Why Canada has become a prime target for Beijing’s sophisticated influence operations.
By Lisa Peryman for Probe International
“What is the United Front? It’s basically a way in which the party tries to control and mobilize the people that are outside of it. So, it’s fundamental to domestic governance. It’s fundamental to trying to mobilize resources abroad.” ~ Peter Mattis
Earlier this year, a groundbreaking report released by the Washington, D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation found Canada has, by far, the highest number of United Front organizations per capita—five times that of the United States.
According to Cheryl Yu, a Fellow in China Studies at The Jamestown Foundation and author of the report, China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) serves as a core pillar of Beijing’s foreign influence operations. Rather than relying on overt espionage, it employs sophisticated, covert networks disguised as community engagement to shape narratives, suppress dissent, and steer political discourse in favor of Chinese interests. By embedding itself across social, political, economic, and cultural spheres, the UFWD exploits the openness of democratic societies, making it difficult to detect and counter. Yu noted that Canada’s significant UFWD presence represented only the visible layer of a far larger, expanding system capable of rapid, scalable mobilization without appearing centrally directed.
In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” Jamestown president Peter Mattis joined host Jan Jekielek to delve deeper into the findings of Yu’s report and its implications for Canada, including why the country’s concentration of UFWD-linked organizations is so high, providing insights into how the United Front network operates, and what it was designed to achieve.
Over the course of the interview, Mattis lays out why the United Front is the Chinese Communist Party’s most potent non-kinetic weapon. He quotes Mao Zedong, who called it “a tool to storm and shatter the enemy’s position.” Far from benign people-to-people diplomacy, the UFWD is the Party’s systematic machinery for identifying, recruiting, mobilizing, and weaponizing people—especially scientists, engineers, and diaspora communities—while co-opting or subverting the civil societies of free countries. It operates through an estimated 600+ “talent programs” (Young Thousand Talents, Hundred Talents, etc.) and seemingly innocuous civic groups such as the China Overseas Friendship Association.
These groups, says Mattis, serve as talent-spotting nets, intelligence collectors, and political influence platforms. In reality, the UFWD is not a single central department but a whole-of-Party system: every ministry, university, company, provincial committee, and even joint ventures abroad has a role. Consulates assign UFWD portfolios, often overlapping with Ministry of State Security officers. The connective tissue is deliberate: leaders of overseas Chinese organizations are selected or co-opted so Beijing can hijack the voices of thousands of genuine community members, presenting Party directives as grassroots opinion.
Canada is uniquely vulnerable and disproportionately targeted.
Peter Mattis explains Canada is the “soft underbelly” of the United States and NATO. It offers easy access to American and allied markets, research institutions, and technology. Decades of minimal pushback—unlike the U.S. Clinton-era “Chinagate” scandals, Cox Report, and various FBI investigations—allowed UFWD groups to operate openly and embed themselves. Over time, high-level Canadian senators, MPs, and community leaders have been drawn into UFWD networks. Large waves of immigration (including Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese) have created both a pool of potential “free-thinking” voices that the Chinese regime seeks to both control and weaponize as ready-made constituencies for influence operations.
Law-enforcement constraints (such as short wiretap limits) and smaller intelligence resources have made Canada a low-risk, high-reward operating environment. Diaspora scientists and engineers are courted through talent programs that offer prestige, funding, and family benefits in exchange for technology transfer. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs), funded by embassies, monitor and channel PRC students, preventing genuine acculturation to Western freedoms. WeChat and other PRC-controlled platforms enable real-time transnational repression. Civic groups become “tall grass” deliberately cultivated to hide “snakes”—including Ministry of State Security agents, PLA operatives, and overseas police stations. The result is espionage, intellectual-property theft, election interference (as seen in Richmond, B.C.), and the erosion of democratic sovereignty: citizens’ voices are replaced by Beijing’s.
The CCP’s end game, stresses Mattis, is simple and unchanging: self-preservation. The Party defines national security not as protection of borders or citizens but as “the relative absence of threats to the Party’s ability to govern.” Anything that challenges one-party rule—free speech, rule of law, academic freedom, constitutionalism—is treated as an existential danger. National security laws (passed under Xi Jinping’s Central National Security Commission) explicitly demand that every Chinese citizen and ethnic Chinese abroad support the “motherland” as defined by the Party. The Party is the motherland.
Mattis outlines the UFWD’s international mission as the neutralization of these ideological threats, accomplished by controlling overseas Chinese communities (in order to prevent the flow of “dangerous” ideas back into China), capturing Western institutions (the World Bank, WHO, universities), and reshaping the global order into a “consultative” system where the CCP sets the terms. Legitimacy is the obsession: the Party must be seen as indispensable, its power respected, its alternative governance model unchallenged.
One of the most striking revelations Mattis shared was his perspective on China’s role in North America’s drug crisis. Often viewed as a form of “reverse Opium War” retribution, Mattis framed Beijing’s effort as a calculated strategy of statecraft. The CCP, he said, has never had a moral prohibition on narcotics; after the Long March it funded itself by growing poppies and selling opium. Today it leverages industrial-scale chemical production, triads, and cartels as proxies. By offering precursors at rock-bottom prices and laundering money for under 10% (versus 30-40% for traditional syndicates), the Party-criminal nexus has captured global money-laundering networks “without firing a shot,” Mattis stated. Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic tolerance of “patriotic” triads is now scaled to industrial levels.
The human and social devastation in Canada and the U.S. is collateral damage in the Party’s quest for revenue, influence, and leverage. The magnitude of the problem is monumental, and involves thousands of organizations, hundreds of thousands of personnel, and a whole-of-Party, whole-of-society effort that has operated for decades with little resistance, said Mattis. Because the CCP’s ultimate goal is regime survival, every democratic norm—open debate, civil society, institutional integrity—is a potential threat to be counteracted.
The problem cannot be arrested away, he said; it demands a broad collective response: honest public conversation, institutional vetting, updated laws, the expertise of motivated diaspora communities, and a refusal to forget Beijing’s track record of hostage diplomacy, forced labor, and institutional capture.
Canada’s “soft underbelly” status makes it ground zero for this struggle. The Party, Mattis reminds us, is not seeking friendship; it is executing a patient, methodical campaign to shatter the positions of those it sees as adversaries—ultimately to ensure its own indefinite rule.