The company that operates the Beijing Visa Centre is owned by police, which raises questions about how the privacy of applicants is being protected. Pictured are Chinese Communist Party police officers in front of the Canadian Embassy in Beijing.
A company owned by the Communist Party’s Public Security Bureau is collecting personal information in Beijing for visa applications to Canada and other countries, giving Beijing’s security services access to information about people planning to travel outside the country, including personal information, plans to go abroad and more.
According to a report published in the Globe and Mail on February 8, Beijing Shuangxiong Foreign Service Company, which operates the Canadian Visa Application Center in Beijing, is owned by the Beijing Public Security Bureau. Some of the center’s staff are Communist Party members recruited from schools where the Communist Party trains its next generation of elites.
Beijing Shuxiong is a subcontractor to VFS Global, which is based in Zurich and Dubai and has a wide range of contracts to provide global visa processing services to the Canadian government, including the collection of personal information and its biometric information, which is then forwarded to Canadian immigration officials as a reference for visa approvals.
VFS relies on subcontractors to operate Canada’s 11 visa centers in China, where the company provides visa services for 34 countries, and says it has strict procedures in place to protect personal data.
The fact that the company that operates the Beijing visa center is owned by the police raises questions about the extent to which VFS can protect the privacy of applicants, given that Communist authorities have extensive and intrusive surveillance tools and restrictions on travel abroad by some officials and ethnic groups.
Visa Center Has High Level of Intelligence Value
According to Robert Potter, an Australian cybersecurity consultant and Canadian government adviser, the Communist regime’s security services “clearly have a great interest in mining visa data.
He said there could be a high level of intelligence value in knowing what’s going on inside the visa centers. “If you can see who’s being denied and who’s being approved, it will give you a better chance of getting your agent through (the visa application).”
Porter said the information could also be used to stop people from leaving China. For some people, such as Muslims in China, “applying for a visa to leave China is enough to be flagged as a terrorist.”
“If you’re Uighur and are applying for a Canadian visa on humanitarian grounds. It’s really dangerous to give that information to the security services.” Porter said.
Canada relaxes standards for Communist regime?
Ward Elcock, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said that involving companies with ties to the Communist government or its security ministries in the Canadian visa application process means that police states like China “have abandoned our standards.
As previously reported by the Globe and Mail, the Communist Party’s state-owned China Investment Corp. is a backer of VFS’s majority shareholder, an investment fund that holds a majority of the company’s shares. However, VFS says investors have no say in how the company is run.
Canada’s opposition parties have urged the government to reconsider its contract with VFS. NDP MPs have written to the immigration and public services ministers expressing “serious concerns about the security of information handled by VFS Global.
While VFS claims that its information is secure, the company has established increasingly close business ties with Communist Party state-owned enterprises. For example, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission owns 30 percent of the city’s Canada Visa Center; China Travel Service owns a majority of the Guangzhou center; and 93.55 percent of the Jinan center is owned by Pei Zhongyi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
According to a report in the RIA Novosti, the people who answer the phone at these visa centers all refuse to answer questions.
The report said Beijing Shuanxiong is wholly owned by Beijing Tongda Asset Management Group, a subsidiary of Beijing Sifu Enterprise Management Office, which is a direct division of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. Beijing Sifu did not respond to a reporter’s request for comment; an operator at Beijing Sifu provided a fax number for the Beijing police, who also did not respond to a request for comment.
Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador to China, said the best assumption is that there are no privacy protections for visa applications filed in China. “You can bet that the Chinese (Communist) government wants to know who plans to study where abroad, who wants to go abroad as a tourist and who intends to immigrate.”
Rémi Larivière, a spokeswoman for Immigration Canada, said through a statement that any foreign company operating in China would have to work with a local Chinese company. “Canadian officials closely monitor the activities of visa application centers around the world to ensure compliance with our strict privacy requirements.”
Beijing Duo has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party
Beijing Shuangxiong, whose history dates back to 1993, claims to be one of the first agencies approved by the Beijing Public Security Bureau to provide immigration services.
The Globe and Mail reports that Beijing Shuanxiong has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, and that the company’s legal representative and general manager, You Xiangdong, is also secretary of the company’s party committee. The company has established close ties with the Beijing Youth Political Institute, which has been playing an important role in training a new generation of Communist Party leaders for decades.
Beijing Shuangxiong has hired many of the academy’s English graduates to work at the visa center. The company said in a report on the partnership that it likes the political reliability of the school’s students.
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