Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China's Secret War Against Canada - Couverture rigide

Molinaro, Dennis

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1039011705 ISBN 13 : 9781039011700

Editeur : Random House Canada, 2025

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 J.W. DAFOE BOOK PRIZE

A National Business Book Award Summer Reading List selection: The Canadian Deep Dive (Politics, Policy & Power)

A Hill Times’ Top 100 Best Book in 2025

Foreword by Cherie Wong

National security expert Dennis Molinaro reveals the shocking details of Beijing’s five-decades-long effort to influence and interfere in Canadian political life. From cultivating future political leaders at the end of the Cultural Revolution to the foreign-interference scandals that have shaken present-day Ottawa, this definitive book addresses one of the most urgent global issues of our time.

Amidst heightened tensions between Western nations and China, Canadians have found themselves astonished by hostage crises, cyberattacks, harassment of members of our government, and theft of intellectual property worth untold billions of dollars. Guided by Molinaro’s experience as a historian and China specialist, Under Assault focuses on the actions of the People’s Republic of China’s government and its governing party, the Chinese Communist Party, against Canada during the past fifty years.

From Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s earliest journeys through the “Middle Kingdom” prior to his election to Parliament in the 1960s, the communist government of the PRC has perceived Canada as a staging ground for spying on and pressuring its ultimate target, the United States. When Canada’s first tech giant, Nortel, was plundered of intellectual property by digital spies; while Canada was manipulated into advocating against the independence of Taiwan; and as Chinese Canadians were targeted in the country where they thought they’d escaped Mao’s terrors, Canada’s leaders have too often seen only what they want to see in China: an emerging market of inestimable value and fertile soil for democratic change for a long-tyrannized people. Generations of Communist leadership have gladly allowed Canada’s government to labour under these misapprehensions, even when the evidence of China’s spying, theft and harassment of Canadian citizens has been happening right before its eyes. Canada has rarely allowed itself to believe what the rest of the world has long understood.

Using Canada as an early warning Under Assault shows how influence operations quietly shape international democratic institutions, markets, and political decisions—including in the United States. Informed by numerous interviews with generations of Canadian politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats; members of diaspora communities targeted by China who have endured this harassment for too long; as well as by new revelations from recently declassified CSIS documents, Under Assault is a timely, eye-opening account of a country compromised by its own illusions in a time of rising global conflict and a burgeoning new world order.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

DENNIS MOLINARO is a former national security analyst and policy advisor for the Canadian federal government. An author and an academic, he earned his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2015 and studies the history of security, counterintelligence and foreign interference. His research on wiretapping and the government's use of emergency powers in the 1970s received national media coverage. A frequent media commentator on intelligence and foreign-interference issues, he has taught courses on modern espionage, human rights law and national security at several Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

INTRODUCTION

I knew Russia. I knew the Cold War like I knew the back of my hand. I was a historian of intelligence and a university professor, and when I joined the intelligence world in 2018 as an intelligence analyst, I took it as a given that I would be working on the Russia f ile. Instead, my focus quickly became centred on the PRC. Now inside Canada’s security and intelligence establishment, I was shocked at the threat posed by one of Canada’s largest trading partners. I quickly came to believe that confronting the PRC was vastly more urgent than any threat presented by our former Cold War antagonist.

Canadians have become alarmed about the foreign interference threat posed by the PRC, but they don’t yet understand it. This needs to change. Counterterrorism has been the primary security focus of the Western world for the past twenty-odd years, and the counter- intelligence effort traditionally aimed at countering Cold War–style state spying differs from foreign interference. However, the PRC remains the most persistent and largest foreign power covertly interfering in the political operations and civic life of Western nations. Canadians have many unanswered questions. This isn’t to say Canadians have met only silence on the subject, but much of the analysis to date has been written by journalists and rooted in their particular angles on the issue. There have been academic books on the Canada–China relationship, but the broader picture of the PRC’s targeting of Canada, from its beginnings to the present, remains untold. With the perspective I developed in my time in intelligence work, combined with my training as a professional historian and academic, I hope to fill that need.

This book is not a recollection of my time in Canadian intelligence or a revelation of specific intelligence files. I do not divulge classified material or “name names.” The entire book was researched and created using publicly verifiable sources. All my comments, conclusions and analysis are derived from those sources. Instead, this book identifies and illustrates a long- standing pattern of failure in Canadian political circles to understand what our own intelligence service has been trying for decades to tell us. The result is, I hope, a realistic appraisal of Canada’s relationship with China, by way of China’s secret operations against Canada over the last f ifty years. I hope readers will come away from this book knowing far more about China’s secret operations, how and why they have been so successful, and what Canada’s failure to stand up to this threat says about the country.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Canada
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1039011705
• ISBN 13: 9781039011700
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 352
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible