After years of alarms raised by experts and civil society groups about transnational repression, the Canadian government has named its first foreign interference watchdog, ICIJ’s media partner CBC News reports.

Former British Columbia chief electoral officer Anton Boegman, nominated by the federal government, will take on the new position, CBC News reports. The seven days given to opposition parties to respond lapsed this week.

The new watchdog comes less than a year since ICIJ’s China Targets investigation revealed how Chinese authorities use extensive surveillance, pressure on family members, hacking and other tactics to target regime critics living overseas.

The collaboration of over 40 media partners worldwide featured interviews with 105 targets, alongside internal Chinese government records spanning two decades, to reveal a coordinated, systematic and global effort by the Chinese government to neutralize dissent in all forms.

In Canada, CBC News uncovered cases of intimidation and harassment against a Hong Kong pro-democracy advocate in exile and a pro-Taiwan activist that included the circulation of deepfake, sexually explicit images online and threats against the activist’s family members still living in China.

Lawmakers have repeatedly emphasized the issue as a priority; in the time since, CBC News reports, the results of a foreign interference inquiry concluded transnational repression was a “genuine scourge” in Canada, citing China as the “most active perpetrator of foreign interference targeting Canadian democratic institutions.”

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Reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists helped force a shift in Beijing’s public stance on Xinjiang, according to new academic research — from denying the existence of a vast detention camp system to justifying it and, eventually, to partially dismantling it.

In an article published in Modern China, a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to China studies, political scientist Jan Švec traces how China responded to growing global scrutiny of its “re-education” campaign in Xinjiang between 2014 and 2022. Švec, who’s based at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, used official Chinese documents, state media analysis, leaked files, and international reporting to argue that international exposure played a decisive role in forcing Beijing to adjust both its narrative and its policies.

Following ethnic rioting, and a series of deadly terror attacks within and outside Xinjiang which Beijing blamed on Uyghurs, President Xi Jinping launched a “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Extremism” in 2014 that framed Uyghur identity as a security threat. Local authorities experimented with so-called “de-extremization” centers, openly praising them in regional media. At this stage, there was little international awareness — and little effort to conceal what was happening.

That changed dramatically in 2017, when mass detentions expanded across the region. As arrests surged, Beijing imposed a strict information blackout. References to the camps disappeared from national media, and Xinjiang coverage was softened to emphasize development and stability. But outside China, journalists, researchers and Uyghur exile groups began piecing together evidence of mass incarceration.

Švec says a turning point came in late 2019 after the U.S. imposed sanctions over the repression of Uyghurs and ICIJ published the China Cables, a trove of leaked internal documents that laid bare how the camps operated. The files included detailed instructions on surveillance, discipline and indefinite detention, confirming in the Chinese government’s own words what survivors and investigators had long alleged: the camps were coercive, centrally coordinated and part of a sweeping program of mass surveillance and population control.

China, which denies human rights abuses and says religious freedom is respected in Xinjiang, responded to the China Cables investigation by decrying it as “pure fabrication and fake news.”

China Cables and a second leak published that November by the New York Times called the Xinjiang Papers — which included internal speeches and documents confirming the central authorities endorsed the mass repression —  had immediate impact. Google searches for “Xinjiang” surged by 236 percent between September and December of 2019, according to Švec.

“The leaked documents and the imposition of sanctions significantly heightened the public attention on Xinjiang in late 2019,” he wrote.

According to Švec, Chinese officials reacted to the leaks as forcefully as they did to Western sanctions. State media launched aggressive attacks on critical media reports, while diplomats scrambled to counter the damage.

“In one response, the official media deemed it necessary to say that Western media ‘cannot have any actual influence’ and ‘just cannot do anything about it’. An officially published letter by a former ‘student’ of one of the camps urged Americans to ‘shut up,’ ” Švec writes.

Yet just days after the China Cables were published, authorities announced that all camp “trainees” had “graduated,” signaling an abrupt policy shift.

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al, partial acknowledgment, formal legalization, downsizing and eventual abandonment of the camps as a visible policy. He says detention facilities were physically dismantled or repurposed, and references to the camps vanished from official discourse after 2020.

Crucially, he says, these changes began before major sanctions were imposed, suggesting that exposure and “naming and shaming” were more influential than economic penalties alone. “China explicitly reacted to investigative findings,” Švec wrote, adjusting its approach even as it publicly insisted it had done nothing wrong.

Švec adds, “Nevertheless, although the first sanctions were adopted only in October 2019, the threat of their imposition had existed since at least 2018, and their influence on the decision making of the authorities cannot be excluded as well.” He states that China’s decision to retreat from the policy of mass internment in Xinjiang was most likely shaped by a combination of international pressure and the perceived reduction of security threats.

Švec argues that his findings challenge the widespread belief that China is immune to international criticism on sensitive domestic issues like Xinjiang. Instead, it suggests that Beijing is deeply concerned about its global image — particularly when human rights abuses threaten diplomatic ties, economic ambitions, and flagship projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s massive global infrastructure and investment strategy.

Entities linked to the Chinese state have quietly assumed control of one of Malawi’s most strategic rare-earth mineral projects — without required oversight from Malawian authorities, an investigation by ICIJ partners PIJ Malawi, Finance Uncovered and The Continent found.

The probefocused on Mawei Mining Company Ltd., the holder of a large heavy mineral sands concession near Makanjira on the shores of Lake Malawi that are believed to contain more than 350 million tonnes of ore including zircon, titanium and monazite, a key source of rare earth elements.

Despite the government’s initial heralding of the site as a major economic opportunity with promises of jobs and infrastructure, work has largely stalled since the licence was granted in late 2017. Community leaders say they have seen no tangible benefits and that promised development projects have not materialized.

The investigation found that the ownership of Mawei’s parent company, British Virgin Islands-based Xinjin International Company Ltd., changed hands twice between 2023 and 2025, ultimately placing the project under majority control of two Chinese state-linked entities — Shandong Zhaojin Ruining Mining Industries Co. and Hainan International Resources, a regional state enterprise.

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s acknowledged that they were unaware of these transactions.

In response to the PIJ Malawi report, the Lilongwe government has launched an official investigation into the ownership changes and compliance with mining laws, with the mining ministry pledging a fact-finding exercise that could result in fines or administrative action.

Civil society groups warn the episode highlights wider governance gaps in Malawi’s mining sector, where weak regulatory capacity and opaque ownership structures risk ceding control of national resources to foreign interests. 

“This is mineral extraction without oversight,” said Joy Chabwera, program manager at the Natural Resources Justice Network, a coalition of civil society groups in Malawi.

The government sees foreign investment, including broader Chinese mining engagement, as key to economic transformation. But for many in Makanjira, the promised benefits of Malawi’s mineral wealth remain elusive.