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Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China's Secret War Against Canada Audiobook
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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 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.
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.
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"Under Siege offers an urgent look at PRC foreign interference in Canada, an issue notwidely understood outside of Canada’s Chinese community until recently. Dennis Molinaro reveals the extent of Beijing’s interference, from Canada’s democratic institutions to its local communities from the 1970s to the present. Drawing on his experience as an intelligence analyst, he outlines a number of actions governments can take to safeguard Canadian sovereignty. This book serves as a wake-up call for one of Canada’s most pressing national security challenges."
— ?Hon. Michael Chong, P.C., M.P.
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A deeply unsettling account of China's systematic and subversive attempts to influence Canadians, and the failure of political and business leaders to deter it. Dennis Molinaro convincingly documents how for decades, the Chinese Communist Party has cultivated and co-opted Canada's elites, interfered in Canadian politics, stolen intellectual property and classified information, silenced criticism and suppressed Chinese dissidents and ethnic minorities.
— ―Michael Kovrig -
Lucid analysis from a national security expert, Under Siege unveils the hidden roots of Beijing’s decades of foreign interference in Canadian society and exposes Ottawa’s misguided beliefs—essential reading for policymakers and citizens alike. It is a fact based must-read on how Canada arrived at this pivotal moment of reckoning with China’s decades of foreign influence activities.
— ―Joanna Chiu, author of China Unbound, winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize forPolitical Writing -
Under Siege offers an urgent look at PRC foreign interference in Canada, an issue notwidely understood outside of Canada’s Chinese community until recently. Dennis Molinaro reveals the extent of Beijing’s interference, from Canada’s democratic institutions to its local communities from the 1970s to the present. Drawing on his experience as an intelligence analyst, he outlines a number of actions governments can take to safeguard Canadian sovereignty. This book serves as a wake-up call for one of Canada’s most pressing national security challenges.
— ―Hon. Michael Chong, P.C., M.P. -
Based on newly released archival material, the book portrays an intelligence world more nuanced than sometimes seen in the literature.
— Kurt F. Jensen, Intelligence and National Security -
The Bridge in the Parks is a must-read for anyone interested in the Five Eyes intelligence community. With top scholars covering a range of engaging issues, the book is an important contribution to the field of security and intelligence, addressing the surprisingly overlooked nature of counter-intelligence in the ‘Anglosphere’ during the Cold War. Indeed, current practitioners in the partnership might also prosper from this historical examination of their community.
— Arne Kislenko, Department of History, Toronto Metropolitan University -
This superb collection offers welcome and necessary insight into assorted intelligence and related practices of Five Eyes countries during the Cold War. The precise configuration of security circumstances may change, but many of the challenges reported in these chapters remain eternal. Understanding the past reported in this book provides, therefore, essential context for evaluating the present and anticipating the future.
— Craig Forcese, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
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