Beijing's "Two-State" Strategy Targets Indigenous Land Claims and Resources to Undermine Canada's National Sovereignty, and Mark Carney's PRC Pivot Makes It More Dangerous

https://www.thebureau.news/p/beijings-two-state-strategy-targets

Op-Ed: As land title recognition accelerates across British Columbia and a powerful pro-Beijing lobby openly courts First Nations investors, Canada's sovereignty vulnerability hides in plain sight.

At a moment when Canada is reassessing its economic sovereignty and Prime Minister Mark Carney is charting what he describes as a deeper strategic partnership with China, a long-running but poorly understood vulnerability is quietly advancing — one that cuts across the most sensitive fault lines in Canadian public life: Indigenous land rights, natural resource development, and Beijing’s patient, methodical campaign to secure the commodities it needs without ever having to negotiate with Ottawa.

The strategy, as intelligence documents obtained exclusively by The Bureau reveal, is not new. It is simply becoming more consequential.

Canada’s National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, in a Top Secret 2019 report obtained by The Bureau, found that Beijing was already targeting First Nations leaders through intelligence operations disguised as tourism. The goal, a People’s Republic of China Embassy official acknowledged in intercept reports reviewed by Canada’s intelligence watchdog, was never cultural exchange.

The tourism invitation extended to a national-level group of Aboriginal leaders, the report says, was merely “beipian” — Mandarin for “to be fooled.” The true purpose was to pursue Aboriginal-controlled natural resources. Chinese intelligence, the report notes, conducted research on each delegate before they arrived, seeking to identify their “potential usefulness.”

That is the covert face of Chinese resource strategy in Canada’s north.

But it has an overt companion, pursued through British Columbia Indigenous business councils, Canada’s most powerful pro-Beijing trade lobby, and quickly evolving legal frameworks.

China’s overt power play — which seeks to leverage not only direct access to resources on lands claimed by Indigenous groups, but to rhetorically counter Canada’s arguments against Beijing’s human rights abuses by citing Canada’s own historical abuses against First Nations, and to do so, in some cases, at the behest of Canadian First Nations leaders themselves — is no less significant than any activities uncovered by Canadian intelligence.

It is conducted in plain sight, in Canadian courts and political offices and public forums, and it is moving quickly. Continue…