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Harnessing People Abroad00:05:04
What is the United Front?
It's basically a way in which the party tries to control and mobilize the people that are outside of it.
So it's fundamental to domestic governance.
It's fundamental to trying to mobilize resources abroad.
So what does that actually look like?
And how far does it reach?
In this episode, I sit down with Peter Mattis, president of the Jamestown Foundation, to unpack their new report, Harnessing the People.
We trace how CCP United Front networks operate across the U.S. and other Western countries.
There's a focus on influencing governments in the United States and Canada.
The number that we have on file right now is over a thousand in the United States.
There is one person in that organization who is knowingly collaborating with the CCP.
They're essentially hijacking our citizens' voices to represent the party.
So, how are these groups able to grow and, in some cases, operate entirely without scrutiny?
Mattis points to Canada as a revealing example.
A lot of these organizations were able to develop, were able to build, and they didn't really have to worry about being investigated, in part because the law enforcement intelligence resources in Canada are relatively small to be going after this.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janya Kelleck.
Peter Mattis, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you very much for having me, Jan.
So, Jamestown Foundation has recently introduced this report, frankly, a groundbreaking report.
Harnessing the people on the Chinese Communist Party's United Front work.
And you identified over 2,000 organizations across a number of Western countries, right?
The US, Canada.
I've been thinking about Canada in particular because there seems to be a concentration of them there.
Explain to me what the United Front is and how it works and how you can have such an astonishing number of organizations working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party in free countries.
Well, first, let's get something straight.
Yes, it was James Hound that published it, but it was our China Studies fellow, Cheryl Yu, who really did all of the work and the labor of getting all of that research together.
The fact is, she continues doing that kind of research.
She's continuing to cover other countries.
There's more of this kind of thing to be discussed and thought about.
What is the United Front?
It's basically a way in which the party tries to control and mobilize the people that are outside of it.
It's fundamental to domestic governance.
It's fundamental to trying to mobilize resources abroad.
If you think about how the CCP has modernized, particularly since Deng Xiaoping kind of switched the relative openness to the outside world, it was a lot of technology, a lot of capital, the legitimacy that was offered by being full members of United Nations organizations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, et cetera, et cetera.
The idea is how do you identify your friends, mobilize them, And you use them to isolate neutrals or recruit them to your side or to strike at your adversaries and to keep them away from you.
And fundamentally, we should think of this as kind of like political campaign machinery, right?
It's not there because it's supposed to do exactly this thing.
It's there because it's a tool that can be used for technology transfer.
It's a tool that can be used to talent spot, whether you're looking for political talent, whether you're looking for scientific talent to bring back to the PRC, or, you know, if you're trying to sort of mobilize people to show up for.
leaders parade when they visit San Francisco or Seattle or any of a number of cities around the world where we've seen this kind of activity.
What you're describing, it sounds like this is something that a Chinese consulate or embassy would be involved in.
Explain to me how these institutions actually work.
I suppose they have different levels of infiltration.
Are they all just founded to do this in the first place?
How does that work?
Let's keep a couple of things in mind about this.
United Front Work is not like a covert action initiated in the United States that requires a presidential finding with the sense that this is what our national security is, here we want to do these things, we want to apply these tools to get this result.
United Front work is what the party does on a day-to-day basis.
In fact, it's been described as the work of the entire party.
And it's because there's a Politburo Standing Committee member who sits atop the system.
There are a couple of Politburo members and the Vice Premier that deal with the system.
And every single ministry has some role to play in it.
There's a Ministry of State Security role, there's a Ministry of Foreign Affairs role, there's a Ministry of Commerce role.
the Ministry of Education role, in addition to all of this party activity that runs from the central committee to provincial committees to local levels and anywhere else that you can find a party committee, right?
Party System Wrapped Through00:02:06
So that means companies, sometimes means joint ventures with foreign companies, right?
It means places like the Chinese Academy of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering, right?
So it is actually a party system that's kind of wrapped all the way through.
And so when you go over to a consulate, right, somebody there is going to have United Frontwork as their portfolio.
But it's also not unheard of for the person who supposedly is doing United Front work to be a Ministry of State security person, right?
Because there is an intimacy, intimate relationship, if you will, between intelligence collection and this kind of mobilization and talent spotting.
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Recruiting Overseas Advisors00:04:26
This sounds complicated somehow because I know there's a United Front Work Department, right, which guides a lot of this work somehow, right?
And at the same time, you're saying this institution exists literally throughout the whole system.
Right.
So basically, every party committee, maybe not every party committee, but a lot of them, will have a United Front Work Department, right?
So you could find a United Front Work Department in a Chinese university.
You can find a United Front Work Department in the China Academy of Social Sciences.
At the same time, you have the central level.
That's usually what people mean when they say, oh, there's the UFWD.
But Beijing City has one.
The Shanghai City Party Committee has one.
And you could go down into basically every major, like a prefectural level city, most counties, they're going to have a United Front Work Department.
The important thing to think about this is the connective tissue between the party and society.
It's doing the organizational work to sort of move society in the way that it wants.
And you've been talking about how it works within China, but a big part of its work, of course, is outside.
Well, the big part of the work that really matters to us happens outside, right?
But it is in part because this is a system that involves hundreds of thousands of people, right?
And this work that happens outside follows some of the same issues, right?
They want to organize, say, scientists and engineers to find who are people that would be susceptible to recruitment.
So you can find examples of individuals who have set up, say, a Chinese American Science and Technology Association in their local area.
They gather a handful of ethnically Chinese people around, maybe Taiwanese Americans if they can get them.
And then that becomes a way to which somebody gets approached by the PRC through one of the 590 odd talent programs in addition to the 1,000 talents.
And in some cases, you see them actively looking To American organizations where they can find a partner or they've recruited someone as an overseas advisor to the Chinese Overseas Friendship Association or as an overseas delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference or any of these other United Front organizations and use that to facilitate the contact and to say, okay, oh, this is someone who could be useful.
There's almost 600 talent organizations?
Talent programs?
Yes.
Because there's not just the central ones, there are provincial ones, there are local ones.
But this is, you know, just like spell out what this is doing, right?
The talent programs were deliberate efforts to recruit people to come back to the PRC to take on part-time work in some cases.
In some cases, for you know, come work for a summer or come work for six months and get an entire second salary for what you're doing.
And a lot of the cases where people get sort of hit on tax issues or not reporting what they were doing in the United States that are related to the talent programs are because they weren't reporting that they were taking on the second job.
They were going on sabbatical or taking leave without pay and then Taking on this work in a lab that was doing parallel work to their company or the university.
In some cases, they might have been funded from the National Science Foundation, and now they're sort of doing the same work and applying it over to PRC Lab.
So let's talk about the scale of the impact here.
And then I also want to specifically talk a bit about Canada because it seems to be like there seems to be an unusual concentration there.
But can you give me a picture of what this means?
I can't remember the exact number in the US, but the implication of that.
Yeah.
Suffice to say, I believe the number, at least the number that we have on file right now, is over a thousand in the United States.
And what we mean by those organizations is that there is one person.
In that organization, who is knowingly collaborating with the CCP.
Now, could they be doing it for their own profit?
Could they be doing it because they do business in China and they want things left off their back, you know, be left alone, right?
But there's somebody who knows.
Survival and Supremacy Law00:13:27
And this gets to the first point, right?
In a democratic society, right, we also use social groups to represent.
So whether you're a town council member, whether you're a congressman, whether you're a senator or a governor, what have you, right?
When you go and meet Your constituents, you can't meet all of them all the time, right?
You have to go to a club, you have to go to the Rotarians, you have to go to the Kiwanis Club, you have to go to PTA meetings, you have to go to church gatherings, right?
And these, in many cases, are community organizations.
So you show up, they organize their members, but or you select the leaders of these organizations because you know they represent, you know, 500 voters or a thousand voters or what have you, right?
But the problem here is that if the person who is a leader of this organization who's sitting at That table, who's sitting face to face like this, is one of those knowing people.
They're essentially hijacking our citizens' voices to represent the party.
It's saying, instead of you and I thinking that we're having a real conversation and that I'm representing 500 people in my community organization, I'm really representing Beijing's voice, but you think it's the 500 people behind me.
So that to me is fundamental because it's actually, given that we're in a room, That has scenes from Philadelphia, mention of the US Constitution, right?
This is fundamental to what it means to have sovereignty embedded in the people, right?
And they're taking voices away.
At the worst case, you have things facilitating espionage, you have it facilitating technology theft, you have it facilitating transnational repression, right?
That's surveilling people, keeping track of them, doing research on people.
And this means that I think these groups often can end up being kind of like, it's like tall grass that's being deliberately cultivated to hide snakes, right?
And the reason why I use this analogy is that for those 500 people, right, they're being used, right?
It's not the grass's fault that snakes are hiding in it and making it dangerous, right?
But they've been deliberately cultivated, they've been deliberately grown so that they can hide the Ministry of State Security, so they can hide the PLA.
So, they can hide the Ministry of Public Security.
This is where you end up with these overseas police stations.
This is where you end up with mobilization of community groups to affect elections, like happened in Richmond and British Columbia.
This is where it is.
But the criminal stuff, the espionage stuff, it's kind of the most glamorous.
But I feel like the political side of it is really the most fundamental.
Well, you're kind of blowing my mind here, because I've, of course, known about the United Front.
For a long time, and kind of felt I understood it better than many people.
But something I've been exploring recently, and I write about this in my own recent book, is how the Chinese Communist Party actively subverts all civil society.
In fact, that's what distinguishes a totalitarian regime from a mere authoritarian regime.
But I'd never really thought of it that really this is, in a way, the function of the whole United Front is basically to co opt all civil society to be.
Under the will of the party.
It's like the thing that de Tocqueville basically imagined would make America unique and powerful and the self organizing ability of Americans.
That's the civil society.
So in communist China, all of that is co opted under the communist party, but with this kind of veneer of civil society.
You've heard the term there's NGOs and then there's gongos, the The government NGOs, right, and so forth.
Well, I guess we should call them Pongos in this case.
Would you agree with that?
That the United Front really is the method of co-opting or destroying civil society.
I think co-opting and subverting is, you know, destroying is the sort of last resort, right?
The effort is really to develop control.
But if you control it, it's not civil society anymore, clearly, right?
Well, but this is, you know, we sit here and we wonder, like, what does the CCP mean when they say that they're a democratic party, right?
And what they mean is that the party represents everyone's interests.
And what they're trying to do with United Front Work, at least domestically, is to create a feedback loop so that sort of people feel like their feedback has gone in and that the party represents them, but then the United Front guidance comes back out and shifts the line and moves people around.
And they call this consultative democracy.
And you can look at the State Council white paper if you want a good explanation, really, of the sort of the theory, if you will, of United Front Work.
But you can look at this internationally.
And when you see Beijing talk about multipolarity, and they talk about a different kind of world order, a new type of international relations.
What they're really talking about is applying that kind of consultative democracy, if you can even call it that, but really this effort of controlling and creating feedback loops that run through the party, but applying that onto an international scale.
And it gets a little bit worse in some perspective because the way the party defines security, right, most authoritarian regimes and most democracies will say resilience in the face of catastrophe.
Our sort of ability to manage threats, right?
But the party defines it.
It's in the national security law.
They define it by the relative absence of threats to the party's ability to govern, right?
I mean, if you remember your sort of freshman philosophy class in college, right, you can't prove a negative.
So there's always a perpetual search for enemies, perpetual search for ideas that are dangerous, and that'll keep pushing out and pushing out and pushing out.
So the border that matters is not the People's Republic and the rest of the world, it's the party and everyone else.
The second thing that's there is threats to the party's ability to govern.
Wait a minute.
That includes ideas like free speech, rule of law, academic freedom, constitutionalism.
These are all things that the party considers dangerous.
Those are direct threats to the party's governance.
It's not just a physical threat, a bomb going off or aircraft carriers or a land army capable of invading.
Are there ideas that can be transmitted back into the PRC?
That would threaten the party's ability to rule.
And that's also why, you know, yes, there's a focus on influencing governments in the United States and Canada and everywhere else.
But another piece of this focus is how do you ensure that there are no Chinese communities abroad that are going to be transmitting these ideas back into the PRC in ways that would resonate?
Because you and I can't do that.
But those communities can.
Well, it also explains why they have a particular focus on Chinese communities overseas.
Look, I think it's important to remember that in kind of like the day-to-day bread and butter, this is the easiest place to spot some of those activities because they're only overseas Chinese that are going to be overseas delegates to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, right?
It's only Chinese that are going to be incorporated as advisors to certain types of United Front organizations.
The Western Return Scholars Association, which is Sort of an association of intellectuals and scientists that have been sort of gathered under the United Front system, sort of sent out, brought back, organized to provide technological and expertise and support to PRC national programs.
Those are all Chinese.
But if you look at where some of the targets are, if you wanted to control, say, the University of Texas system and control how China was researched and thought about there, to pick an example that is real, they can use Tang Chi Hua.
from Hong Kong and his money and his reach to reach out to the UT system and to try to put money in there and to try to gain control of it.
But that's targeting the university president who was not Chinese American.
That's targeting other faculty members who were not Chinese.
So if you want to control Western institutions, if you want to control, say, the World Bank or the WHO, that's not necessarily about overseas Chinese so much as it is the mindset and the mentality of United Front of like, How do you recruit friends?
How do you mobilize them to strike at our enemies or to isolate them and to take control of institutions so they can be guided?
Let's go to the national security law for a second.
Nick, you can kind of remind me of this clause that you just mentioned that kind of reveals the thinking of the United Front type thinking, but also what this whole national security law is for the benefit of those that aren't familiar with it.
The thing is, Xi Jinping set out a bunch of national security legislation.
There's the counterterrorism law, the counterespionage law, the national security law.
National Intelligence Law and a number of others.
And really, what these laws are about is telling people the expectations of the party, right?
To put it in no uncertain terms, this is what is expected of you.
And so there was a whole string of legislation that was organized by the Central National Security Commission or the Central State Security Commission, whatever your preferred translation is, and that was a new body that was created or announced at the end of 2013 that Xi Jinping stood at the top of, and it was to Kind of guide some of the national security processes so they're more forward looking.
That political and bureaucratic power was a little more integrated than it had been had previously.
So if you remember, there was a little bit of a coup attempt in 2012 in the power transition involving a Politburo Standing Committee member who oversaw the public security apparatus.
This was an effort to restrain and then also to integrate and then to set out the expectations of here's what we expect you as a citizen, here's what we expect you as a government official to understand and to do with respect to national security.
If you remember, there was that famous document number nine about ideological conflict, and that pretty much set out the here are the dangerous ideas that we have to deal with, here are the things that we consider threats to our governance.
We have that in kind of a nice ready form to say yes.
All of these things that are fundamental to democracy, rule of law, constitutionalism, free press, et cetera, et cetera, these are incompatible with the CCP led rule, and the national security law says here's what you need to do to target them.
Just the thing that's interesting is I hadn't fully grasped, I think you laid it out really well, is that the Chinese government's key priority is the survival and supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party, and that's actually kind of enshrined in a sense in this law.
But I think it's one of those things where we have to recognize that politics is for power and policy is for governance.
In some ways, United Front Work is a great synergy between those two things.
Because if the party was just about being in power, just about being inside, we wouldn't see the kind of effort to build a blue water navy.
We wouldn't see the kind of effort.
To build sort of long distance fishing bases out in the world that also seem to be built to military specifications and could be repurposed or reused for those kind of things.
That's not something that strikes me as being particularly defensive, right?
Mao Zedong never thought of China as being internal, right?
He always thought about China on a global stage.
He didn't launch the Great Leap Forward and starve 35 million people because they wanted to be Asia's largest steel producer, right?
It was to become the world's largest steel producer.
Mao Zedong's fight with Stalin was which one of us should be the global leader of international communism.
Despite the fact that Stalin had helped Mao win, Mao said, well, actually, we should be the leaders.
There's always been this kind of global and I hate to use the word positive in a sense, but it is a proactive or a positive agenda of how do we reshape global order?
How do we reshape international relations?
Whether it was the five principles of peaceful coexistence that have been kind of morphed and evolved and played on to become a new type of international relations or a community of common destiny for mankind, it is a global through line.
So, yes, there's politics for power.
How do you preserve the CCP?
But there's also a sense of purpose.
And we do ourselves a disservice if we don't get that drive to reshape the world because there isn't a natural, oh, we're going to fall into this defensive position, right?
Reshaping Global Relations00:06:43
It's that they are out there actively changing the world in proactive ways.
And they've been doing this for decades.
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So, I've often described this as the party deep down inside knowing it's illegitimate and needing to basically subvert anything that demonstrates that.
We've kind of talked about this a little bit already why you don't want any sort of information coming back that would support these free forms of governance, let's say.
But do you view it that way or is it something different?
I mean, deep down, there is a Sort of concern about legitimacy.
You can see it in the language, for example, when Prime Minister Takei in Japan last November said, you know, actually, if we see a war over Taiwan, this can't help but affect our interests and we need to, you know, we will probably need to be involved.
And the response from Beijing was just over the top.
But when you look at that language that was used, or if you think about it, when the ambassador in Sweden for the PRC, you know, threatened them.
Said basically, we have fine wine for our friends and shotguns for our enemies, right?
And clearly implying that what Sweden was doing made them an enemy.
This comes down to respect.
Like when you look at the language that's used, it's often about you are not respecting our power.
You are not respecting our influence.
So I think you're right that there is this kind of deep-seated sense of illegitimacy or that we have to change the terms of legitimacy so that we are recognized and our contributions as a Communist Party of China.
are recognized for creating an alternative path for development, creating an alternative way of governance that doesn't rely on liberal values.
I want to touch on this one thing.
You mentioned the military civil fusion briefly early, but I just want to kind of remind us of that.
It was actually your testimony.
I can't remember when you talked about the fact that Xi Jinping had elevated this idea into the top seven national priorities.
If you could just briefly explain that for the benefit of our viewers, because I still think it's something that's not sufficiently understood.
The Military Civil Fusion Development Strategy, as it was elevated to a sort of a party strategy in 2015, integrated into the party charter, and there are six other strategies that go back to the late 1990s.
All of these seven strategies are about how do we fix specific deficiencies to raise our overall level of comprehensive national power.
This is one of those terms that they actually obfuscate a little bit in official English translations.
So you have to be looking at the Chinese to see how often and how common it is.
They'll use composite national power, composite national influence, aggregate national power, like all sorts of little terms.
But if you see it in Chinese, you see that it's clear, it's consistent, they've supported it.
And military-civil fusion is fundamentally about how do we ensure that we don't duplicate investments in the civilian side and the military side?
How do we ensure that when we have something that's valuable to both or particularly valuable to the military, That there's a seamless transition to bring it over and to make use of it.
And that's it's really about reducing friction to ensure that the military has the best access to scientific and technological expertise that's taking place out in the world, right?
Because they recognize as much as anyone else that it's not just in national labs, it's not just in military research facilities where the cutting edge work is being done.
And in some cases, the government can't keep up with those things in quite the same way.
So, is anything independent of the Communist Party and Communist China?
I feel like when you look at Chinese society, when I was at Tsinghua in 2003, 2004, and over trips through the years, you could see that there was a space that had been carved out in the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s where people could kind of opt out of party life, where they could find a way to live their life without being subjected to its pressures in the same way that it had been in the Mao era.
I feel like Xi Jinping has taken that away.
He's taken away that option that you can kind of be like, oh, you know what?
Live and let live.
I'll live my life.
I won't challenge you.
Let's just leave it that way.
I feel like Xi Jinping has kind of changed that.
Propaganda is up in places where it didn't used to be.
And people tend not to even, in fact, actually, members of the international department that I met on my last trip to China weren't even aware because they were just like, oh, I didn't even think about all the propaganda that was up there.
But it was, instead of an advertisement, there's the four comprehensives.
of Xi Jinping.
You could see them all over the place in ways that I only remember seeing the tail end of the Three Represents campaign that was Jiang Zemin's crowning achievement as the outgoing general secretary of saying, here's his contribution to party theory.
Then it went away, and then you didn't see it on the streets.
You didn't see it on red banners hanging across the roads.
You've seen this push into everyday life.
You've seen the gamification, if you will, of political education apps.
It was in the PLA starting maybe 2011, 2012, then just continued and continued and expanded out into the broader population.
But what about, you know, I still see people saying, well, prove to me that this company is CCP affiliated or the CCP, this looks like an independent company to me.
Shifting Discourse in Media00:13:57
So the most important thing here is that, yes, someone can have those dreams and someone can have those things.
But when the party wants it, It's theirs, right?
So inside the People's Republic of China, the party's not everywhere all the time.
But if it sets up shop somewhere and says, you know what, this little patch, whether it's a company, whether it's a park, whether it's a mosque, as it were, in Qinghai or in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, it's theirs.
And there's no way to really challenge it.
And that's what's so hard, right?
Because you do want to engage and you want to keep doors open.
But it makes it hard when you have your relationships weaponized against you, right?
And that's really the danger.
Well, and I mean, and we know they have a kind of a unique fixation on the United States, but this kind of my argument always has been that if anything has a kind of US connection, of course the party's involved.
Like it would be almost unthinkable that the party would not be involved.
Heads would roll, right?
Just because of this whole kind of, I guess, you know, structure.
structure, lattice work, if you will, that you've been describing here.
Well, and it's become increasingly informed with technological surveillance.
Again, is it perfect?
No.
Is it completely automated?
No.
But can they start finding what they want if they go searching?
Yes.
And I think one of our challenges has to be to recognize that the party also coerces Chinese people to join it, right?
And cuts off opportunities if they won't do it.
And so the question, I think, for us has to be well, like, yes.
This person might be a party member or they might have joined or they might have been forced to join the Communist Youth League.
Okay, so how do we draw them out?
How do we give someone a sense of safety?
Because the fact is we have Chinese people who are coming to the United States and they don't have freedom of speech.
They don't get to participate.
Let's say they're a university student.
They don't get to participate sort of freely and fully and fairly in the university system.
I mean, one story that really sticks with me.
is that an American history professor at a university in this area got approached by one of the Chinese undergraduates who said, I want to do this group project.
Please don't put me in a group with other Chinese students.
Because if you do that, I can't participate.
I'm going to have to hold back.
But I love this class, and I want to dig in.
I want to enjoy and really do this project.
And the teacher was like, well, of course I'll do that.
and approach some people who are more familiar with China about, wait a minute, what the heck is going on here?
Never encountered this kind of thing.
Is this real?
Is this a genuine concern?
Yes.
Our universities do have the power to change minds.
They have the power to shape things in a positive direction.
Our controversies domestically aside, they do have this power.
But it's only there if you can break people free and give them the space to experience it and not be Surveiled, if you will, by the United Front system.
Because right now, for example, a lot of universities will take Chinese students that's sort of a full freight or a PRC national scholarship.
But then the moment that they come, all of the acculturalization and sort of localization of getting used to the United States and getting used to a US university and the freedoms that come with that, relatively speaking.
They are now in the hands of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which is funded from the consulates and embassies and really is used as much as anything to spy on people and is a classic example of united front work.
How do you channel people into the social groups where the party controls it and monitors and is able to sort of guide them where they want them to go?
Yeah, and I mean, in this case, they have the university's cooperation basically in doing it, right?
This is the cost of naivete.
I don't think that there's necessarily anything malicious.
There are plenty of people who have had their organizations affected or shaped or.
Well, let's say it's naivete and maybe taking advantage of our greed because there's a lot of money involved.
Right.
I mean, when there's a lot of money involved, you kind of want to look the other way.
Let's talk about Canada.
Something that was very stark.
I mean, you had a whole press conference where Cheryl.
In Canada to kind of introduce this report.
It was received very well by some, very poorly by others.
Canada seems disproportionately affected.
I think that's actually clear in your report.
Why?
Part of it, or the first reason I think that Canada is sort of more visible is that they've faced less pushback over the last two or three decades.
You have to go back to sort of the declassification of Project Sidewinder, which was a look at.
So, the linkages between the CCP, business, triads, the potential for political influence being built in Canada.
And it was a controversial report because some people claim that it wasn't particularly well done.
Others will say, probably rightly, that it was a little too speculative and that it hadn't quite reached what it was saying it was, but it was a sign of things to come.
But that was kind of the last really public visible pushback.
Then you have the WTO ascension for basically pushback on CCP influence operations.
Exactly.
And putting it in the public eye and saying, wait a minute, this is something to think about.
As a result, a lot of these organizations were able to develop, were able to build, and they didn't really have to worry about being investigated, in part because the law enforcement intelligence resources in Canada are relatively small to be going after this.
They just didn't have it.
Whereas, if you think about the 1990s in the United States, you have the Clinton campaign finance scandal.
You have people visiting the White House that were associated with state owned enterprises and PLA related corporations.
And pushback on that, right?
Congressional hearings, investigations, money and attention being put to discuss these problems.
You have the Cox Committee report that some parts of it are kind of a little shaky and other parts of it are really, really good about.
sort of the threat of technological espionage and like all of the different ways in which the PRC will go after and target specific technologies and make sure that the expertise gets sort of funneled back to people who can use it.
Right.
So we were discussing it.
The FBI is bigger and you have so many different investigations, right?
You can kind of look back and be like, oh, well, there was a Wen Holi scandal and obviously the FBI screwed things up and, you know, here was an awful, awful investigation where someone was unjustly sort of imprisoned.
And leaving that case aside, you actually have a lot of other investigations where there were convictions, where people were gently moved out of position, lost their clearances, were no longer at national labs.
That was all taking place.
So the PRC had a very good reason to take U.S. capabilities seriously.
And as a result, I think that's why you end up kind of at a number of organizations per million people being quite a bit different in Canada versus in the United States, because they just haven't had to deal with that kind of pushback.
And we're only now getting to that point where you have a national commission investigating foreign influence in Canada, where you have the beginning of a kind of registration scheme that's still being put together.
I think it's been about a year and a half now that it's been going, but we're only at the beginning edge.
And so that means that these groups have never really had to hide themselves.
They've never really had to be careful.
And therefore, they could just sort of move and operate.
is, it's always easier to operate in the open than it is to operate with camouflage and all of the things that you need to do for security if you're really concerned about being investigated.
It seems like these influence systems, the United Front work, has politically yielded a lot of success for the CCP in Canada.
You mentioned some elections, for example, like in Richmond and so forth.
But it...
Basically, what I'm trying to get at is the Because there's this heightened level of this activity and this is represented in the number of organizations, but you can kind of, I guess you can measure it in other ways as well.
This has had, I think, a pretty profound impact on Canada.
I wanted if you could kind of talk about that just a little bit.
I think the most important impact on Canada is that when this kind of approach dominates the discourse, right?
As you know from your parent organization, the Chinese language news media has gone through a really profound change in the last two decades.
One of the impacts of this, and Canada certainly feels it, is that almost all Chinese language news media has gone toward the CCP.
With a few exceptions.
With a few exceptions, yes.
Right.
But it's no longer in sort of the good old days, if you will, or the Of anti communism within the Kuomintang in the 60s and 70s and 80s, there was an active sense of fighting back and of fighting for control of the means of perception, fighting for control of newspapers and broadcast.
But now Taiwan is relatively insignificant, and part of Taiwan is not really interested in debating what it means to be Chinese because they see themselves as being Taiwanese.
A lot of media organizations that set people up.
Therefore, it can change the discourse in Chinese language media.
Second, with so many more PRC nationals that have gone abroad, they use WeChat for their news.
It's created a fundamental problem of, in essence, exporting the information firewall and ensuring that people, even when they leave, are still operating inside the PRC information bubble.
Because it's easier to read news in your native language than it is to be.
You know, kind of rapidly scrolling through things.
Because WeChat, even here, actively employs the CCP's censorship system.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, some people don't know this, right?
It's like, really?
How is that possible?
Well, it is.
Well, it's the kind of controls and security that can be built into any app.
And this is why there was such a fierce debate over TikTok.
This is why there's been, to some degree, a debate over Little Red Book.
Of course, the CCP was very happy to cut off that kind of open contact.
Yeah.
because they didn't like that much either.
But this is the inherent piece, right?
It's not just a human element.
It's a technological component of wherever there is connectivity to the PRC, it can be weaponized.
And the party is willing to weaponize it against people, right?
And whether that means shaping what they read, shaping what they hear, shaping how they interact, but then also having a means of communication.
If there's a WeChat user in Canada who decides to organize a white paper protest and hold up a white paper or to have a Xi Jinping is not my president, as happened when he changed the Constitution to serve a third presidential term, that person can get a message on WeChat saying, you shouldn't do that.
Or in some cases, they get a call from their family saying, well, someone came over by here from the Ministry of State Security and said, you really shouldn't be doing that at McGill University or University of Toronto.
or what have you.
So that's really the – to me, that's the most disconcerting core because it's a base that now builds to shaping the social groups that now shapes what MPs who are representing particular constituencies think is their job or think what is their.
And in some cases, you have to wonder about some of the individuals in Canada's political system that are senators or MPs that You see embedded essentially in a network of these United Front organizations.
Now, is that because the CCP has deliberately built that around them or is it because they themselves have been co-opted and maybe the first couple were the CCP's direction but now the others are their active collaboration and cooperation with it?
And it's very easy to say, well, oh, these are just social groups or this is just a cultural group, right?
But the party is trying to define what it means to be Chinese.
And they are saying that If you are Chinese, if we claim you as Chinese, you have a duty to support the motherland.
Xi Jinping has been really explicit about this.
The motherland, by the way, means the party.
Meta Problem for Democracies00:12:04
Right.
Right.
The party led China, right?
The official China.
What you have there, you can see this in speeches where Xi Jinping says to achieve the national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, the sons and daughters of China's hearts need to beat as one and work as one to support.
to support national modernization, to support the unification or annexation of Taiwan, their areas, to support the kind of social and cultural assimilation, if you will, that's taking place in minority areas.
This is all part of the same picture.
I think this goes back to the point I said at the beginning, that the border that matters is not the People's Republic of China and the world.
The border that matters is the party and everyone else.
So, okay, given everything you've just said, you know, in Canada, there's, you know, Canada's announced a new strategic partnership just a few months ago, you know, kind of a thawing of relations, no more looking back at the two Michaels, you know, all of this stuff.
Is this concerning?
Is this concerning, I mean, for Canada?
Is it concerning for the United States?
It's concerning for Canada, it's concerning for the United States, and the reason is simple.
The first is that we keep forgetting stuff, right?
So it's like, oh yeah, let's just forget that two citizens were arbitrarily detained and left to rot in jail for what, almost three years?
Maybe a little past that.
Let's forget that Beijing disappeared the head of Interpol, right?
Let's forget.
That the World Bank was funding some of the concentration camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region a decade ago.
In a sense, I mean, from some testimony I heard, let's forget that there's forced labor at all.
And let's forget that these canola purchases, for example, that were a part of that agreement, were things that Beijing had already agreed to.
That impetus to forget is really, really troubling.
And this is kind of a, I don't know. a meta problem, if you will, that suffuses democracies that we're sort of like, ah, well, it actually isn't that bad.
And we sort of say, oh, well, shouldn't we accommodate?
Isn't it natural that there should be some change in how these organizations work or the values that are there because it's a changing world?
And the question I've got is just at the point that the World Bank is funding concentration camps as part of development and everyone's kind of being like, eh, we're okay with that.
Like what's left to change?
Like what else do we think is for sale or what else do we think is there?
But second thing, you know, when it comes to Canada, I understand why he might have an emotional response to the United States, right?
There's a great CBC radio contest from decades ago where it was, you know, it was a contest to come up with as Canadian as in the spirit of as American as apple pie, right?
And the winning entry was as Canadian as possible under the circumstances, right?
They know where they are.
They know where they're located.
They're looking for just a little bit of respect under the circumstances.
But I think with that emotional response, it's like look for other partners.
Look for countries that share your values.
I would argue the U.S. is that country, frankly.
But let's say you don't want to be.
Let's just pick up an emotional response or say you're looking at us.
There's a certain amount of this that is going to be natural.
Or you might.
Sort of, you know, there might be some kind of snapping back or reduction, or there's going to be a little change.
But we're still hugely important to each other.
And no one, no leadership is really going to change that.
But if you're looking to shift on the margins, right, and China for Canada is the margins, right, there are lots of other countries out in the world that are important to Canada that could be there.
Why does this matter to the United States?
First and foremost, because we have a trade agreement with Canada where when you can get something into Mexico, when you can get something into Canada, it now becomes possible to make it or a little bit easier to get it into the United States.
And therefore, the problems in one start to affect the problem, can become problems in the others.
And if Canada is unwilling to put in really strong controls, then it's not just a Canadian problem, it's the beginning of an American problem and a Mexican problem.
And the same could be said about the other players that are a part of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement.
So we've talked about why China might be important to Canada or why they might be making that foray, but why is Canada so important to China?
I mean, judging, just looking at that, you know, per capita, per capita United Front work.
And a diplomatic presence that's actually comparable to the United States.
Which is astonishing.
I mean, it's absolutely astonishing.
Right.
But they have, you know, just for one reason, they've got hundreds of thousands of people that came from Hong Kong, that came from China in varying waves of immigration.
So there is, right, there is that threat of people that want to transport something back.
The second is that – In other words, Canada has a disproportionate number of free-thinking Chinese from the Communist Party's perspective.
Or potentially free-thinking Chinese.
Potentially free-thinking.
And therefore it has to be present.
Has to make sure that they're not, that that potential is kept down, or at least, you know, or ideally under control.
It is a soft underbelly, if you will, to the United States, to the rest of NATO, right?
China has made it very clear that the party does not like alliances.
They don't like things that bind democracies together, that enhance the strength of these countries and give them more capacity to defend themselves and to do other things out in the world.
The other piece is that Canada is a place where the CCP's role in drug smuggling, in money laundering, has just been easier to do than it is in other places.
And part of that has to do with restrictions that are there on Canadian law enforcement.
I think they've got something like 60 days with a wiretap before they have to inform the target of an investigation.
And that means that they've got to do some fancy footwork or they've got to work with allies.
To sort of spy on those kinds of targets and creates some kind of thing where if it's a foreign intelligence target, then Canadian law enforcement doesn't necessarily need to share it.
So, how do you kind of work it?
It creates a lot of complicated things how do you get an investigation?
How do you get an investigation that has legally admissible evidence?
That gives the party a lot of opportunity.
I think when you look at how the party is operated in places like Hong Kong, how it is operated with with triads and other organized crime groups, right?
The party's already filling in these kinds of spaces, these little interstices in normal functioning to collect rents and to keep things.
And they get the opportunity to take advantage of with these groups.
And it works, you know, as long as I think it was Deng Xiaoping who referred to, you know, as long as the triads are patriotic, then, you know, we can figure out a way to do business.
and kind of keep things away from the party and keep things away from the state apparatus and let it kind of work under the table.
It's a great way to help people earn money on the side for being patriotic.
And this is the kind of reason why you've seen this kind of party criminal nexus essentially take over global money laundering without really firing a shot.
Because it used to be in the old days if someone laundered your money, they took 30, 40 percent.
The Chinese are doing now is something less than 10%.
You can't compete with that because of the inside outside with the PRC.
It's actually in Vancouver, through the work observed in Vancouver, that this term unholy trinity was coined, which is the triads, the state security or the party, and the wealthy business tycoons, if you will.
Individually, they don't seem to be, it doesn't necessarily seem to be obvious that they're working together, but the moment that you see it, You can see that there's kind of tight collaboration in many cases.
Well, look, I mean, it's worth noting that the party itself has never actually had a problem with drugs.
One of the ways that the CCP funded itself after the Long March in Yenan was by cultivating poppies and selling opium to Chinese people.
And the reason why we know this is because the Comintern people there were kind of like, is this really okay?
Should we really be selling drugs?
Should we really be doing what we're complaining that the imperial powers had done?
Right?
So, I mean, this is Stalin's common turn.
They're kind of like, yeah, that's maybe a little too much.
Right?
But I don't think the party has ever had a particular problem with this.
And it's just now they've got the industrial capacity to be and the control mechanisms to be pushing it abroad at industrial scales and moving them through their proxies and through their conduits of triads or.
Or of cartels saying, you know, here's the cheapest chemicals at the best price, you know, go for it.
Well, it's just, it's interesting because often you see this sort of drug warfare that the CCP has been affecting on America and so forth as a reverse, they call it reverse opium war.
But this, you know, bit of information that you just offered puts a chink in that argument, i.e., the CCP itself was involved in a sense, right, in exactly the use of these sorts of.
Substances.
Right.
I mean, this is where you really have to come to grips with the fact that the CCP does not really have a moral bottom line, right?
As you know, with the book that you've written on organ harvesting, right, this is something where there isn't actually some clear statement of like, oh, no, we're unwilling to do this.
We're not, we'll draw the line here because we don't think that's right.
We have all of these examples where it's not clear that there's. that there's some moral bottom line or that there's some moral restriction.
I was taking a little look into biological weapons research and what does the PLA talk about with bioweapons.
One of the things that was interesting is when they were talking about the Biological Weapons Convention, they were just like, this treaty means nothing because if a war ever comes, everyone's going to use it.
If there's a weapon, it will be used.
There will be no restraint.
So we should just go ahead.
Right?
So, in essence, these guys were mirror imaging that these treaties didn't mean anything, that people weren't, you know, that the United States had perhaps really stopped researching sort of offensive pathogens and was really like our biological weapons research has been entirely defensive in nature.
Responding to Political Threats00:13:04
But the party looks at it, or the PLA looks at it, and like they don't believe it because they don't have that moral inhibition.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then it just, it also creates this escalation immediately.
Where, you know, if you know what you do, that the CCP is developing these things, you're, you know, you're creating your own deterrence, or at least that you will, you know, powerful forces within your own, you know, security and military system are saying, we need deterrence.
I think this gets to the point, really, fundamentally, right?
And it's not just encountering united front work, but it's how should our countries be responding to this threat?
Because there's a military and defensive threat, there's an economic threat.
There is a threat to our democratic system and how it operates.
There is a threat to individuals that come to the United States for the same reason that people have been coming here now for 250 years.
We want a new life.
We want something different.
And the party, in the case of some people, is trying to take that away from them, to take away that kind of choice.
We have to be able to talk about this.
We can't keep it behind classification.
We can't keep it behind closed doors.
If we have defectors, we can't just keep them behind and have them talking only inside government.
Jamestown was founded 40 odd years ago to help Soviet block defectors find purpose and meaning in their new lives.
The first products that we had were the Romanian intelligence chief's Red Horizons, Ion Pachiba, writing about the crimes of the Czeskiew regime.
Second one was Arkady Shevchenko's breaking with Moscow.
The whole point was to ensure that Americans heard from inside that system what those systems were like.
How should they understand the stakes of the Cold War?
There were a number of other defectors that Jamestown helped along the way.
We were sort of a speaker's bureau, a literary agent, a bit of a life coach.
How do you adjust from the time when you get a coupon to pick up a pair of shoes every other year?
And now you can walk into a department store floor and it's literally shoes, right?
How do people adjust to this from no choices to an almost infinite, comparatively infinite amount of choice?
That was the kind of conversation we should be having.
We did have.
We should be having.
And that's one of the things that makes the United Front work in our country so problematic is because they're deliberately trying to distort it, right?
They're deliberately trying to push.
And you can see some of the efforts to push back on the China Initiative in the United States by the Department of Justice, some other things, to describe these kinds of efforts as racist.
When fundamentally, if we keep it in our mind what it is that we're about, which is we want our citizens and we want the people that live in the United States to have free and full lives, to be protected with the full faith and credit of the Constitution and of our laws, that's a really clear powerful thing and it means we have to have a conversation about what that is.
What does that mean?
What does it mean when someone associates with one of these organizations?
Because we tend to say, oh, well, that organization's fine because it just does cultural things or it's involved in educational exchange or it's involved in, you know, whatever, people-to-people diplomacy, whatever we want to attach to it.
Oh, it's just that.
But Mao Zedong described United Front work as a tool to storm and shatter the enemy's position.
That means that that organization is about political struggle.
It's not about exchange.
This isn't a way that we reach Chinese people.
This isn't a way that we reach to the party leadership.
This is there to affect us, not allow us to affect them.
So we need to get more creative about how we work around it, but also be prepared that we should be able to have an honest conversation.
If you're working with an organization whose purpose is in part to shatter our system, Then what are you doing?
Now, you could have fallen into this naively, but it's something we should be able to have a civil conversation about because no one would sit here and say, oh, if you were Canadian and you were working with CIA and you were trying to keep a raft on this relationship, that's perfectly normal, right?
We would draw a distinction between an intelligence service and citizens of another country.
Like, maybe there are some questions that are reasonably asked, right?
Oh, are you allied countries?
Well, if you're an allied country, You know, what's the appropriate openness?
Are you a clandestine source?
Maybe that's not appropriate.
Are you just going over as an academic and participating in an exchange?
Okay, sure.
We're allies.
That's fine.
Right?
But here we have an organization, a set of organizations that mean us harm.
Why can't we talk about this?
Like, this should be fundamental to how we do it.
Because it doesn't lead to consequences, it doesn't necessarily lead to arrest.
But we want to be able, as a society that governs ourselves, that as we are citizens, we have a kind of responsibility.
But if this information is not aired, if it's not discussed, if you're not putting out, like Cheryl did, here's the methodology for recognizing it.
We said, if you're connected with these organizations, if you're an advisor to this kind of organization, if you're a delegate to this organization, that's a problem.
Or we're willing to say that here's an organization where someone in it is bringing this back to the party.
We should be able to talk about that in a civilized way because that's what democracies do.
It's so critical.
I mean, the subtitle of my book is, and the true nature of America's biggest adversary, right?
And it's just this nature that we've just kind of not understood and it's cost us.
I mean, I say us, I mean, Canada greatly, right?
The United States, every free society that the CCP has gotten interested in, which is frankly everyone.
Peter, as we finish up, You're talking about at least being able to have a conversation about an institution or a system that seeks to smash us, to use the term.
Shouldn't we be doing more than just having a conversation?
Well, look, there are a number of things that need to be done, right?
But as citizens, this is one of the most important things, is to be able to talk about it.
Because if we're associated with a university, if we're associated with a company, if we're with a nonprofit that's looking for partners, We have to be able to vet.
We have to be able to look and to say, okay, here's what this is.
Second thing that we have is that the scale of this problem is such that we can't arrest our way out of it.
So that means that, yes, the citizen part of it is important.
Second thing that it means is that we're going to have to use different kinds of tools than trying to drag everything into a courtroom.
And besides, if we're dragging everything into a courtroom, that's maybe not an ideal approach for a democracy.
We want We want our laws to sort of draw clear lines and we want government investigative and intelligence powers to be on the illegal side.
We don't want them investigating legal behavior.
That's the other reason why you have to have the citizen discussion and people taking responsibility for their own institutions and ensuring the integrity of them.
That also goes to governments.
We lost the integrity of the World Health Organization when they failed to declare a pandemic and they did it because of a CCP proxy inside the office that was preventing a decision to go.
And, you know, what happened in the U.S. is on us, but what happened in dozens of other countries around the world happened because their response was tied to the WHO's decision, right?
Because they don't have the same resources to be watching around the world.
So it was tied to it.
That cost lives.
So we have to remember those things.
And it is a government responsibility because they are our voice in a place like the World Bank and the United Nations and the World Health Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization.
You can go on and on and on.
So, it's not just, oh, a citizen should do this.
Here's the government result.
It has to be to protect and preserve the integrity of these institutions that have helped govern the way our countries have often interacted.
Another piece of this has to be the investment in expertise.
And there are a couple of ways to think about this.
The first is that we've got to be doing a lot better than only what is now a few thousand Chinese language students in the United States.
to think critically about how do we build their exposure and their understanding so that they can go into corporate roles, they can go into government roles, and they can be cleared, right?
We basically kind of said, oh, well, they went and spent time in China, and they spent long enough time there to get really good language skills, therefore we can't clear them.
That's an acknowledgement of failure that we can't identify patriotic Americans.
So we have to fix that.
We have to fix that problem.
We also need to be thinking about the fact that there are a lot of motivated Hong Kongers and Taiwanese and Uyghurs and many others.
And actually, you know what?
A lot of Chinese nationals that don't buy what Xi Jinping is selling.
How do we create a home?
How do we professionalize them in the United States?
How do we ensure that they're sort of ready to go?
Because they've been facing this.
They are motivated.
They want to contribute.
So how do we make a pathway?
I know a few of them.
Right?
So that expertise building and professionalization is bigger than just, oh, we need some language students, right?
It's bigger than that, right?
Because it's not just a language understanding.
It is a, what is the nature of the party?
What are they willing to do?
How will they go?
How does it work bureaucratically, right?
These are all things that are difficult, but we need that piece of expertise because How do you have a citizen-led discussion?
How do you have institutions protect themselves if you're not generating the people that can go into it?
And to be a person there and say, oh, well, wait a minute.
Yeah, should we really be doing that?
That doesn't seem like a good idea.
Wait a minute.
You know that that guy actually works for the PLA, don't you?
We need that in there.
And then the last piece, we should remember that our classification laws, our FARA laws, are basically dating to World War I and before World War II.
So, they're dealing with a problem that's now almost a century old.
They were almost entirely focused around national defense.
So, if you or I went over and took pictures of a military base or certain other kinds of critical infrastructure, the question of whether or not we could be arrested or whether or not there would be a problem is not a classification issue.
It's that this is very clearly a national defense and sensitive facility.
But we haven't thought about what this means in a political sense.
And we haven't updated those laws to say, Okay, how do we protect all of these things that have been under attack?
And there are some things that we can take inspiration from in the Cold War, but we ought to remember that we didn't really do this necessarily all that well inside our own country during the Cold War, right?
We were simply not as bad as the Soviet Union, and we weren't crumbling the way that the Soviet Union was.
But the resources that the CCP is bringing to bear, including inside our own country, is far more substantial than what the Soviet Union was ever able to do.
And therefore, it's a different kind of problem on a different scale.
And I think it's time that we start rethinking well, how do we think of national security in a bigger way than just this narrow definition of national defense?
And that's kind of where I would focus on the legal side of it.
So it is really a whole of society and a whole of government because we all have little pieces of it as a citizen here, as a professional here, as a government official there.
And that means that if you're at Treasury and you're in international affairs, working with the international organizations, you've got a role.
You've got a role if you're at the FBI and an investigator.
You've got a role as a congressional staffer.
How do you make sure that your boss is not hearing from the CCP instead of their constituents?
Rethinking National Security00:00:23
Right?
That's what it means to deal with this kind of challenge.
Well, Peter Mattis, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
It was a pretty good conversation.
I think we kept it a little looser than we thought we would.
Thank you all for joining Peter Mattis and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.