China Is Weaponizing Chinese Worldwide to Support the CCP

• To make matters worse, the Chinese state has been open about its hostility to the United States. Among other things, in May 2019 People’s Daily, the Party’s self-described “mouthpiece” and therefore most authoritative publication in China, declared a “people’s war” on America.
• Many of those “different social systems”—especially the United States—are squeamish when it comes to singling people out because of their race. Yet American policymakers cannot ignore the fact that the Communist Party’s appeal to overseas Chinese is overtly race-based.
• In February… the Justice Department ended its Trump-era “China Initiative,” which concentrated law enforcement efforts on Chinese espionage. Yet given Xi Jinping’s call on overseas Chinese to work for the Chinese Communist Party, it is time to reinstitute that program and devote more resources to it.
• Can Americans of Chinese descent be loyal to both America and China?
• No. China’s Communist Party has made itself an existential threat to America and every other society…. The promotion of tianxia [ruling “All under Heaven”] means, among other things, that the Party views the U.S. government as illegitimate and America as nothing more a tributary society or colony.
• Although we [“Chinese-Americans”] technically do not have an obligation to prove our loyalty to America, we must, as a group, understand that a hostile power is trying to weaponize us. Xi Jinping has openly called on us to become a subversive force, to help him destroy the country we now call home.
• It is time, therefore, for us to begin cleaning our own ranks…. Moreover, it means not shouting “racism” every time law enforcement arrests someone of Chinese descent.
• We may think it unfair, but we now have to make a choice.
• After all, our country—the United States of America—is in peril because a foreign state—the People’s Republic of China—is attacking it and hoping to use us to take it down.
• The Communist Party of China refers to us as “overseas patriotic forces.” People in our communities will want to know to which country we feel patriotic.

“Promoting the great unity of the Chinese people is the historic responsibility of China’s patriotic united front work in the new era,” said Chinese ruler Xi Jinping at the end of last month to Communist Party cadres in Beijing. “To do the job well, we must… truly unite all Chinese people in different parties, nationalities, classes, groups, and with different beliefs, and those who are living under different social systems.”

“Different social systems” is Party lingo for “other countries.”

Xi’s words sound benign, but the intent is not. In short, Xi, at the Party’s United Front Work Conference, said he hoped to unite—in other words, mobilize—ethnic Chinese everywhere to support the CCP, to effectively make every Chinese individual a CCP agent.

“The Chinese Communist Party just doesn’t accept that people who adopt foreign citizenship are no longer beholden to the motherland as represented by the Chinese Communist Party,” said Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute to “CBS Eye on the World” on August 17. “There is no escape from this ethnic identification based on being descendants of the Yellow Emperor.”

Xi’s predecessors also appealed to overseas Chinese, so in one sense there was nothing new in his words last month. Yet there is nonetheless cause for great concern. Mao Zedong in fact tried to use ethnic Chinese populations outside China to overthrow their governments. Xi reveres Mao, has adopted many of Mao’s tactics, and is surely as determined as Mao in using Chinese people to do his bidding. Xi is serious in seeing all the world’s Chinese as a single unified force.

By Gordon G. Chang