United Front Work Department
The United Front Work Department (UFWD) (Chinese: 中共中央统战部) of the People's Republic of China is an agency under the command of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Its main function is to manage relations with the non-Communist Party elite, including individuals and organizations holding social, commercial, or academic influence, or who represent important interest groups. In so doing, the UFWD seeks to ensure that these groups are supportive of and useful to Communist Party rule.[1]
The UFWD consists of eight minor political parties and the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. It maintains a close relationship with the State Administration for Religious Affairs, which overseas the five officially sanctioned religions, and plays an active role in managing ethnic and religious minorities, particularly in Tibet.[2] The current department head is Du Qinglin.
The United Front Work Department was created during the Chinese civil war, and was reestablished in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping. It expanded the scope of its work internationally during the reform era, and again following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The department includes a bureau tasked with handling Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and overseas affairs, and articulates the importance of using overseas Chinese populations to promote reunification.[3] It played an important role in building support for "One country, two systems" in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s, operating under the name of the "Coordination Department."[4] The UFWD has been critically described as serving to co-opt non-Communist community leaders outside China, and "using them to neutralize Party critics," sometimes coercively.[5]
Some national intelligence agencies have expressed concern that the mandate and operations of the UFWD can constitute undue interference in other nations' internal affairs.[5] In their book Nest of Spies: the starting truth about foreign agents at work within Canada’s borders, de Pierrebourg and Juneau-Katsuya allege that the United Front Work Department “manages important dossiers concerning foreign countries. These include propaganda, the control of Chinese students abroad, the recruiting of agents among the Chinese diaspora (and among sympathetic foreigners), and long-term clandestine operations.”[6] In 2007, the Communist Party increased the United Front Work Department’s budget by $3 million to further bolster China’s “soft power” abroad.[6]
[edit] References
- ^ Carol Lee Hamrin and Suisheng Zhao, "Decision-Making in Deng's China", (New York, NY: East Gate, 1995.), pp 66 - 67.
- ^ William A. Joseph, "Politics in China: an introduction", (Oxford University Press, 2010), p 169.
- ^ United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee, '华侨、华人工作的基本任务, March 23 2009.
- ^ Christine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong", (Hong Kong University Press, 2010), p 148.
- ^ a b Holly Porteous, “Beijing’s United Front Strategy in Hong Kong”, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Commentary 72 (1998)
- ^ a b Fabrice De Pierrebourg and Michel Juneau-Katsuya, “Nest of Spies: the starting truth about foreign agents at work within Canada’s borders”, HarperCollins Canada, 2009. pp 160 – 162
