United Front organizations are managed primarily by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), but the United Front strategy is not limited solely to the UFWD. The strategy involves numerous subservient front organizations and affiliates outside of China, which tend to obfuscate or downplay any association with the CCP.[9][10][11][12]
The United Front "assumed its current form" in 1946,[14] three years before the CCP defeated the authoritarian governing party Kuomintang's Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Mao credited the United Front as one of his "Three Magic Weapons" against the Kuomintang—alongside the Leninist Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army—and credited the Front with playing a part in his victory.[14][15]
Organs
The two organs traditionally affiliated with United Front are the United Front Work Department and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). According to Yi-Zheng Lian, the organs "are often poorly understood outside China because there are no equivalents for them in the West".[14] Scholar Jichang Lulu noted that United Front organizations abroad "re-purpose democratic governance structures to serve as tools of extraterritorial influence."[16]
The United Front Work Department is headed by the chief of the secretariat of the CCP's Central Committee. It oversees front organizations and their affiliates in multiple countries such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Association,[9][17] which helps Chinese students and academics studying or residing in the West, enjoining them to conduct "people-to-people diplomacy" on behalf of the People's Republic of China.[14]
The United Front is a political strategy that the CCP has used to influence beyond its immediate circles while downplaying direct associations with the CCP.[18] In theory, the United Front existed to give front organizations and non-Communist forces a platform in society.[19] Historically, the CCP co-opted and re-purposed non-Communist organizations to become part of the United Front through tactics of entryism.[20] However, scholars describe the contemporary United Front as a complex network of organizations that engage in various types of surveillance and political warfare for the CCP.[21][22][23]
According to a 2018 report by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, "United Front work serves to promote Beijing’s preferred global narrative, pressure individuals living in free and open societies to self-censor and avoid discussing issues unfavorable to the CCP, and harass or undermine groups critical of Beijing’s policies."[9] According to Financial Times, nearly all Chinese embassies include staff that are formally tasked with United Front work.[24]
Scholar Jeffrey Stoff also argues that the CPP's "influence apparatus intersects with or directly supports its global technology transfer apparatus."[25][26] In 2019, the United Front's aggregate budget across multiple institutions was estimated at over $2.6 billion which was larger than the Chinese Foreign Ministry's budget.[27]
Leaders of formal United Front organizations are mostly selected by the CCP, or are themselves CCP members.[28] This process is institutionalized in the CPPCC.[29] In practice, United Front member parties and allied organizations are subservient to the CCP, and must accept the CCP's "leading role" as a condition of their continued existence. According to the Taiwanese Mainland Affairs Council the United Front uses internet celebrities to carry out infiltration campaigns on social media.[30]
Starting in January 2020, United Front-linked organizations in Canada and other countries were activated to purchase, stockpile, and export personal protective equipment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China.[31][32] In September 2020, the CCP announced that it would strengthen United Front work in the private sector by establishing more party committees in regional federations of industry and commerce (FIC), and by arranging a special liaison between FICs and the CCP.[33]
United Front affiliates in the National People's Congress
"In building socialism it is essential to rely on workers, peasants and intellectuals and to unite all forces that can be united. In the long years of revolution and construction, there has been formed under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party a broad patriotic united front which is composed of the democratic parties and people's organizations and which embraces all socialist working people, all builders of socialism, all patriots who support socialism, and all patriots who stand for the reunification of the motherland. This united front will continue to be consolidated and developed. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a broadly based representative organization of the united front which has played a significant historical role, will play a still more important role in the country's political and social life, in promoting friendship with other countries and in the struggle for socialist modernization and for the reunification and unity of the country. The system of the multi-party cooperation and political consultation led by the Communist Party of China will exist and develop for a long time to come."
^Compare:
"Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. INTRODUCING THE COMMUNIST: October 4, 1939". Marxist.org. 4 October 1939. Archived from the original on 15 July 2018. Retrieved 21 May 2018. Although the united front was formed and has been maintained for three years now, the bourgeoisie, and especially the big bourgeoisie, has constantly been trying to destroy our Party, the big bourgeois capitulators and die-hards have been instigating serious friction throughout the country, and the anti-Communist clamour is incessant. All this is being used by the big bourgeois capitulators and die-hards to prepare the way for capitulating to Japanese imperialism, breaking up the united front and dragging China backwards. Ideologically, the big bourgeoisie is trying to "corrode" communism, whilst politically and organizationally it is trying to liquidate the Communist Party, the Border Region and the Party's armed forces.
^Compare:
"Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. INTRODUCING THE COMMUNIST: October 4, 1939". Marxist.org. 4 October 1939. Archived from the original on 15 July 2018. Retrieved 21 May 2018. ... our eighteen years of experience have taught us that the united front, armed struggle and Party building are the Chinese Communist Party's three 'magic weapons', its three principal magic weapons for defeating the enemy in the Chinese revolution.
^Suli, Zhu (2009), Balme, Stéphanie; Dowdle, Michael W. (eds.), ""Judicial Politics" as State-Building", Building Constitutionalism in China, New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, pp. 23–36, doi:10.1057/9780230623958_2, ISBN978-1-349-36978-2
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