A former member of China’s secret police who fled to Australia will be providing evidence to the Foreign Interference Commission, a media outlet has reported.
The man known by the pseudonym “Eric” worked for China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) for 15 years, including as an undercover agent. He told Australia’s public broadcaster ABC that he was invited by the commission to testify as a witness this fall.
ABC didn’t say if Eric, 39, would appear publicly. A commission spokesperson told The Epoch Times it would “not comment on the status of its investigation, its investigation plans or whether a specific matter or person is the focus of its investigation.”
The public inquiry was launched in response to concerns about Chinese interference in Canadian society. While its mandate was made broader to look at actions from other states, its focus has remained on China.
ABC said Eric arrived in Australia last year and provided the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation with a trove of records documenting his activities for the MPS’s Political Security Protection Bureau. This MPS unit is referred to as the 1st Bureau and works to quash political dissidence.
“It is the darkest department of the Chinese government,” Eric told ABC. “When dealing with people who oppose the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], they can behave as if these people are not protected by the law. They can do whatever they want to them.”
Eric provided some of his information, such as encrypted messages and intelligence reports, to the Foreign Interference Commission, ABC said.
The commission already has access to Canadian intelligence holdings pertaining to foreign interference, but receiving first-hand accounts from inside a Chinese operation could prove valuable.
Eric was involved in collecting information as an undercover agent on Chinese dissident Hua Yong in Thailand. Hua, a longtime critic of the CCP, later made his way to Canada. He drowned in a kayaking accident in B.C. in 2022.
“But in fact, I couldn’t tell whether his death was just an accident or a murder, because I wasn’t part of it,” he said. “All I could say is that Mr. Hua had been a long-term target of the secret police.”
The RCMP has not ruled the death as suspicious, previously telling The Epoch Times a thorough investigation had been completed.
Canada has been rocked by foreign interference scandals in recent years, including the killing of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil. Ottawa has publicly accused Indian agents of involvement, a charge New Delhi has denied.
Chinese police stations were also reported to be operating in Canada, leading the RCMP to conduct disrupting activities such as disclosing the existence of ongoing investigations.
The stations, first reported by human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders and present across the world, are said to be involved in transnational repression and pursuing persons of interest to Beijing.
Australia received a similar warning about Chinese intelligence operations when Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin defected there in 2005. Chen said there were 1,000 CCP spies in Australia at the time.
