EXPLAINED: What is China’s United Front and how does it operate?

Paul Eckert for RFA

Evidence is mounting of clandestine Chinese influence operations in the heart of America.

Just in the last few months, a former aide to the governor of New York state and her husband were arrested for alleged illicit activities promoting the interests of China; a Chinese democracy activist was arrested and accused of spying for China; and a historian was convicted of being an agent for Beijing.

The three separate cases of former Albany functionary Linda Sun, dissident Yuanjun Tang and author Wang Shujun took place in New York alone. And they were not the first cases of alleged Chinese influence operations targeting immigrants from China in the Big Apple.

Those cases came to light as a detailed investigation by the Washington Post revealed that China’s diplomats and pro-Beijing diaspora were behind demonstrations in San Francisco that attacked opponents during President Xi Jinping’s visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, summit last November.

All bear the hallmarks of China’s “united front” influence operations conducted by government ministries, party operatives and local proxies – but in a veiled manner.

“United front work is a unique blend of influence and interference activities, as well as intelligence operations that the CCP uses to shape its political environment,” said the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in a report published last November.

What is the United Front Work Department?

Coordinating this overseas influence and interference work is Beijing’s shadowy United Front Work Department, or UFWD, set up in 1942, even before the Communists took over control of China.

Headed by Shi Taifeng, a Politburo member, it seeks to promote China’s political interests through an extensive network of organizations and individuals around the world, experts say.

It spares no effort trying to push Beijing’s view – and crush dissenting opinions – among people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, ethnic minorities such as Mongolians, Tibetans and Uyghurs as well as among religious groups.

How does the UFWD operate?

The United Front Work Department is engaged in a mixture of activities, from interfering in the Chinese diaspora and suppressing dissidents to gathering intelligence, encouraging investment in China and facilitating the transfer of technology, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, said in a report.

It uses quasi-official organizations and civil society groups based overseas to blur the line between official and private, giving China plausible deniability in many cases, witnesses told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which advises Congress on China.

It funds Confucius Institutes – Chinese-language study centers on university campuses around the world – many of which have been shut down in the United States. It also funds diplomats’ engagement with foreign elites and its police force’s perpetration of “transnational repression” – clamping down on dissidents or opponents outside China’s borders, the review commission said in a 2023 report based on expert testimony.

United front groups often have innocuous sounding names, like the Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification or the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Many appear to be ordinary overseas Chinese community organizations, and are found in business and even in multinational corporations.

Lurking behind or within them, though, are government or party agencies – very often China’s powerful intelligence, security and secret police agency.

“United front groups are used – very specifically – to hide the Ministry of State Security,” said Peter Mattis, head of the non-profit Jamestown Foundation. “This is why I like to think of the United Front Work Department as the tall grass that is sort of deliberately cultivated to hide snakes,” he told RFA.

What is the history of China‘s ’united front’ work?

Under the Moscow-led Comintern in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party adapted Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s concept of forming a “united front” – forging temporary alliances with friends and lesser enemies in order to defeat greater enemies.

After Mao Zedong’s Communists took power in 1949, united front work focused internally on co-opting Chinese capitalists and intellectuals, who were brought to heel and persecuted in the 1950s under Mao’s vicious ideological campaigns.

Xi Zhongxun, the father of current President Xi Jinping, played a key united front work role with top Tibetan Buddhist figures, trying to influence the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.

What role has Xi played?

While China denies meddling in the affairs of foreign nations, experts say that under President Xi, China’s overseas influence activities have become more aggressive and technologically sophisticated.

In 2017, Xi famously repeated Mao’s description of united front work as a “magic weapon” for the party’s success. But two years before that, he established a “leading small group” to coordinate top-level united front work and carried out a major expansion and reorganization of the UFWD.

“We will build a broad united front to forge great unity and solidarity, and we will encourage all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation to dedicate themselves to realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation,” Xi told the 20th Party Congress in 2022.

That congress saw Xi’s top ideological theorist, Wang Huning, who ranks fourth in the Politburo, appointed to lead the national-level united front system, the House Select Committee report said.

Xi has built up the power and capacity of the UFWD, which controls 11 subordinate government agencies, including the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the State Administration for Religious Affairs, according to Australia’s ASPI.

What are some examples of the UFWD’s efforts in the U.S.?

In New York, prosecutors say that Linda Sun and her husband, Christopher Hu, received millions of dollars in cash, event tickets and gourmet salted duck from the UFWD. In exchange, Sun tried to remove references to Taiwan in state communications, and obtained unauthorized letters from the governor’s office to help Chinese officials travel, prosecutors say.

In California during Xi’s visit in November, the Washington Post reported, the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles paid for supporters’ hotels and meals and directly interacted with aggressive actors who punched and kicked anti-Xi protesters and attacked them with flagpoles and chemical spray. U.S. stopovers by Taiwan leaders have drawn similar protests.

Who are the targets of united front work?

Sun and Hu represent a key demographic in the UFWD’s crosshairs: the Chinese diaspora. The activist Tang had access to the overseas Chinese dissident and pro-democracy community and its network of supporters.

United front pressure and harassment tactics – including threats against family in China – are deployed against diaspora members of China’s persecuted ethnic and religious minorities: Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and members of the banned Falun Gong movement.

Citizens of Taiwan have for decades been pressured by united front efforts to support unification with the Communist-controlled mainland.

The recent imposition of draconian national security legislation in Hong Kong has made citizens and exiles who oppose those authoritarian steps in formerly free Chinese territory targets of united front pressure.

These targets are not alone and the list is growing, with Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand also grappling with Chinese influence campaigns that smack of united front work.

“There’s no clear distinction between domestic and overseas united front work: all bureaus of the UFWD and all areas of united front work involve overseas activities,” the report from Australia’s ASPI said.

“This is because the key distinction underlying the United Front is not between domestic and overseas groups, but between the CCP and everyone else,” it said.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington told Radio Free Asia that the United Front’s domestic role is to “promote cooperation between the (Communist Party) and people who are not members of it.” Outreach to the diaspora “helps give full play to their role as a bridge linking China with the rest of the world,” the embassy spokesperson’s office said in an e-mailed statement.

“Its work is transparent, above-board and beyond reproach,” it said. “By making an issue out of China’s United Front work, some people are trying to discredit China’s political system and disrupt normal exchange and cooperation between China and the United States.”

Additional reporting by Jane Tang of RFA Investigative. Edited by Malcolm Foster.