FPI / September 20, 2022
Geostrategy-Direct
At the Chinese Communist Party’s United Work Conference in late July, supreme leader Xi Jinping called for ethnic Chinese throughout the world to mobilize in support of the CCP, effectively seeking to make every Chinese individual a communist agent.
"Promoting the great unity of the Chinese people is the historic responsibility of China's patriotic united front work in the new era," Xi said. "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 CCP lingo for "other countries."
Xi's predecessors also appealed to overseas Chinese, "so in one sense there was nothing new in his words in July. Yet there is nonetheless cause for great concern," Gordon G. Chang noted in an Aug. 23 analysis for Gatestone Institute
“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,” Chang wrote.
"We all share the same ancestors, history, and culture, we all are sons and daughters of the Chinese nation and descendants of the dragon," said Yang Jiechi, now China's top diplomat, in 2013 to a group of overseas ethnic Chinese children attending a government-sponsored "roots-tracing" tour event.
The regime sponsors these tours to indoctrinate. Foreign children, in Taishan in Guangdong province during a tour late last decade, were asked to sing the 1980s-era "Descendants of the Dragon." The appeal to race is unmistakable, as this portion of the lyrics makes clear: "With brown eyes, black hair, and yellow skin, we are forever descendants of the dragon."
“China's regime asks, cajoles, threatens, and intimidates dragon descendants,” Chang wrote. “As successful American prosecutions indicate, some ethnic Chinese are especially susceptible to those appeals.”
In February, however, the Biden administration's Department of Justice ended its Trump-era "China Initiative," which concentrated law enforcement efforts on Chinese espionage.
Full Text . . . . Current Edition . . . . Subscription Information
FPI, Free Press International
