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In China, all of the organizations involved in outreach to the overseas Chinese community are led by senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Sun Chunlan, the former head of the United Front Work Department, is listed as the president of the China Overseas Friendship Association and the executive vice president of the China Council to Promote Peaceful Reunification. The head of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, Qiu Yuanping, also leads the China Overseas Exchange Association. Madame Qiu has a career background with the Party's International Liaison Department. The president of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification is none other than Yu Zhengsheng, the former chairman of the Chinese People's Consultative Conference and a former member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party's Central Committee.⁶

Goals and Methods

The key goal of the Party's united front work with overseas Chinese is to gain support for the Communist Party's efforts to modernize the country by convincing members of overseas Chinese communities that the Party is the sole representative of China and to isolate competing forces that the Party perceives to be adversarial, or even hostile. For example, as part of a massive campaign to monitor, control, and even intimidate China's ethnic minorities (no matter where in the world they are), Chinese authorities are creating a global registry of Uighurs who live outside of China. Chinese authorities threatening to detain Uighur relatives who remain in China if they do not provide personal information of their relatives living abroad to the Chinese police. This campaign has particularly targeted Uighurs living in Germany but is now reaching Uighurs in the United States as well.⁷ Uighurs are not alone; Tibetan exiles living in the United States have long reported similar campaigns against members of their families and community. Chinese security officials have even been known to travel to America on tourist visas to exert pressure on Chinese dissidents living here.⁸ FBI agents have contacted prominent Chinese exiles in the United States offering them protection from Chinese agents who might travel to the United States to menace them.⁹

For most Chinese Americans, however, China's efforts to influence them are far more anodyne. The official description of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) states its purpose as: "to enhance unity and friendship in overseas Chinese communities; to maintain contact with and support overseas Chinese media and Chinese language schools; [and] to increase cooperation and exchanges between overseas Chinese and China related to the economy, science, culture and education." Over the past three decades, the OCAO has dispatched former reporters and editors from the OCAO-run China News Service to establish pro-Beijing Chinese media organizations in the West. (Chinese officials have described such Chinese-language media outlets, schools, and other kinds of organizations as the "three treasures" (三宝) of united front work overseas.)¹⁰

Officials from Beijing have stated clearly that they do not view overseas Chinese as simple citizens of foreign countries, but rather as "overseas compatriots" (华侨同胞们) who have both

Section 3

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