Odd story.

China recently discovered how astroturfing, creating fake “grassroots” support, loses its impact when the deception aspect is revealed. A recent example (late January 2020) occurred outside a western Canada (Vancouver) courthouse as demonstrators assembled to protest efforts to extradite a Chinese telecommunications executive. This was a big deal in China because this defendant worked for Huawei, the largest telecom company in China and the world. A crowd gathered carrying signs demanding the release of the Huawei executive. One sign even made reference to a pair or Canadian diplomats arrested in China and charged with espionage. That was relevant because the diplomats were actually taken as hostages to pressure the Canadian government to release the Huawei executive. Soon after the demonstrators began their protest things took a turn for the bizarre.
 
When reporters went to interview some of the demonstrators it was discovered that the demonstrators didn’t know they were demonstrators. The sign carrying group had been hired as background performers for a music video and were paid a hundred dollars each for two hours work. The “background performers” were not happy to find out they had actually been hired for astroturfing. This form of Information Warfare has been increasingly used because it’s a relatively cheap way to get some favorable publicity, especially if the astroturfing stunt goes viral on the Internet and becomes a news event. This only works, of course, if the audiences doesn’t know it’s astroturfing, especially before the event is even concluded.

They usually just hire our politicians.

Terry Glavin;

[R]easonable people will understand fraud as a vice involving dishonesty, trickery, sleight-of-hand, swindling and related varieties of self-dealing monkey business, and each of these have in their way contaminated the public debates about Meng’s case. Those debates are inextricably bound up in the matter of Beijing’s barbaric retaliatory kidnapping and imprisonment of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, along with a variety of costly trade reprisals and threats of more punishments to come.
 
The culpability of quite a few yesteryear Liberal party big shots in giving Beijing every impression that these sorts of strong-arm tactics would work in Canada is at issue as well, or at least it should be. We are expected to believe, for instance, that Jean Chrétien, John Manley and Eddie Goldenberg, in relaying Beijing’s ransom demands — the crudest being a “prisoner exchange,” Meng for Kovrig and Spavor — are sage and wizened statesmen whose advice is offered in a public-spirited way, in the national interest. After all, we’re talking about a former prime minister, a former deputy prime minister, and Chrétien’s former chief of staff.
 
The charade here is that Jean Chrétien has been a senior skid-greaser in the China trade racket ever since he resigned in 2003, and he currently serves as a trusted counsel with Dentons LLP, which serves as the public face of the Chinese corporate law conglomerate otherwise known as Beijing Dacheng. Manley is a senior adviser with Bennett Jones LLP and a director of Telus Corp., which is up to its eyeballs in Huawei gear and is quaking at the thought of Huawei being properly barred from Canada’s 5G internet roll-out on national security grounds. Bennett Jones’ clients roster includes several of Beijing’s ministries, agencies and state-owned enterprises, and the firm’s “co-head of government affairs and public policy practice” is none other than Eddie Goldenberg.
 
The prisoner-exchange remedy they’ve proposed relies on some heretofore undisclosed assurance from Beijing that indeed the two Mikes would be surrendered if only Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would hornswoggle from Justice Minister David Lametti an unseemly intervention on Meng’s behalf of the sordid kind he failed to procure from Jody Wilson-Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin affair.