United Front Work Department

The United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the CCP Central Committee is the core organization used to advance the Chinese Communist Party's interests with the goal of co-opting organizations that might threaten it. Foreign targets can include the overseas Chinese communities, government officials, education institutions and any persons deemed influential.

The CCP's United Front system mobilizes the party's “friends” to strike the party's enemies. The system was greatly energized and expanded by Xi Jinping. It operates inside foreign political parties, diaspora communities, colleges and corporations, all with the goal of promoting the party's interests. The express goals of the United Front system include undermining social cohesion, exacerbating racial tension, and using of psychological warfare (psyops), media warfare (propaganda and fake news), and legal warfare (lawfare).

The CCP uses propaganda and influence operations as a means of projecting its power and weakening its enemies. Chief amongst the targets for these kinds of operations is the United States. These operations are coordinated and directed by the UFWD.

Controlling the narrative

To advance the CCP narrative that the world is biased against China, the CCP has stepped up its United Front work to stifle criticism of the CCP, spread positive views of the CCP, and incentivize voters in foreign democracies to influence their domestic policies in ways favorable to PRC. The CCP has also cracked down on what it terms “historical nihilism,” or attempts to undermine Beijing’s official history.

During anti-CCP protests in San Francisco surrounding the 2008 Olympic torch relay, former U.S. intelligence officials said Chinese security officials monitored and directed counterprotesting blocs of thousands of Chinese students to drown out Beijing’s critics, which Politico called an “operation … by a hostile foreign intelligence service to forcibly suppress First Amendment activities in a major American city.” U.S. law defines “conspiracy against rights” as conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same” or going “in disguise … or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured.” The UFWD efforts at suppressing protests on U.S. soil to promote its narrative is as much a problem of civil rights as it is a problem of national security.

Overseas diaspora and dissident groups

The UFWD teaching manual directs operatives to win overseas Chinese over to the CCP’s side by emphasizing “flesh and blood” ties to China with the goal of securing political, moral, and financial support for the CCP. To achieve these ends, UFWD officials often meet with local chapters of “Hometown Associations” (groups that connect Chinese emigrants from the same locale), sometimes along with senior staff from Chinese consulates. In March 2018, the UFWD absorbed a number of State Council offices, including its Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, further consolidating its responsibility for activities that seek to sway the overseas Chinese communities.

Chinese intelligence services have specifically targeted ethnic minorities such as Uyghurs living overseas, threatening to send their families still in Xinjiang to internment camps, or keep them there, if the former do not agree to spy for China. According to Uyghurs who have been threatened in this way, this coercion is intended “not only to gather details about Uyghurs’ activities abroad, but also to sow discord within exile communities in the West and intimidate people in hopes of preventing them from speaking out against the Chinese state.”

Other organizations

In addition to the UFWD, a range of CCP military and civilian organizations are active in carrying out United Front work, either working directly for the UFWD or under the broader leadership of the CPPCC. The broad swath of actors involved in this work underlines that while certain organizations like the UFWD and CPPCC are explicitly involved in implementing United Front work, the strategy is a priority for the “whole Party.”

Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification

The China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification (CPPRC)—a prominent organization promoting China’s take over of Taiwan—is directly subordinate to the UFWD and has at least 200 chapters in 90 countries, including 33 chapters in the United States registered as the National Association for China’s Peaceful Unification. The CPPRC has become one of the most prominent groups claiming to represent the Chinese diaspora communities and is a leading organization mobilizing international Chinese communities in support of Beijing’s policies.

A separate entity, the Liaison Department of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) General Political Department (GPD), facilitated the activities of a number of front organizations—including “friendship” and “cultural” associations—as part of its broader mission to conduct propaganda operations, perform perception management, and gather intelligence.

China Association for International Friendly Contact

See also: Hunter Biden#I am the managing director of CEFC

The China Association for International Friendly Contact (CAIFC) is a United Front organization run by the Liaison Department of the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission, active in intelligence collection. The department aims to dampen foreign army morale and break them up.

The National Endowment for Democracy argued in its December 2017 report, Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence, that targets of CCP influence operations are often under the mistaken impression that media, academic, and friendship organizations operate independently from the CCP, but “[m]ost, if not all, of the Chinese entities that engage with their peers abroad unequivocally serve national party goals—either by following official or unofficial guidelines, or by avoiding taking positions that might violate [CCP] guidelines or jeopardize the regime’s goals.”

In the early 2000s, Ye Jianming was the deputy secretary of CAIFC. Ye met with Hunter Biden at a Miami hotel in May 2017 and gave Hunter a 2.8-carat diamond worth $50,000. Ye and his associate Gongwen Dong (aka "Kevin"), applied to a bank and opened credit lines for a business named Hudson West III LLC, giving Hunter, Joe Biden's brother James Biden, and James’ wife Sarah Biden, credit cards which the Bidens used to buy extravagant items.

Chinese Students and Scholars Associations

After the Tiananmen Massacre, the CCP increased ideological work targeting Chinese university students and subjected overseas Chinese students to aggressive methods of group management and extraterritorial influence. These efforts resulted in the creation of Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSA), which proliferated to include at least 142 chapters in the United States.

CSSAs receive funding and direction from the CCP through Chinese embassies and consulates—governmental ties CSSAs frequently attempt to conceal—and are active in carrying out overseas Chinese work consistent with Beijing’s United Front strategy. Journalists and activists have shown CSSAs to coordinate with the Chinese government and have been involved in the suppression of free speech and the harassment, intimidation, and surveillance of Chinese students.

Confucius Institutes

See also: Confucius Institute

CCP propaganda centers and spy nests in the United States.

A Confucius Institute is a program found in numerous universities in the U.S. and other countries. It is supported and funded by China's Communist Party. While ostensibly existing to promote learning Mandarin and cultural exchange, Confucius Institutes are effectively the foreign propaganda arm of China's Communist Party and can threaten academic freedom and national security.

CIA reports obtained by The Washington Free Beacon in 2012 revealed,

"The [Chinese Communist Party] provides ‘strings-attached' funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it [the CCP] in a negative light. It has used this tactic to reward pro-China viewpoints and coerce Western academic publications and conferences to self-censor. The CCP often denies visas to academics who criticize the regime, encouraging many China scholars to preemptively self-censor so they can maintain access to the country on which their research depends."

Elite U.S. colleges, a key junta constituent, spent thousands of dollars lobbying Democrats to halt federal probes into their multimillion-dollar partnership with China and other human rights abusers. House Democrats blocked passage of sweeping legislation against the Confucius Institute. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) refused to hold a vote on an anti-Confucius Institute bill that unanimously passed in the Senate in 2020. Under the junta, the institutes rebranded themselves as the Asia Society Chinese Language Partner Network with more than 100 “Confucius classrooms” catering to the K-12 educational system in the United States. Sec. Mike Pompeo referred to the CCP threat as "within the gates."

See also

• United Front
• CCP propaganda war
• 50 cent army

External links

• China’s Overseas United Front Work Background and Implications for the United States, U.S.-China Economic Review Commission Staff Research Report, Alexander Bowe, August 24, 2018.