What is the United Front Work Department?
An analysis of the Chinese organisation recently mentioned alongside Prince Andrew
The Investigator | No. 03/2024
The recent case involving Prince Andrew and attempts to interfere in the United Kingdom (UK) by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has once again highlighted the United Front Work Department (UFWD). This Investigator sets out the background to the UFWD’s work.
The history of the UFWD
In Mao’s description, the CCP, the People’s Liberation Army and the UFWD constituted the ‘three magic weapons’ in the fight against the Nationalist Party during the civil war. The purpose of the UFWD was to unite to the communist cause’s elements in society which were not natural ideological allies or bedfellows. Shut down during the Cultural Revolution, the UFWD was revived in 1979. It is one of the six main departments of the CCP.
The UFWD is primarily a domestic beast
Ultimately, the role of the UFWD is to keep the CCP in power, to prevent unrest, and to promote stability.
Leninist though the system is, the CCP has always taken the temperature of the people with a view to heading off developing pressures. In this, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which comes under the supervision of the UFWD, plays an important role. It is headed by Wang Huning, one of the seven Politburo Standing Committee members, and has around 620,000 employees and delegates throughout the People’s Republic of China (PRC), at four of the five levels of government.
According to UFWD work regulations of September 2015, its targets are the eight ‘democratic parties’; non-party persons; non-CCP intellectuals; ethnic minorities; religious people; non-public economic entities; new social classes; those studying abroad and returning students; Hong Kong and Macao compatriots; Taiwan compatriots and their relatives on the mainland; Overseas Chinese (OSC), returned OSCs and relatives; and ‘other personnel who need to be contacted and united’. The UFWD bureaus align with these targets.
The tightening of CCP control started before Xi Jinping became General Secretary in 2012. But he has accelerated it. In 2015, he held a United Front conference, and he has considerably widened its control and budgets. Internal factors such as a perceived need to tighten controls over ethnic minorities, the rise of religion and a fast-expanding private sector provided the impetus. Five bureaus were added. At the 2018 National People's Congress, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, State Administration of Religious Affairs, and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office were brought under direct UFWD control.
The growing external importance of the UFWD
At the same time, globalisation required a more active promotion of CCP interests and values abroad. Two areas were of particular importance: bringing OSC and Chinese students overseas into line behind the CCP. But the CCP also reinforced its work on the more general objective of ensuring that foreign countries, their governments, businesses, academia and societies better aligned with the CCP’s world view and ambitions.
The UFWD’s role abroad
It is important to distinguish between influence and interference. All governments do the former – public diplomacy by another name. However, interference is covert, coercive and corrupting.
It is also important to grasp the nature of the United Front strategy. In essence, this piece of CCP dialectic operates by identifying the main enemy – in international affairs, the United States (US) – and then seeks to move those friendly with the main enemy to a neutral position, and those in a neutral position to one where they align with the PRC.
It is not just the UFWD which carries out this strategy: all CCP officials and those whom the UFWD co-opts – many, but not exclusively, party members – also play a part in what is a ‘whole of state activity’. The ultimate aim of the United Front strategy in the UK is to break its close relations with the US.
More detailed aims of the UFWD
Amongst the aims of the UFWD abroad, the following are the most important:
Overseeing Chinese students abroad, to guard against the bringing back of ideas threatening to the CCP;
Ensuring that Chinese studying abroad return home to use their talents and learning to benefit the PRC;
Ensuring that the CCP narrative about China dominates foreign media, academia, politics, and so on;
Influencing foreign politics so that policies adopted are, if not favourable to CCP, then not adversarial;
Obscuring the threat which activities and policies of the CCP pose to other countries, so that necessary defence and security measures remain lax;
Identifying opinion makers and inviting them to the PRC in order to influence them or to target recruits for espionage;
Identifying science and technology targets. These will often be invited to the PRC for rewarded lectures and exchanges with Chinese scientists. This is in line with very long-standing programmes for science and technology collection.
How the UFWD set about its aims
The methods used by the UFWD are often, but not always, hidden in plain sight. They include:
Controlling academic discourse via the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which gets funding and instructions from the Chinese Embassy, or using academics in UK universities who are CCP members and may have followed the lifelong oath to work for the party. Confucius Institutes can be mobilised to help. All these sources may collect science and technology developments or identify British people useful to the PRC;
The power of money: British universities are over-reliant on fees from Chinese students. Other levers might be funding for think tanks or pressure on UK companies with interests in the PRC;
Ensuring that leaders of Chinese associations abroad align with CCP aims and that the diaspora promotes CCP goals. Examples included the Council for the Peaceful Reunification of China, and provincial associations;
Attempting to control foreign media. The first but not the only target is Chinese language media, which can be vulnerable particularly if owners also have other business relations with the PRC. Such interests can be promoted or hindered;
Persuading and inducing the influential, ex-officials, business people, politicians, lobbyists and academics to espouse CCP aims, often by an unspoken aligning of business or pecuniary interests with support for the PRC, or a playing down of potential threats;
Invitations to the PRC with expenses paid, and often ‘Potemkin visits’.
The UFWD is, and is not, an intelligence organisation
The PRC is an ‘intelligence state’. This means the borders of intelligence work are fuzzier than in many other countries. The UFWD is not an intelligence organisation in the same way as the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the Central Intelligence Agency, or, even, the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) or military intelligence organisations are. It is not an organisation running agents collecting classified information. It does, however, seek to have a network of ‘agents of influence’. It also provides cover for intelligence officers of the MSS. But the CCP pursues a ‘whole of state’ approach to information (cutting edge science and technology may not always be classified, but its transfer to the PRC can be as big a threat to UK security and interests) and intelligence gathering. Therefore, the UFWD may either retain control of assets or hand them on to the MSS, military intelligence, a research institute or whoever is best placed to exploit them. The UFWD is a ‘forward radar’ for intelligence work.
Dealing with the threats posed by the UFWD
A lack of understanding of the CCP and its UFWD is a recipe for easy exploitation. Greater transparency, publicity when UFWD activity is identified, and putting a clear set of protections in place are necessary as reinforcements for greater awareness of the UFWD. The UK has been heading in the right direction with legislation such as the National Security Investment Act (NSIA), the National Security Act (NSA), and the establishment of the Research Collaboration Advisory Team (RCAT). But as ever, legislating is one thing, implementation another. The following measures could be implemented to protect British interests more effectively from UFWD activities:
Place the PRC on the ‘enhanced tier’ threat level, so that it falls under reporting requirements in the Foreign Interests Registration Scheme (under the NSA);
Protecting the UK’s science and technology by better resourcing and implementating the NSIA and RCAT;
Strengthen the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, to prevent inappropriate work on behalf of Chinese companies which might threaten economic and national security (still-serving ministers and officials may otherwise be tempted to make decisions with an eye on future employment opportunities);
Set up a Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator’s Office, as the Australians have done, to coordinate domestically and also to exchange experiences with other countries.
Charles Parton OBE is Chief Advisor to the China Observatory at the Council on Geostrategy.
Further detail on Chinese interference and countermeasures is available in the author’s February 2019 paper ‘China–UK Relations: Where to Draw the Border Between Influence and Interference?’.
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Great insight into the United Front Work Department. It is definitely something that more people should be aware of.