we learn from how this Mosaic Effect was implemented throughout Canada?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
The value of the book is to see the chronology of events that took place and the various ways that the United Front Work was able to penetrate civil society. It’s an excellent case study of a democratic country that slept for too long and didn’t pay attention to the wolf that was entering the barn. That wolf was able to penetrate every level of civil society, and now has a strong influence on society.

It is also a preoccupation because Canada is a territorial neighbor and friend of America. China definitely wants to use Canada as an entry door to the U.S. That’s another situation that needs to be looked at. Let’s not forget the fact also that Canada is part of the Five Eyes, just like the U.S.

a unique collaboration of five English-speaking countries; Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the U.S. that was created in 1946 after the Second World War to share top secret information. That is another potential danger—China could get access to that information.

That returns to what I was saying earlier, that we need to cooperate with one another. The U. S. shouldn’t think that they have to cut ties with Canada and not to work with Canada. On the contrary, Canada has a lot to offer in the lessons learned from that experience with the Chinese. The two countries could build up a form of continental defense, rather than only national defense, when it comes to dealing with the Chinese issue.

Mr. Jekielek:
One final question. How much has been done to dismantle this infiltration in Canada?

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
In Canada, we’re just now realizing the size and the scope of the work that the Chinese have done. In spring of 2023, we had a lot of discussion and testimony about foreign interference coming from China. This was from revelations from a whistleblower that gave documents to the media in Canada, and that created the political crisis.

Now, in the fall of 2023, we have a public inquiry that has been called. They are going to testify, and we will learn more. Of course, some people do not have an interest in hearing too much, so there will be a certain exercise of control there. But the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be returned, and we must now change the situation.

One of the first things that needs to be done is for Canada to adopt a law defining what foreign interference is. What is the punishment if you’re caught doing foreign interference? They did this in 2017 and 2018 in Australia. The U.S. has already done this, and the UK has done this as well. We need to have Canada adopt the law, because law enforcement needs the tools to adequately investigate.

We definitely need to create more accountability and transparency in dealing with foreign influence and have a registry for foreign agents. We also need to understand that a registry of foreign agents is just like having a registry of lobbyists; it has its limitations. Lobbyists will continue to do what they do and pull strings in the back room. We need to understand the limitations of all this, but we definitely need to be able to make investigations.

Maybe we need to create a new organization totally separate from the law enforcement that we currently have. Obviously, the law enforcement who brought the information up to the prime minister’s office for decades were all successful in getting them to actually act worse. The prime ministers used that information for their own benefit, either partisan or personal.

Maybe we need to create an organization like the one that existed at one point in Hong Kong, the anti-corruption police, who were able to investigate independently of any interference that could come from the political or legal system. They could use law enforcement powers and lay accusations in court if need be.

The U. S. needs to watch Canada, learn to cooperate more, and see if the Canadian government will take the right countermeasures, because the Chinese are really good. They are a formidable opponent and have been at it for decades now. They’re subtle and they’re everywhere, so it will take a while before we succeed in regaining control of the situation.

Mr. Jekielek:
Michel Juneau-Katsuya, such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Juneau-Katsuya:
It was an honor and thank you very much for the opportunity.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Michel Juneau-Katsuya and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jakielek.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.