demi7en 🎗🇪🇺WaPo: 🇨🇳 Chinese organized crime front serves Beijing's interests, investigation shows
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2025/china-hongmen-organized-crime-geopolitics/
Courtney Donovan Smith
@davidonformosa Also worth noting that #ASPI themselves are facing significant budget cuts in #Australia. 🤦♂️️
For now they're probably the most well-informed organization in the world to shine light on China's global influence operations.
The Chinese regime would naturally like to see them disbanded altogether.
@VOANews And only in Taiwan, right?
Nowhere else?
Not everywhere else....?
#Taiwan #CCP #china #MSS #UnitedFront #UFWD #sabotage #espionage #helloWorld
@kravietz ☝️ One thing that needs to be mentioned along with "wartime mindset" is that #russia isn't acting alone or in a vacuum to bring back the age of imperialism. While russia targets its immediate "liberal and democratic" enemies, #china is targetting those very enemies globally.
Too many European leaders are now "talking the talk" what comes to russian open warfare against the continent, *BUT* vehemently insist that business with china must continue unhindered. 🤷🏻♂️
If you still haven't yet, look up Chinese Communist Party's #UnitedFrontWorkDepartment... They've been at war with democracies since Lenin inspired the party's founding.
📜 A really gentle and diplomatic (re-)introduction to CCP's United Front Work Department (UFWD) by the BBC. Still, better than nothing.
Media coverage of UFWD and its work esp. in foreign countries can be seen as a useful barometer of media's appeasement level wrt. PRC China / CCP; the treatment of Tibet (even mentioning its very name which the CCP is trying to eradicate) is another.
To understand all this, one first needs to understand something about human nature. Trusting people and societies tend to, by default, consider other people and societies having some level of trustworthiness as well.
Likewise societies were people can't generally trust one another adopt that modus operandi themselves and don't easily believe anyone to be trustworthy. Global corruption indices act as a rough guideline here.
Now, the CCP is an extremely and inherently #paranoid organization that sees enemies everywhere. They are particularly paranoid about existential threats and after seizing power in China in 1949 they psyched and propagandized themselves as the only and irreplaceable organization (read: dictatorship) that can not only keep the old imperial state forcefully together but also to restore the "Middle Kingdom" to its rightful historical (mythical) position as the greatest power under heaven.
When the Chinese communists realized that actual communism (under dictatorship) was fucking useless after Mao Zedong's decades of nominal communist "internationalism" (where the empire's "ethnic peoples" had nominal rights or even nominal "autonomy"! Repression, massacres and famines were simply written out of history), the CCP was in desperate need for a "raison d'etre" or a reason to justify its very existence.
Enter national-socialism, a form of ethno-centric nationalism under dictatorship. Party cadres who could access foreign books learnt how a relatively small Nazi-Germany managed to mobilize the entire state to defeat the gigantic and communist Soviet Union with relative ease...!
(Of course what really happened was that after December 1941 (Pearl Harbour) when the USA was pulled into WWII it was only America's absolutely mindblowing amount of "Lend-Lease" military aid to Soviets (look it up!) that turned the tide against the nazis... but the points about "effectiveness" of nazism vs communism couldn't be ignored.)
CCP cadres also learned how the German nazis had used "legalism" devised by Carl Schmitt to justify *everything* the State would do as "legal". Absolutely everything. What's not to love! Ethnic supremacism? Check!
After 1989 (Tiananmen) and then the 1991 crumbling of the Soviet-russia empire the new war front that emerged was based on acquitition of technology and money as essential ingredients. No longer a hermetically sealed dictatorship, the CCP would pull in foreign industrialists and financiers to engage and entangle in "win-win" projects while starting to send its loyalty-checked subjects overseas by the million to study and bring about technological revolution in the PRC.
This is where the UFWD begins to emerge as *the* key department for the CCP. Its tentacles would not only keep the expatriate Chinese students (and increasingly businessmen; and they are invariably men) in line politically, but the UFWD would facilitate and focus their tasking and the transfer of data where they really wanted it. With increased foreign exposure came opportunities to influence and corrupt any and all useful foreign idiots in politics, science, business, finance...
With the newly re-adopted ethno-centrism ("Han chauvinism") another key target for UFWD was the large diaspora of ethnic Chinese emigre settlers in foreign countries. There are particularly large Chinese "communities" in most South-East Asian countries where, ironically, they are sometimes viewed similarly as the Jews ahd been at the other end of the continent; a society within society, depending on murky ancestral networks and controlling business and finance well beyond their numbers...
(NB. After playing friend and extracting all technology and science it could from Israel, CCP easily threw them under the Arab islamic bus because the latter are, for now, far more useful allies in CCP's wider war against democracy worldwide, an existential threat...)
The UFWD would effectively take over these old ethnic networks and harness them to serve business and industry of their "motherland" turned CCP Party-State.
This is just the mere rough outline of United Front's responsibilities, but it's not hard to see why CCP really considered it a "magic weapon".
⚠️ The best published research on this massive organization with global reach is done by #ASPI and #Merics.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c878evdp758o
#CCP #china #PRC #UnitedFront #UFWD #carlschmitt #nazism #BBC
🇺🇸💥🇨🇳☭ 📜 China-Watching Committee Warns US Congress About Beijing's 'Magic Weapon'
「The United Front Work Department, which answers to the Communist Party's Central Committee, oversees the broad spectrum of the party's institutionalized influence operations and intelligence activities targeting groups inside and outside of China.
Known collectively as united front work, its task is to coordinate favorable narratives and organize events to promote them; identify and nullify challenges to the CCP's rules; and ultimately advance the party's ideological, political, economic and security interests globally.
"Through its united front work strategy, which Xi Jinping has called a 'magic weapon,' the Chinese Communist Party uses every tool at its disposal, whether legal or illicit, to influence the American people and interfere in democratic societies," Gallagher, the committee chair, told Newsweek.」
「The committee's memo will inform members of Congress, their staff and their constituents to help them understand the CCP's targeting of Chinese nationals, overseas Chinese, as well as ethnic Chinese who are not Chinese citizens, according to Cheryl Yu, a senior researcher at the Common Sense Society, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit.
"They need to be aware of how the CCP operates and the risks that come from engaging the party's proxies," Yu told Newsweek.」
「"The CCP deliberately tries to mobilize overseas Chinese groups—and many others—to support Beijing's goals and to pressure their governments. Because the CCP singles out Chinese people for influence, any response needs to address overseas Chinese organizations," Yu said.
"Calling out united front groups, unfortunately usually overseas Chinese organizations, has nothing to do with racial discrimination. Overseas Chinese a lot of times are victims of the CCP's propaganda without knowing themselves," she said.」
https://www.newsweek.com/united-front-select-committee-us-congress-memo-1846974
🇨🇦💥🇨🇳☭ 📜 Transnational Crime and Foreign Interference networks in Canada:
「The network of an elite Chinese Mafia suspect with significant industrial assets in British Columbia has been implicated “in recent RCMP investigations of CCP police stations in Canada, and other countries,” according to a sweeping new report from a United States anti-corruption NGO.
The report cites a collection of stunning cases and statistics to argue that transnational criminal networks with ties to China, Iran and Russia are using Canada to launder tens of billions annually, and related economic and political operations are undermining safety and democracy in the West.」
「Canada is currently a hub of illicit trade and crime convergence [and] a weak link within the international financial system for bad actors and threat networks to make illicit profits and launder and hide their dirty money,” the report says.
No longer is profit the sole motivator for these criminals,” it adds. “These threat convergence activities are now being weaponized against rule of law institutions and democratic states for generating more political power, building illicit empires, and financing greater insecurity globally.」
「Operatives affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, Ministry of State Security, and Ministry of Public Security live in several Canadian cities and liaise locally, and nationally, with Asian Organized Crime networks,” the report says.
China’s political warfare arm, the united front, is believed to be supported, in part, by proceeds from a variety of criminal enterprises and receive guidance and direction through the Chinese Embassy and consulates in Canada.」
https://www.thebureau.news/p/canada-a-safe-zone-for-transnational?r=l2dv4
#CCP #中国 #PLA #UnitedFront #UFWD #China #overseasChinese #Iran #russia #Canada
☝️ A very thorough overview of Singapore's position in the 21st century version of the "Great Game" between the USA and democracies on one side and the PRC and its axis of authoritarians on the other.
「Because of Singapore’s majority ethnic Chinese (Han) population, the PRC’s appeals to loyalty, or at least affinity, along ethnic and cultural lines are attractive to some segments of society. Since coming to power, Chinese President Xi Jinping has shown a renewed interest in diaspora nationalism and mobilization, as seen in everything from key policy statements to the more comprehensively subsuming of overseas Chinese affairs under the CCP’s United Front Work Department. Ethnic- and cultural-based mobilization revolves around the idea that people who identify as Chinese should actively support PRC positions, whether these are claims over the South China Sea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, or opposition to the United States. Accompanying such assertions is the view that resisting an amorphous “Western” threat represented by the United States means standing up for a constructed idea of Asia and the developing world, pitted against a history of colonialism, injustice, and even rapaciousness.」
#Singapore #GreatGame #authaxis #Chinese #diaspora #CCP #China #HongKong #UFWD #propaganda
@inchg
An informative nitter🧵by the WaPo article's co-author, #ShibaniMahtani:
「When I started conceptualizing my new role as an investigative correspondent, I knew one of the stories I wanted to dig into was how & why extreme pro-Beijing narratives are hardening within parts of multicultural Singapore, my home. Here is what we found:」
「In an ecosystem where people including my friend's parents get forwarded extremely pro-CCP messages that veer on explicit Han chauvinism within this multi-racial society, Zaobao -- a respected, trusted newspaper backed by the state -- can provide a counterweight. It has not.」
https://nitter.nl/ShibaniMahtani/status/1683647052323110912
#WashingtonPost #Singapore #SouthEastAsia #chinesediaspora #CCP #china #PRC #unitedfront #UFWD #ethnonationalism #hanchauvinism
Shibani Mahtani (@ShibaniMahtani)
When I started conceptualizing my new role as an investigative correspondent, I knew one of the stories I wanted to dig into was how & why extreme pro-Beijing narratives are hardening within parts of multicultural Singapore, my home. Here is what we found: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/singapore-china-news-influence-lianhe-zaobao/