[FlameOn]

Canadian vocal pro-Hong Kong democracy supporters getting rape, abduction, and harassment threats including disturbing ones to their family back in China. Canadian police powerless to stop them since harassment originates from China.

For Cherie Wong, the threats of rape and murder she receives on social media are only a semi-constant reminder that many supporters of the Chinese Communist Party see her as an enemy.

Back in January, Wong — executive director and co-founder of Alliance Canada Hong Kong, a group pressing the Canadian government to defend the former British colony's democracy — flew to Vancouver for events associated with the alliance's launch. Someone had been keeping tabs on her, she said.

"My hotel room was booked by someone else as a security measure. And two days after the launch ... I received a threatening phone call to my hotel room demanding that I leave immediately, that these people are coming to collect me," she said.

Wong said she still doesn't know how her whereabouts were disclosed. She said she reported the call to the police but was told there was little they could do.

Wong said activists in her group had a foretaste of the impotence of Canadian police in the face of such harassment on August 17, 2019, when members of the Hong Kong diaspora rallied in 30 cities around the world to back Hong Kong's anti-extradition protests. They were met by counter-protesters waving Chinese flags.

Wong said she was one of a number of protest participants who were subsequently "doxxed" by online antagonists. "They took photos of me and started digging up my personal information, my email address, where I was living, my phone number," she said. "And [they] shared that kind of information maliciously through WeChat channels."

Implied threats to family members were more alarming for immigrants from mainland China than for Hong Kong ex-pats — who had reason to believe their families were safer. That's beginning to change, he added.

"'We know where your parents live,'" said Cheuk Kwan of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China. "This is the phrase that they use all the time.

"You know, it could be just a little kind of phone call that says, 'Hey, by the way, I see your parents are doing well in ... somewhere.' You right away know that they know where your parents live.

"People would say, 'OK, I better be quiet, I better shut up or I better not do something.' And ... if you talk to people, the RCMP or CSIS, they will say, well, you can't prevent people from calling people up and saying, 'How are your parents doing?' Right?"

Gurski acknowledges that it's difficult for Canadian authorities to thwart that kind of back-channel pressure.

"I absolutely agree [that] if these are people who are engaged in activity here in Canada which the government of the People's Republic of China would see as threatening or besmirching the reputation of the PRC, they would certainly reach out to them and threaten them exactly that way," he said.

"The problem is if I call up and say, 'Hey, how's Mom and Dad?', you and I may know exactly what I'm talking about, but how do you prove that is actually a very subtle yet very direct threat against one's family, with the intended impact that you'll stop what you're doing? And if you don't ... then you may have something happen to your relatives back home?

"It may be as obvious as the nose on your face [but that's] just not the same as proving it in a court of law."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/chi...nada-1.5717288