How Xi Jinping ensures his will is being enforced — at home and abroad

Xi’s Communist Party has extended its reach deep into suburban Australia, effectively silencing dissidents and ensuring Beijing’s agendas are enforced.
By Jamie Seidel

China bigger security threat than Russia: Wray

GROWING concerns about the security of sensitive national infrastructure projects involving Chinese firms are well founded, says University of Adelaide Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies Dr Gerry Groot.
“The Communist Party is always interested in leveraging its companies and people to serve its economic, strategic and military interests as it seeks to make China more powerful and eventually eclipse the United States,” he says.
It’s a key element of Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’ of national rejuvenation.
The Communist Party, which Xi runs, has an additional advantage. 

It controls an international network of seemingly innocent representative bodies that inevitably weave their way back to Beijing.
And the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department is a two-headed hydra, Dr Groot says.
At home it has the public face of being a conduit between Chinese society and the Party’s leadership. Compulsory united front associations are established everywhere, to represent everything and everyone.
This includes religious groups, trade groups, sporting organisations — and Chinese managers working in international businesses.

A poster of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping with his eyes blocked by words " Not my president" is seen as thousands of protesters march in Hong Kong. The Communist Party has an extensive network in place to report -- and suppress -- such protests. 

UNITED WE STAND
China’s United Front is being used as a means of enforcing State control, Dr Groot says. 

Each association monitors and reports on the behaviour and performance of its members.
“This organisation is yet one more means by which the Party can reach out to, work with or coerce otherwise private Chinese-owned businesses through industry associations and chambers of commerce,” he says. 

“However, because there is much to be gained by being on the good side of the Chinese government, many business people are only too happy to be seen as supporting it.
“If you want to get anywhere, then you have to be in the related official organisation. And if you want a leadership role, you have to be approved by the United Front department.”
Through these United Front associations, the Communist Party’s influence now extends to international corporations and organisations within China.
“They’ve targeted Chinese managers in foreign companies and joint ventures,” Dr Groot says. 

“They also target every new industry that pops up. They soon start organising an association for them, and (if you’re Chinese) you either have to be in that association or you’re going to get into trouble. It’s quite invasive.”
Details about these groups and their members — whether within China or without — are funnelled up the Communist Party chain.
“There is also the Party’s increased emphasis in recent years, of forming Communist Party organisations within Chinese companies and China-based foreign companies with numerous Chinese employees,” Dr Groot says. 

“This means that there is no such thing as a major Chinese company which is free of Communist Party influence. To believe that companies would be willing, let alone able to refuse Party orders, is asking a lot of them.”

A security guard extinguishes a burning portrait of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping held by a pro-democracy activist during a protest march by thousands in Hong Kong. 

LOOMING PRESENCE
It’s the all-pervasive reach of these various Party controlled associations that should make us think very carefully before giving Chinese businesses access to major infrastructure projects, Dr Groot says.
“The reason is those companies must listen to the Party. They must have Party committees at the highest levels. And anyway most of the bosses are patriotic — and if ex-military people run them, what do you expect? Moreover, it is always a good idea to have the Party onside, business is more successful that way. “
Dr Groot says the United Front’s international presence is all about maintaining control over those it regards to be its citizens, promoting Beijing’s agenda — and generating Party-positive perceptions.
This applies to business people and students studying abroad — as well as exiled Tibetan communities and Uyghur ethnic group refugees
“Interestingly, one of the reasons we’re not hearing about what’s happening to the Tibetans and Uyghurs, in particular, is the success of the United Front Department in shutting down these disparate critics abroad. They’ve even turned up in Adelaide to do their work,” Dr Groot says.
“Australia’s Falun Gong community will often tell you that they’re getting surveilled and that they’re getting nuisance phone calls in the middle of the night.”
A simple ‘chat’ with a United Front representative is often enough to do the job, he says.
“They work for the United Front or the Ministry of State Security, and they can go around in Australia and talk to people. They can say ‘oh, I can help you if you really want to go and see your parents. I can help you do this, or solve that problem’. It’s carrot-and-stick stuff.”
Chinese consulates also serve this dual role, he says.
“Consulates are another Communist Party arm. Business people like consulates because they make business easy, that’s true. But they have other responsibilities. They still have to carry out Party policy, which includes looking for enemies, looking for Chinese democracy activists, Falun-Gong or other religious dissidents — Tibetan splittists, Uyghur splittists …
“I think it’s very interesting these communities have been very quiet in Australia for a long time. There’s been very little peep out of these groups. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

A Dragon dance being performed in Rundle Mall, Adelaide. Chinese business and communities abroad are being influenced by the Communist Party.

Tech Quisling

U.S. lawmakers want Google to reconsider links to China's Huawei

Reuters

WASHINGTON -- Republican and Democratic U.S. lawmakers asked Alphabet Inc’s Google on Wednesday to reconsider its work with Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, which they described as a security threat.
In a letter to Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, the lawmakers said Google recently decided not to renew “Project Maven,” an artificial intelligence research partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense.
“While we regret that Google did not want to continue a long and fruitful tradition of collaboration between the military and technology companies, we are even more disappointed that Google apparently is more willing to support the Chinese Communist Party than the U.S. military,” they wrote.
The letter was signed by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, Republican Representatives Michael Conaway and Liz Cheney, and Democratic Representative Dutch Ruppersberger.
Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville said the company looked forward to responding.
The letter was the latest in a series of efforts by members of the U.S. Congress to target Huawei, and ZTE Corp, another major Chinese telecommunications equipment company.
They have written bills that would bar government agencies from using the companies’ products and try to overturn Donald Trump’s agreement to end a ban on ZTE.
Earlier this month another senator, Democrat Mark Warner, wrote to Alphabet and other technology companies asking about any data-sharing agreements with Chinese vendors.

Insane Clown President

U.S. lawmakers push back on Trump talk of helping China's ZTE

By Patricia Zengerle, Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON -- U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday rejected any plan by Donald Trump to ease restrictions on China’s ZTE Corp, calling the telecommunications firm a security threat and vowing not to abandon legislation clamping down on the company.
Trump on Monday had defended his decision to revisit penalties on ZTE for flouting U.S. sanctions on trade with Iran, in part by saying it was reflective of the larger trade deal the United States is negotiating with China.
“I hope the administration does not move forward on this supposed deal I keep reading about,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio said. 

Bilateral talks between the world’s two biggest economies resume in Washington this week.
The Trump administration is considering an arrangement under which the ban on ZTE would be eased in exchange for elimination of new Chinese tariffs on certain U.S. farm products, including pork, fruits, nuts and ginseng, two people familiar with the proposal said. 

The potential arrangement was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“They are basically conducting an all-out assault to steal what we’ve already developed and use it as the baseline for their development so they can supplant us as the leader in the most important technologies of the 21st century,” Rubio said at a Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Asia policy.
Trump had taken to Twitter on Sunday with a pledge to help the company, which has suspended its main operations, because the penalties had cost too many jobs in China. 

It was a departure for a president who often touts “America First” policies.
The Commerce Department in April found ZTE had violated a 2017 settlement created after the company violated sanctions on Iran and North Korea, and banned U.S. companies from providing exports to ZTE for seven years.
U.S. companies are estimated to provide 25 percent to 30 percent of components used in ZTE’s equipment, which includes smartphones and gear to build telecommunications networks.

CYBERSNOOPING
The suggestion outraged members of Congress who have been pressing for more restrictions on ZTE. U.S. lawmakers alleged equipment made by ZTE and other Chinese companies could pose a cyber security threat.
“Who makes unilateral concessions on the eve of talks after you’ve spent all this time trying to say, correctly in my view, that the Chinese have ripped off our technology?” Senator Ron Wyden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade policy, told Reuters.
Wyden, who is also on the Intelligence Committee, was one of 32 Senate Democrats who signed a letter on Tuesday accusing Trump of putting China’s interests ahead of U.S. jobs and national security.
Republican Representative Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a Bloomberg event on Tuesday he did not expect lawmakers would seek to remove a ban on ZTE technology from a must-pass annual defense policy bill making its way through Congress.
“I confess I don’t fully understand the administration’s take on this at this point,” Thornberry said. 

“It is not a question to me of economics, it is a question of security.”