The videos showed a man in camouflage and a balaclava, teaching viewers how to prepare for armed revolution against the Chinese Communist Party. His militia was called the V Brigade. It did not exist. The man worked for China’s Ministry of Public Security, and he invented the whole group to win the trust of one exiled artist.
The artist was Hua Yong, a painter already notorious in China for his Tiananmen commemorations and his footage of mass evictions in Beijing. The man goes by Eric. In messages he later shared with journalists at ABC and Radio-Canada, his handler put it bluntly: the higher-ups found Hua annoying and wanted to deal with him. Hua believed in the V Brigade enough to spread its videos and bring Eric into his inner circle. After Hua moved to Canada, his address, his phone number and his contacts kept flowing back to Eric’s handlers. Hua died while kayaking in November 2022. Eric has told Radio-Canada it may not have been an accident.
What the V Brigade story lacked until …