United Front Work Department

The United Front Work Department was created during the Chinese Civil War, and was reestablished in 1979 under paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. Since 2012, the role and scope of the UFWD has expanded and intensified under CCP general secretary Xi Jinping. Civil war and gaining power United front policies were most used in two periods before the Chinese Communist Revolution, namely from 1924 to 1927, and from 1936 to 1945, when the CCP cooperated with the Kuomintang ostensibly to defeat the Japanese. The simplest formulation of united front work in the period was to "rally as many allies as possible in order to...defeat a common enemy." In the early years, the CCP also used united front policies to cooperate with "disaffected warlords, religious believers, ethnic minorities, overseas Chinese, and minor parties and groups," in order for the CCP to appear democratic and to persuade key groups that the Nationalists were "illegitimate and repressive while the CCP embodied progress, unity, and democracy." Regarding religious policy, Li's view was that there were few counterrevolutionaries among religious believers, and that the majority were "patriotic". Reform and opening up In 1977, Ulanhu became head of the UFWD. In 1980, the CCP Central Committee approved a request by the UFWD to create a national conference for religious groups. The participating religious groups were the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, the Islamic Association of China, the Chinese Taoist Association, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and the Buddhist Association of China. operating under the name of the "Coordination Department." The UFWD has been critically described as serving to co-opt non-Communist community leaders outside China, and "using them to neutralize Party critics," sometimes coercively. Scholar of Chinese political history John P. Burns presents in his book ''The Chinese Communist Party's Nomenklatura System'' excerpts from internal party documents demonstrating the role of the UFWD. The UFWD is to "implement better the party's united front policy and to assess and understand patriotic personages in different fields... so that we can arrange for correct placements for them and fully mobilize and bring into play their positive role in the Four Modernizations and to accomplish the return of Taiwan to the motherland so as to fulfill the cause of uniting the whole country, and to carry forward and solidify the revolutionary, patriotic united front." The UFWD was used in the early years of PRC rule "to guarantee CCP oversight" over groups that were not directly associated with the Party and government. Those groups, including NGOs, were brought under the authority of the UFWD, whose job it was to “continuing to play its part in mobilizing and rallying the whole people in common struggle” after the Liberation in 1949. When the CCP "shifted its focus from the 'mass line' to 'class struggle', the real united front disappeared. While the United Front Department still existed, its duties of uniting with all forces for the 'common struggle' shifted mainly to serving the Party's leadership and 'consolidating the proletarian dictatorship'," according to Brookings Institution visiting fellow Zhang Ye. According to Roger Faligot, the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre led to the "growing use of party organizations, such as the United Front Work Department and friendship associations, as fronts for intelligence operations." Based on their actions in Taiwan and elsewhere the United Front Work Department appears to be used as a cover to conduct intelligence operations against targets of interest to the CCP. Xi administration Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized the importance to the UFWD, adopting Mao's phrasing that "united front work" is one of the CCP's three "magic weapons". In 2018, the UFWD went through a reorganization during a series of institutional reforms in which it absorbed the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) to become two internal bureaus. The UFWD also assumed direct control of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission. With the reorganization, the UFWD effectively became China's main agency overseeing and managing ethnic, religious and overseas Chinese affairs. In 2021, UFWD and SARA issued the directive Some Views on Managing Folk Beliefs, which provides a framework for legitimizing Chinese folk religion, which it characterizes as "folk belief". Previously, few folk religious temples were able to obtain registered legal status, often by registering as Buddhist or Daoist sites. Following the policy changes in the Xi administration, folk religion temples can register as folk belief activities sites. == Structure ==