Vancouver police are looking into organized crime connections in relation to the murder of two Chinese women, one of whom was a leader of a pro-Beijing group with deep ties to China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD).
On the morning of Feb. 20, Wu Shumin, a 50-year-old businesswoman from China’s Fujian Province, was found dead inside a white BMW X5 SUV. The car was parked on the street beside her $7 million mansion in Point Grey, Vancouver,
Global News reported on April 28.
Wu was not alone; the neighbour who first spotted the car with a shattered window saw another woman lying still beside her, covered in blood.
According to Global, the Vancouver police have so far only confirmed that Wu and the other victim, Sun Yingying, were victims of a targeted shooting the night before. Sun, 39, was a former Chinese soccer player.
B.C. Attorney General David Eby told the outlet he is aware “of allegations of organized crime involvement” in the murders, but he could not comment on police investigations.
An investigation conducted by Global, however, shows the backgrounds of Wu and Sun were more complicated than they seemed.
Both women ran a “high-end VIP clubhouse” by the name of Fit Palace in a strip mall minutes from Vancouver International Airport. The clubhouse’s services include massage, gym, and spinning classes.
The findings also show that Wu and Sun socialized and had business dealings with pro-Beijing expatriates in Richmond, B.C., and Markham, Ont.
“Interviews with police sources and searches of B.C. court, real-estate, and business records indicate that the victims socialized with and did business in the same clubhouse entertainment sector as some suspects involved in investigations by RCMP and CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service],”
wrote Global investigative journalist Sam Cooper in a tweet on April 28.
In addition, Cooper’s findings show that Wu was a leader of the
Quanzhou Friendship Society that was established in Vancouver in 2006, purported to make “meaningful contributions to Canada.” Sun had an association with the group.
Cooper said according to the webpage of the Fujian Province UFWD, Quanzhou Friendship Society has hundreds of members in Vancouver working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their operations include influencing Taiwan through strategic business investments, in an attempt to undermine its sovereignty and eventually subsume it to CCP control.
A review of the group’s webpage shows that in 2014, its leadership met with CCP officials, including Qiu Yuanping, then-head of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO), Global reported. Wu and the group met repeatedly in Vancouver and Fujian with OCAO and UFWD officials over the next few years. UFWD took over OCAO in 2018.
OCAO was a national-level bureaucracy controlled by the CCP. While the regime claimed that the agency “protect[s] the legitimate rights and interests of overseas Chinese,” a
2012 scholarly article by
James To, a senior adviser at the Asia New Zealand Foundation, says otherwise.
According to To, “qiaowu,” or overseas Chinese affairs work, “in practice ‘works to legitimise and protect the
CCP’s hold on power, uphold
China’s international image, and retain influence over important channels of access to social, economic, and political resources both domestically and abroad.’”
UFWD, which functions as the CCP’s primary foreign interference tool, has engaged in activities that include co-opting elites and facilitating espionage that are detrimental to national security, according to Public Safety Canada.
Copper
said federal police and intelligence investigators are interested in the broader context surrounding the case, as both Wu and Sun came from similar networks as Bo Fan, a 41-year-old Chinese woman murdered in June 2020 while she was working for a Vancouver-area “wealth clubhouse.”
