The B.C. Coroners Service has not yet completed an investigation into the death of Chinese dissident Hua Yong, whose body was found nearly two years ago after he left on a kayaking trip from the province’s Sunshine Coast.
The province’s coroner’s office declined to explain why the probe continues into the death of Mr. Hua, a Chinese artist and human-rights activist who had been a harsh critic of the Chinese Communist Party.
“The investigation into Hua Yong’s death is still open and on-going,” Amber Schinkel, manager of communications and media relations for the BC Coroners Service, said in a statement.
“While I can’t comment on this specific investigation, there are many factors that determine how long an investigation takes, depending on the different partner agencies involved and various testing.”
Earlier this year, a former Chinese spy told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Mr. Hua had been kept under surveillance by Chinese security services, with his movements and contacts monitored.
The former spy, identified by his English first name, Eric, told the ABC that he harboured doubts about Mr. Hua’s death. “My first reaction was that maybe he’d been killed, but in fact, I couldn’t tell whether his death was just an accident or a murder, because I wasn’t part of it,” Eric told the network.
The RCMP say they have investigated his death and concluded it was not suspicious.
“The RCMP have gathered all available evidence and information, and followed up on all tasks and tips,” said Sergeant Vanessa Munn of the force in B.C. “In this particular case, there is no evidence to suggest that there was any criminality, despite the concerns expressed to the media by those who were not involved in the investigation.”
She said the Mounties would reopen the case if new information came to light.
The Chinese embassy in Canada, led by envoy Wang Di, said in a statement it was “not aware” of this case and advised consulting Canadian authorities.
Defence Minister Bill Blair said information about Mr. Hua’s death “has not come across my desk.”
But friends of Mr. Hua say they have long been worried that his death was not fully investigated, pointing to the attention he had garnered from the Chinese security apparatus as reason to raise further questions.
They point to Mr. Hua’s posts to social media, in which he laced criticism of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, with violent allusions. He accused Mr. Xi of doing “evil,” dubbed him “Xi Zedong” and sketched him with three knives buried into his head, dripping blood.
The main reason for the Chinese state to attack Mr. Hua was not because he was a dissident, “but because the CCP believed that Hua Yong had sent people to shoot Xi Jinping,” said Li Jianfeng, a friend of Mr. Hua.
Mr. Hua had also warned that he could be arrested, repatriated, disappeared or assassinated after a 2020 article from Radio Free Asia, which described his situation in exile in Thailand. His girlfriend at the time had been threatened with allegations that she had committed financial fraud. Mr. Hua, in turn, pleaded for help from international institutions.
“Although I am nervous, I am not afraid,” he wrote on the former Twitter, now X.
An artist, Mr. Hua fled China after repeatedly making his own body a tableau to call attention to the bloody acts of the country’s ruling Community Party. In 2011, he went to Tiananmen Square, where anti-corruption and pro-democracy protesters gathered before the slaughter of June 4, 1989. He punched himself in the nose, drawing enough blood to write the numbers six and four – shorthand for June 4 – on the square’s paving stones.
Police quickly took him away, but he returned a year later, this time drawing blood from his finger to write the numbers on his forehead. He was sent to a labour camp.
Eric, the Chinese spy, provided the ABC with voice recordings from his handlers, who assigned him to lure Mr. Hua to Cambodia or Laos. Chinese agents have in the past spirited dissidents out of those countries and back into China. “The superiors now find him very annoying and want to deal with him,” the handler told Eric.
Chinese security services offered a bounty of nearly $20,000 for the successful capture of Mr. Hua, Eric said.
But in 2021, Mr. Hua left for Canada, which allowed him entry as a temporary protected resident, a designation for people deemed to be in urgent need of help.
In British Columbia, he made a home in Gibsons, on the province’s Sunshine Coast. In social-media posts, Mr. Hua documented some of his life in Canada, where he received a Red Cross gift package filled with daily necessities and snacks and cultivated a love for the outdoors.
Among his purchases was a small yellow kayak, which he liked to paddle in the waters off Gibsons. Some of the pictures he posted to Twitter showed him paddling in late afternoon, the sky flush with the colours of sunset.
On Nov. 25, 2022, he set out again. This time he did not return. Search and rescue teams were called in to search for him. Local authorities said elements of the search were unusual.
“It was curious at the time,” said Gibsons Mayor Silas White. He recalled Mr. Hua’s disappearance as “kind of this mystery – that somebody who wasn’t from here and might have been kind of a neophyte when it came to kayaking, went out alone.”
Search and rescue crews understood that Mr. Hua was different.
“The indication that we had at the time was that it was potentially not just a local situation – that it had further-reaching implications,” said David Croal, a Gibsons city councillor who sits on the board of the local Marine Rescue Society.
Mr. Hua’s body was discovered the following day off the western shores of Bowen Island, which is separated from Gibsons by several islands and two channels of water.
But winds and tides in the area can move in complex ways, Mr. Croal said. And, he added, it was impossible for those monitoring the search to know what happened to Mr. Hua, who may have courted danger by being in a kayak late on a November day, on waters frequented by much larger vessels that might not see a smaller craft in darkness, including tugs towing barges on long lines.
Mr. Croal recalled reports that another vessel had spotted Mr. Hua with a prawn trap balanced on the prow of his kayak. “That in itself could have caused him to overturn,” Mr. Croal said.
What happened to Mr. Hua “might have been simply an accident,” he said. “But now, knowing the individual’s background, it does raise some questions.”
The recent history of foreign interference in Canada should give rise to more scrutiny of cases like that of Mr. Hua, said Sophie Richardson, an expert on human rights in China who has conducted intensive research on Ottawa’s responses to Chinese actions. Ms. Richardson is a former China director at Human Rights Watch.
Canada has documented numerous instances of agents of the Chinese state harassing people in Canada. RCMP are already investigating what the force called “alleged Chinese police stations” in Quebec.
“And the RCMP doesn’t see a need to go a few extra miles in investigating this case?” asked Ms. Richardson.
Failing to take seriously the possibility of Chinese involvement in Mr. Hua’s death, she said, sends a signal, providing “another data point for Beijing in understanding how best to achieve its goals without attracting certain kinds of attention – or consequences.”
Western democracies, Canada included, have tended to see the “Chinese government’s track record on human rights as a problem that happened over there. And the cold hard reality is, in fact, that it’s now right here,” she said.
“Unless and until governments really come to grips with that, and respond with resources and ambition and seriousness of purpose, we’re going to see more violations and not less.”