But the Communist Party, she said, “was already here.”

The smears cannot be definitively linked to the Chinese government, experts say.

However in Canada, security experts have warned for years about the growing influence of Beijing not only on Chinese expatriates but on the government itself. In 2010, the head of Canada’s intelligence service shocked the country by declaring that the Chinese Communist Party had “agents of influence” in local governments.

And in 2017, a confidential report prepared by the Canadian branch of Amnesty International alerted the authorities to the harassment of Chinese-Canadian activists, the scale of which appeared “consistent with a coordinated, Chinese state-sponsored campaign.”

The dissident who seemed to be getting the worst of it: Sheng Xue.

“I think she’s a victim,” said Andy Ellis, the former assistant director of operations for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. “I strongly do. I think the Chinese government is trying to sully her reputation to advance their own interests.”

The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa declined to comment.

Rise to prominence. Flood of hate.

Sheng Xue, whose pen name is Mandarin for “abundant snow,” arrived in Canada in August 1989 on a visa to study journalism.

But while she had left China, she could not leave China behind.

Haunted by the sight of soldiers shooting into a crowd close to her family’s apartment during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June of that year, Sheng Xue abandoned her study plans and threw herself into the burgeoning Chinese democracy movement in Toronto. She helped form a local branch of the Federation for a Democratic China, which at its height had 3,000 members in 25 countries.

Despite having forgone a degree, Sheng Xue broke into journalism and fashioned a successful career as a writer. But she was best known for her activism — leading protests, lobbying governments and helping fellow activists with their asylum cases.