Report shows China’s ‘widespread’ interference
Communist Party using department to infiltrate companies, universities
A comprehensive new report has mapped out the structures, methods and effects of what it calls China’s global foreign interference system.
And the report’s author tells the Star he believes such activities are “widespread” in Canada, with clues often out in the open.
The report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think-tank details how Beijing uses the United Front Work Department to stifle criticism, infiltrate foreign political parties, diaspora communities, universities and multinational corporations.
The report draws on extensive reviews of Chinese Communist Party documents, Chinese-language media articles, overseas organizations’ websites as well as photographs and posts on Chinese social media platforms including WeChat.
The United Front Work Department has been an official department of the Chinese
Communist Party since 1979, when ambitious Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping tasked it to collect information from sources around the world and advance global support for the party. An earlier iteration of the United Front Work Department was first founded by the CCP in 1948, but had gone dormant.
The CCP says that United Front work is democratic, to seek consultation from people and organizations around the world, but its own documents show that the United Front agency works closely with the propaganda department as well as the ministry of state security, which is the China’s intelligence agency.
In recent years, Chinese President Xi Jinping presided over an expansion of the agency that included adding 40,000 staff.
The report calls the United Front’s overseas expansion “an exportation of the CCP’s political system. Overseas United Front Work taken to its conclusion would give the CCP undue influence over political representation and expression in foreign political systems.”
The report does not cover Canada’s experience, but Alex Joske, the report’s author, shared some of his findings exclusively with the Star.
“When it comes to Canadians attending major United Front conferences and events, online directories of attendees show a large number of Canadian participants as well as Australians,” he said.
For example, a United Frontsponsored conference in North China’s Hebei province last October for overseas Chinese language media listed more than 50 attendees from Canada, while the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, a key united front organization that has been openly identified as such in Chinese state media, listed 24 Canada-based delegates and 24 Australia-based delegates in 2018.
The event descriptions and signs pictured in photographs from the events clearly showed Chinese government involvement, according to records shared by Joske and reviewed by the Star.
For many years, there has been little international response to counter the United Front’s activities. According to the report, this includes setting up organizations abroad that claim to speak on behalf of groups such as Chinese international students, ethnic minorities and religious groups.
The findings of the report should come as no surprise to Canada’s leaders, said Garnett Genuis, a Conservative MP from Alberta who is a member of a special parliamentary committee on Canada-China relations.
He pointed out that public servants including the former director of Canada’s spy agency, Richard Fadden, have repeatedly warned that state actors, including Russia and China, are increasingly working to advance its strategic interests abroad.
The annual public reports of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have reported attempts at “foreign interference” in Canada for decades, and Fadden’s predecessor, Jim Judd, had said publicly that China accounts for about half the attention his agencies gives to foreign intelligence gathering efforts.
“The intelligence is already there to suggest there is a concern,” Genuis said.