By Yi-Zheng Lian
Amid all the hoopla about Russia’s covert attempts to manipulate the 2016 American presidential election, one state has been conspicuously quiet: China. Yet its leaders may well be sneering at the Russians’ heavy hand. Since the project masterminded from Moscow largely relied on social media in the United States, American techies were bound to find out about it soon enough. Likewise with the baldfaced poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter in Britain, which has also been pegged to Moscow. Too crude, too traceable, these operations could only generate a backlash. China, too, can be a bully, especially with Asian governments in its immediate sphere of influence — imposing economic sanctions on South Korea for deploying defensive missiles or orchestrating the kidnapping of book publishers from Hong Kong and Thailand. But it doesn’t usually set out to openly hurt or antagonize stronger opponents like the United States; instead, it tries to quietly gain an edge for the long haul.
Rather than coercing, China manipulates, preferring to act in moral and legal gray areas. It masks its political motives behind laudable human-interest or cultural projects, blurring the battle line with its adversaries. When the job is done, the other side may not realize it was gamed, or that a strategic game was even going on.
If this sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories, it’s because there is a conspiracy afoot, and it isn’t theoretical. The Confucius Institutes and Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) cells being established on campuses outside China are but a few dots in this picture — when the whole lot are properly connected they outline a vast, smooth-running machine that taps Chinese people throughout the world to spread its influence and harvest intelligence in the service of the Chinese state.
Take the story of Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel laureate in physics.
Mr. Yang left China in the mid-1940s and then studied under Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. After he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957, the Chinese authorities sent emissaries, including his father, to secretly meet him in Geneva and entreat him to return home. Mr. Yang repeatedly refused, and became an American citizen in 1964. But when China began opening up in the 1970s, he returned to help modernize Chinese physics research. Beijing, well aware of the importance of physics for China’s development — as well as the possible demonstration effect of Mr. Yang’s newfound patriotism on other Chinese scientists overseas — practically made him a national hero. And more.
In late 2004, just over a year after his wife had died, Mr. Yang married the young Chinese graduate student whom the authorities had assigned to be his personal assistant at a major conference; in February 2017, when he was 94, it was announced that he — as well as another returnee, the Turing Award-winner Andrew Chi-Chih Yao — had renounced his American citizenship. Prudish media scorned the marriage because of the couple’s vast age difference, but serious critics pointed out that pairing a high-value target with a young wife was an established practice of the C.C.P.; there is even a stock phrase for receiving such attentions from the state: coming under “the warm concern of the Party” (or the premier). A young spouse was also the reward for Li Zongren, a former top general and acting president of the Republican government that the Communists overthrew in 1949, after he returned to China in the mid-1960s.
Chen Ning Yang talks to his wife before delivering a speech at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, in 2006.CreditChina Photos/Getty Images
Zhou Enlai, then China’s premier, is said to have personally overseen Mr. Li’s case. I know of no official record showing that the Chinese leadership masterminded Mr. Yang’s remarriage, but there is ample circumstantial evidence, including statements by the father of Mr. Yang’s young wife, who said that his daughter’s “sacrifice” had been “a virtue and a glory.”
News of Mr. Yang’s reversion to Chinese citizenship reverberated across the Chinese-American community, especially among scientists and engineers. The C.C.P. gained much-needed respectability, having just poached a major human-capital asset of the United States, and one who had received most of his training there.
In fact, ever since the California Institute of Technology aerodynamics and missile expert Tsien Hsue-shen returned to China in 1955 — and became instrumental in building China’s missile industry — the F.B.I. has been well aware of the danger this peculiar kind of reverse brain drain poses for the United States. “I’d rather see him shot than let him go,” Dan A. Kimball, the secretary of the Navy in 1951-53, reportedly once said of Mr. Tsien. “He’s worth three to five divisions anyplace.” Hundreds of Chinese scientists overseas went back to China in the 1950s.
Mr. Yang’s renunciation of his American citizenship may have had an even greater effect, if only because there are many more Chinese-Americans in the United States today than there were some six decades ago. Certainly, his return to China in the 1970s was a great source of patriotic inspiration among my generation of Chinese studying and working in high-tech in the United States then. Again and again, such homecoming stories have helped repair the C.C.P.’s tarnished image after it lost the support of intellectuals — with its disastrous Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 or again after the brutal Tiananmen crackdown in 1989.
Longtime China observers readily recognize in Mr. Yang’s trajectory the handiwork of the C.C.P., specifically the painstaking orchestrations of its well-masked machine of influence. Foreign academic and intelligence circles, however, are only just beginning to appreciate China’s method — and how it differs from, say, Russia’s — and to take the full measure of its effectiveness. China’s ploys are difficult to discern, and its plants are difficult to dislodge, especially when they take root in unsuspecting open societies, like the United States, New Zealand or Australia.
The Chinese influence machine has nebulous outer layers, partly because connections between its members, be they individuals or organizations, are often imperceptible. But at its core is a well-defined, battle-tested structure first deployed by Mao in the 1930s. Mao famously identified it as one of his Three Magic Weapons against the Republican government of Chiang Kai-shek, alongside a Leninist party and the Red Army, and he gave it a respectable name: the United Front. The organization assumed its current form in 1946. Three years later, Mao’s Communists won the civil war, and credited the United Front in part for their victory.
The United Front comprises two organs, which are often poorly understood outside China because there are no equivalents for them in the West. One is the enigmatic United Front Work Department; the other is the high-profile Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (C.P.P.C.C.).
The United Front Work Department is a nimble and tightly led party organ, headed by the chief of the secretariat of the C.C.P.’s central committee. It oversees a dozen organizations that do political networking, through both persuasion and infiltration. One of those is the European and American Alumni Association, which keeps close tabs over the ever-larger number of Chinese students and academics training or residing in the West, and enjoins them to conduct “people diplomacy” — in effect turning all those scholars into foot soldiers for the United Front.
The C.P.P.C.C., on the other hand, is a sort of vast invitation-only club — led by a member of the standing committee of the party’s Politburo, working primarily through personal networks. During its annual meeting, it is one harmonious gabfest of 2,150-odd participants. About 40 percent of them are C.C.P. members; the rest are people of renown from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau carefully selected for their wealth, popularity and political pliability — like movie stars, religious leaders, business tycoonsand university presidents. (At least that goes for the C.P.P.C.C. at the national level; lesser patriots start by joining provincial or lower-level offshoots and work their way up.)
C.P.P.C.C. members nominally are political consultants to the C.C.P.; in fact, they must toe the party line. And their real job begins when the shop talk ends: It mainly consists of influencing other important people in their respective walks of life and eventually drawing them into Beijing’s orbit — with money, women, the promise of fame or simply by tapping their patriotism. Any recruits are given good opportunities in China: to perform, proselytize, invest or make a lot of money.
In some ways, the C.P.P.C.C. operates like a mafia: It is secretive, relies on close personal ties and stands ready to break the law. It is also something of a political Ponzi scheme: Its members are rewarded when they entice others to become initiates — only then to come under more pressure to do even more. Patrick Ho Chi-ping, a former home affairs secretary of Hong Kong and the head of an energy nonprofit, now finds himself embroiled in a criminal case in the United States, accused of bribing African heads of states to secure oil contracts for Chinese energy interests controlled by the state. A veteran of the C.P.P.C.C., he appears to have been done in by those connections.
Yet China’s influence machine purrs on. Earlier this year the Chinese authorities in Beijing allocated to Hong Kong a record 200-plus seats in the current C.P.P.C.C., about 10 percent of the entire membership — even though the city’s population is the equivalent of only about 0.5 percent of China’s total.
Seven decades ago, Mao’s United Front was instrumental in catapulting the Chinese Communists to power. Since then, China’s influence machine has become infinitely more resourceful — and far more global.
Yi-Zheng Lian, a commentator on Hong Kong and Asian affairs, is a professor of economics at Yamanashi Gakuin University, in Kofu, Japan.
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