The Ultimate Social Network: China's Expansionary, Internationally Oriented United Front Strategies 1923-2020

“The Communist Party of China shall…expand the broadest possible patriotic united front…to strengthen the unity of all the Chinese people, including…overseas Chinese.” This passage from the 1956 Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party illustrates China’s expansionary international active measures which are, and have always been, the bedrock of Chinese foreign policy from its earliest days through today. Academics such as Peter Perdue have shown that China pursued continental consolidation and westward expansion in a manner far more consistent with the United States’ eventual hegemony over North America than any stylized version of a peaceful rise. This dynamic was true not only during early periods such as the aptly named Warring States period and subsequent dynasties, but also during periods where other historians such as Chung-in Moon and Seung-won Suh have argued for a “Confucian Long Peace” driven by the unique characteristics of China, in particular during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) prior to western intervention during the Opium Wars (1839-1860). Active measures were a core part of this story over a period of thousands of years. Inscriptions show intelligence operations during the middle Shang period (1200 BCE), and significant use of agents during the Spring and Autumn period (722-481 BCE), culminating in their aggressive deployment during the Warring States period (403-221 BCE). Their centrality was subsequently memorialized in Sunzi’s Art of War. These tactics included measures that will sound familiar to readers in the present day, as Jie Xuan wrote during the Ming Dynasty: “Creating forged letters is clandestine written action. Holding discussions that stupefy the enemy is clandestine civil action. Creating prophetic verses that circulate Ultimate among the people is clandestine action by prophecy”. Our opening quote helps to illustrate that the centrality of these policies continued under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), since its very inception in 1921. This expansionary approach, and these active measures, continued unabated. This reality is not fully recognized by foreign policy professionals analyzing active measures today, who remain focused almost exclusively on Russian, Iranian, and North Korean efforts. It is the equivalent of the boardwalk magician, leveraging the sound and fury created by the right hand, while the left hand silently and slowly picks your pocket. Media and policy attention has been solely devoted to the sound and fury, while the slow and constant efforts of China have been largely ignored. Put another way, consensus has focused on the louder visible social networks such as Facebook leveraged by Russia and Iran, while ignoring the pervasive silent social network that is China’s United Front and its active measures. Global perception must catch up to the historical reality of China. This paper will explore perception gaps that exist regarding 1) China’s historically based expansionist nature (focusing on the period of the Qing dynasty prior to the Opium Wars, and the “peaceful rise” narrative championed for political expediency by the CCP), as well as 2) the significant evolution of United Front active measures from Mao Tse Tung, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Jintao, and on to the present day under Xi Jinping. Mainstream consensus thinking regarding China, at least until 20-25 years ago, positioned it as a nation and government primarily focused on domestic control, with a long history of non-expansionary behavior. This view has been in place since the early days of Western analysis of the Middle Kingdom, back to the 1930s when John Fairbank walked the streets of Peiping, and provided the scholarly foundation on which much of western thought regarding China has been built. Academics began to reconsider this conceptualization by the mid-1990s. Properly framing this reality is one of the most important questions facing International Relations scholars and foreign policy professionals today, as it cuts to the primary drivers and motivation of Chinese foreign policy efforts, and the tools utilized to advance them. This paper will show that China is, in my nomenclature, “Just Another Country” (JAC), and that the “Confucian Long Peace” was a politically motivated historical fallacy. It will then illustrate the importance of this misunderstanding, leveraging an analysis of the evolution of Chinese active measures campaigns under the United Front banner from their inception as the First United Front between the CCP and the Kuomintang (KMT) against warlords and imperialists (1923-1927), to the Second United Front to expel Japan (1937-1941), to a United Front against the Kuomintang in 1946, to a pivot by Mao to launch international United Front Activities beginning in South East Asia in 1948, to their strengthening under Xi. This history shows that an expansionist China leveraged active measures, albeit “with Chinese characteristics”, at least as aggressively as countries receiving far more publicity and government discussion time, such as Russia, Iran, or North Korea. This reality has far reaching implications for understanding Chinese foreign policy, which I argue deserves more policy and academic consideration relative to that devoted to the sound and fury of Russian measures. This paper is organized into three sections. The first will provide an overview of the historical Fairbank model of understanding China and the more recent challenge to this thinking led by scholars such as Perdue. The second will illustrate the “Chinese characteristics” of active measures through a brief history of United Front activities in China as adopted from the Soviet Union and their subsequent evolution in China under Mao and Deng and most particularly under the current Xi Government. The third and final section will provide an overall summary as well as a discussion regarding the differential goals at play for episodic disinformation campaigns vs. ongoing operating environment focused United Front strategies.