By sending Nong Rong, a Chinese politician with close ties to the United Front Works Department (UFWD), as ambassador to Pakistan, Beijing is making an all-out effort to influence South Asia in support of the Strip Initiative. and the Route (BRI) and divide the critics of the Xi Jinping regime. Ambassador Nong replaces career diplomat Yao Jing in Islamabad this week.
A study of prominent Chinese ambassadors in South Asia shows that the current Beijing representative to Bangladesh, Li Jiming, and the former Chinese ambassador to Sri Lanka, Cheng Xueyuan, had ties to the UFWD. This organization, in which President Xi Jinping served for many years, has the mandate of conducting psychological operations with the task of influencing the political, economic and intellectuals of other countries and the aim of systematic penetration into the systems of the target country. .
Even China’s ambassador to Nepal Hou Yonqi is an Asian affairs expert with a background in PLA intelligence, having served as the director of the Department of Foreign Security Affairs in 2012-2013. Beijing has tasked Ambassador Hou, who speaks fluent Urdu, with holding the communist movement in Nepal together and not dividing it between Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and party chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal or Prachanda.
Clearly, the task of China’s ambassadors to South Asia is to pressure the BRI and aggressively undermine the influence of Indian civilization.
The benign-sounding UFWD is a unique organization that has been formed to create a critical mass of support for the Communist Party of China (CCP) among non-communists. It has a national and international wing. At the national level, its role is to create sympathizers among people who are not part of the 86 million strong CCP.
For example, ethnic minorities, religious groups within China, especially in the provinces and border regions, have been its main targets. In an attempt to foster the CCP’s hegemony within the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the UFWD has been tasked with generating fundamental social support in Xinjiang, using soft power. Consequently, UFWD has been extremely active among the Uighur ethnic community, aiming at Sinizar Xinjiang.
Similarly, the UFWD has been very active among the Tibetan Buddhist community in Tibet. In fact, the UFWD was openly activated after Xi Jinping’s latest ruling on the sinicization of Tibet, to foster greater social integration in China, to support the one-China principle.
The UFWD was a key institution promoted by Mao, following the example of the Soviet Union, where the concept of the UF was first launched during the Russian revolution by Lenin. The organization was revived by the new Supreme Leader Xi Jinping in 2014.
The UFWD has always played an important external role, focusing primarily on the co-optation of non-communist overseas Chinese (OC). In the 1980s, for example, the scope of the UF was intended to attract foreign investment and economic aid from OC entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, a strategy that was especially successful with those who still retained ancestral and family ties with the coastal provinces. that they had established “Special Economic Zones”. which included coastal provinces like Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang. But important influencers have also been used among foreigners.
During Xi’s time, the UFWD overseas wing has been extremely active in building support for BRI initiatives, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and the Arab Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well. such as the Central and Eastern European countries that have been identified as China’s bridgeheads to promote BRI.
UFWD’s modus operandi is to target opinion makers and try to co-opt them to support the cause of China. Internally, the UFWD focuses on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a Maoist-era advisory body that is now a permanent fixture in the Chinese political system. The political importance of the CPPCC lies in the way it enables the Party-State to co-opt non-CCP elites, especially as two-thirds of its members, many of whom are co-opted religious, business and artistic elites, among others. they are not members of the Party. UFWD is at the forefront of inviting generational opinion formers in destination countries by promoting fully funded academic conferences, press conferences and media trips, and offers a generous grant for Belt and Road initiatives, especially in key developing countries in South Asia, poor countries in ASEAN and Africa. .
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