China has long strived to influence and monitor Chinese-Canadians, Chinese citizens who study here and Canadian society as a whole — and done the same in many other countries. In recent years, however, that project appears to have surged in importance.
Since rising to prominence in 2012, the country’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, has overseen what one leading academic expert calls a “massive expansion” in China’s use of soft power overseas, much of it under the auspices of the United Front Work Department, a shadowy offshoot of the Chinese communist party.
“United Front work has taken on a level of significance not seen since the years before 1949,” Anne-Marie Brady, a political scientist at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, told a U.S. conference last year. “(China) is increasingly able to use its soft-power ‘magic weapons’ to help influence the decision-making of foreign governments and societies.”
Working partly through officials in foreign missions, its activities include influencing the Chinese diaspora to back China, co-opting foreign political and economic elites, promoting Beijing’s agenda worldwide and forming a China-centred economic bloc, the political science professor says.
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