Cultivating friendly forces: The Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations in the Xinjiang Diaspora

This report is a part of a larger online project which can be found on the Xinjiang Data Project website.

What’s the problem?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed well-documented and large-scale human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and other indigenous minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) that amount to crimes against humanity. Through its complex united front system, the CCP is actively monitoring members of the diaspora, including Uyghurs, creating databases of actionable intelligence, and mobilising community organisations in the diaspora to counter international criticism of its repressive policies in Xinjiang while promoting its own policies and interests abroad. These organisations are powerful resources in Beijing’s ongoing efforts to reshape the global narrative on Xinjiang, influence political elites abroad, and ultimately control the Chinese diaspora, but they’re also poorly understood.

These organisations purport to represent and speak on behalf of ‘Xinjiang’ and its indigenous peoples.

They subsume Uyghur and other minority cultures and identities under a nebulous yet hegemonic ‘Chineseness’, which is defined by and connected to the Han-dominated CCP. In reality, these organisations and their leaders play important roles in muting alternative and independent voices from the community while amplifying CCP messaging and spreading disinformation. They exploit the openness of democratic and multicultural countries while assisting the CCP and its proxies to surveil and even persecute members of the Xinjiang diaspora community or individuals who are critical of the CCP’s Xinjiang policies.

Like united front work more broadly, the activities of these groups and their links to the Chinese Government are often overlooked and can be difficult to parse. While human rights abuses in Xinjiang are being exposed internationally, the mechanisms and tactics developed by united front agencies to co-opt overseas Xinjiang-related community groups have gone largely unnoticed. Our research demonstrates how these groups can sow distrust and fear in the community, mislead politicians, journalists and the public, influence government policies, cloud our assessment of the situation in Xinjiang, and disguise the CCP’s interference in foreign countries.

What’s the solution?

Transparency is the best weapon at our disposal. The international community must expose and counter the CCP’s overseas influence and interference operations. In order to counteract Xinjiang-related united front work, we must shine a brighter light on community organisations that cooperate with the CCP to achieve its repressive political aims overseas; at the same time, we must safeguard the ability of citizens of all backgrounds to engage in public life free from outside interference.

Governments must first acknowledge the problem and then denounce the CCP’s interference operations publicly. They should work together to disrupt the CCP’s capacity to covertly intrude in sovereign countries and open societies, carry out transnational repression and cover up its human rights abuses in Xinjiang. They must strengthen countermeasures through intelligence work, law enforcement and legislative reform, and provide additional funding to analyse the CCP’s united front system while working closely with other countries to safeguard universal human rights in China and other parts of the world. Understanding the CCP’s united front system, tactics and methods is a crucial starting point.

Finally, we must increase the capacity of political figures and civil society organs to understand and resist interference by the CCP and other nefarious state and non-state actors and strengthen the ability of the policy sector, academia and the media to identify and call out foreign interference and misinformation. This is playing to the strengths of open societies in particular, but is also key to any state’s ability to exercise sovereignty in the face of corrosive CCP activities.