Ever since a civil war split the two sides more than 60 years ago, China has viewed Taiwan as a renegade province that needs to be absorbed into the mainland. To that end, the legion of Taiwanese businesspeople working in China is a beachhead.
In June, hundreds of those businesspeople gathered in a hotel ballroom in the southern city of Shenzhen. They were there to toast the new head of a local Taiwan merchants’ association. They sipped baiji liquor and ate seafood as a troupe performed a traditional lion dance for good luck. An honored guest, senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official Li Jiafan (李家範), stood to deliver congratulations and a message.
“I urge our Taiwanese friends to continue to work hard in your fields to contribute to the realization of the Chinese dream as soon as possible,” Li said, using a nationalist slogan Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has popularized. “The Chinese dream is also the dream of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait — our dream of reunification.”
Illustration: Yusha
Li, who ended his speech to beating drums and loud applause, is a department chief in the Shenzhen arm of the United Front Work Department, an organ of the party’s Central Committee. Its mission: To spread China’s influence by ultimately gaining control over a range of groups not affiliated with the party and that are often outside the mainland.
United Front documents reviewed by Reuters, including annual reports, instructional handbooks and internal newsletters, as well as interviews with Chinese and Taiwanese officials, reveal the extent to which the agency is engaged in a concerted campaign to thwart any move toward greater independence by Taiwan and ultimately swallow up the self-ruled nation of 23 million people.
The United Front’s annual work report for Zhejiang Province last year, for instance, included the number of Taiwanese living in the province, the number of businesses they run and an entry on background checks that have been conducted on the Taiwanese community in the province, an entrepreneurial hub near Shanghai.
The United Front has not confined itself to the mainland. It is targeting academics, students, war veterans, doctors and local leaders in Taiwan in an attempt to soften opposition to the CCP and ultimately build support for unification. Last year’s work report included details of a program to bring Taiwanese students and military veterans on visits to China.
INFLUENCING POLITICS
Through the United Front and other state bodies like China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, which is responsible for implementing policies toward Taiwan on issues including trade and transport, Beijing has also tried to influence politics in Taiwan, in part by helping mobilize Taiwanese businesspeople in China.
Many of them are heading back home this weekend to vote in mayoral elections that are being viewed as a barometer of support for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which favors closer ties with China than does the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). A large number of those businesspeople, who a senior KMT source said would largely vote for the party, would be flying on deeply discounted airfares being offered by Chinese and Taiwanese airlines.
“The goal is simple — peaceful unification,” a person with ties to the Chinese leadership in Beijing said.
Soft power, not armed force, is the strategy.
“To attack the heart is the best. To attack a city is the worst,” the source said, quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (孫子兵法).
Questions sent by fax to the Beijing office of the United Front Work Department were not answered. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office referred Reuters to a statement on its Web site saying it does not comment on elections on “the island.”
What is happening in Taiwan is part of a broader effort by Beijing to bolster its control over restive territories on its periphery.
The United Front has long been active in Hong Kong, which is ruled under the “one country, two systems” model that enshrines a wide range of personal freedoms for its residents and which China’s leaders have proposed as a model for Taiwan.
Reuters reported in July that United Front operations in Hong Kong had shifted from the backroom courting of academics and businesspeople to the streets, where new groups of pro-Beijing agitators were attempting to silence critics of China.
“What the United Front is doing to Taiwan now is the same as what it has been doing in Hong Kong since the 1980s — a quiet, slow, but extensive penetration,” said Sonny Lo (盧兆興), a professor at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and author of a book on China’s covert control of the territory.
Unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan is a fully democratic entity. It has an army, but does not have membership in the UN, and China has refused to rule out the use of force to gain control of Taiwan.
Since the KMT won the presidential election in 2008, cross-strait ties have been warmer than ever. More than 20 trade deals, including the establishment of the first direct flights between Taiwan and the mainland, have been inked. No trade agreements were signed under the previous DPP-led administration. Earlier this year, Chinese and Taiwanese officials held their first official meeting since 1949.
Taiwan’s economy has become increasingly intertwined with China’s. About 40 percent of Taiwan’s exports are to China and some key sectors like technology have much of their manufacturing in China. The world’s biggest electronic components maker, Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles Apple’s iPhones, has many of its plants in China.
Presidential Office spokesperson Ma Weikuo (馬緯國) said in Taipei that Taiwanese heading home to vote were exercising their right as citizens.
“It is normal that Taiwanese businessmen living in Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Europe, Japan and other parts of the world want to return to Taiwan to vote,” she said.
PRIZED HONOR
The United Front’s annual work reports and handbooks provide a window into the agency’s methods. It has at least 100 offices in Zhejiang. The work report said 30,000 Taiwanese businesspeople and their families were living in the province and 6,800 Taiwanese enterprises had operations there at the end of 2012.
United Front officials reported creating a more friendly business environment by helping to smooth investment problems and resolve legal disputes for resident Taiwanese. In the Zhejiang city of Ningbo, one United Front office said it spent 110,000 yuan (about US$18,000) to buy life and traffic accident insurance for 137 Taiwanese executives.
Under a “three must visit” system in effect across the mainland, United Front officials are instructed to visit Taiwanese businesspeople and their families during traditional holidays, when a family member is ill and when someone is facing economic troubles.
“They help with our business as well as little problems in daily life such as car accidents, illness and schooling for kids,” said a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin, who works in the property sector in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province.
One enticement China has dangled in front of the Taiwanese business community residing in China, is provincial and municipal membership in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which serves as an adviser to the government. It is a prized honor for businesspeople whose livelihoods are directly dependent on China. The position affords access to government officials and a form of protection in a nation that lacks an independent judicial system.
“There will be a force that helps protect your business on the mainland,” Lin said. “They won’t make trouble if you are a CPPCC member.”
Holding CPPCC membership is a violation of Taiwanese law that bars citizens from taking positions in state or party bodies in China. However, it is legal to be an honorary, non-voting CPPCC member.
The Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland (ATIEM), which lists about 130 Taiwanese business associations across China as members, met with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in December 2012 to try changing that.
Their bid to persuade him to allow Taiwanese to become full-fledged CPPCC members ultimately failed. The Mainland Affairs Council announced that same month that Taiwanese could not sit on the CPPCC.
Earlier in 2012, the National Security Bureau had handed a list of 169 Taiwanese suspected of being CPPCC members to the Mainland Affairs Council. The council whittled the list down to 32. Ultimately, no one was punished after Taiwanese authorities determined those named were all either honorary CPPCC members or were not holders of a Republic of China passport.
FAR-REACHING DEALS
Taiwanese working in China have actively lobbied for increased trade ties with China. ATIEM lists some of Taiwan’s largest companies as members on its Web site. Several of the group’s founding members urged Taiwan’s government to sign far-reaching deals with China, arguing it would boost Taiwanese business in China. They held meetings with the Mainland Affairs Council to help lay the groundwork, a senior member of the organization said.
Their efforts were rewarded when Taiwan signed trade deals in 2008 that for the first time allowed direct flights, shipping and mail links with China.
ATIEM has not always been on the winning side. In March, students occupied the Legislative Yuan in Taipei in a bid to block passage of a deal that would have allowed for freer trade with China. The protests, known as the Sunflower movement, fed off fears the pact would give China greater sway over Taiwan. The protest ended when parliament agreed to suspend a review of the bill.
ATIEM did not respond to questions sent by e-mail.
Some Taiwanese officials warn against United Front encroachment. In late September, the head of the Overseas Community Affairs Council, which handles matters related to citizens living overseas, told a legislative committee that the United Front was stepping up work among Taiwanese business leaders and younger Taiwanese in China and abroad.
“They are drawing the Taiwanese who are more receptive to China over to their side, exerting pressure on Taiwan’s government and affecting its mainland policies,” former Mainland Affairs Council vice chairman Alexander Huang (黃介正) said.
He did not cite specific examples.
Mainland Affairs Council spokesperson Wu Mei-hung (吳美紅) said United Front activity should not be interpreted in an “overly negative way.”
“China has some political intentions,” she said. “But Taiwan has its own advantages in terms of systems, core values and soft power. All of these, we hope, will impact China via exchanges.”
The KMT dismisses charges from the DPP that it is benefiting from United Front activity.
KMT director of China affairs Kuei Hung-cheng (桂宏誠) acknowledged the close relationship between Taiwanese businesspeople in China and the Chinese authorities, but said that did not mean Beijing held sway over the party.
“The KMT will not be influenced or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. That is not possible,” he said.
A MAGIC TOOL
The United Front is a legacy of the earliest days of Leninist communist revolutionary theory. China’s version of the United Front, dubbed a “magic tool” on the agency’s own Web site, helped the CCP become established in China and ultimately prevail in a civil war that forced former president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) KMT to retreat to Taiwan in 1949. The United Front has as its primary goal the promotion of “motherland unification” and blocking of “secession.”
A 2007 handbook for United Front workers in Beijing instructs cadres to “unite neutral forces in order to divide and attack enemies.” It also directs them to “make friends extensively and deeply with representatives from all sectors” in Taiwan and abroad to “form a mighty troop of patriots.”
A senior Taiwanese defense official, who did not want to be named, referred to the United Front’s tactics as a “war.” The ultimate goal was “to overturn the Republic of China,” he said.
The front’s activities have not been confined to harnessing China-friendly forces. Greater Tainan, which is a bastion of the DPP, has been singled out. One group in the city that has gotten special treatment is doctors, who have been invited on trips to China, according to a 2011 work report from an organ associated with the United Front.
The visits had “successfully enhanced identification with the motherland among some pro-green Taiwanese,” the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League, a nominally independent political group that is permitted to operate by the CCP, wrote in its report. Green is the color associated with the DPP.
Some politicians in Taiwan unabashedly favor unification. Among them is China Unification Promotion Party founder Chang An-le (張安樂). Known as the “White Wolf,” Chang was once a leader in the Bamboo Union crime syndicate. He lived for a decade in China as a fugitive from the law in Taiwan, but ultimately was never tried. He also spent 10 years behind bars in the US on drug-smuggling charges.
Sitting in his office in Taipei dressed in a white jacket and black shirt, Chang says he and his party have regular contact with China’s Taiwan Affairs Office and he has “friends in the United Front.”
The Chinese government has provided all-expenses paid trips for members of his party to China, he said.
“Getting carrots from China is better than getting sticks,” he said.
UNSPOKEN CONSENT
The United Front and China’s Taiwan Affairs Office are also deeply involved in an activity that in China is strictly prohibited: democratic electoral politics.
Taiwanese executives based in Shenzhen and Shanghai said they have been encouraged by United Front officials to head home to vote in past elections.
This year, the stakes are high for Beijing. The DPP champions independence. The KMT government backs a “status quo” position of “no unification, no independence, no war.”
Election airlifts helped the KMT to victory in 2008 and 2012. Close to one quarter of a million Taiwanese living in China headed home to vote in the 2012 presidential election, according to a senior KMT member who estimates there are about 1 million Taiwanese working and living in China. As many as 80 percent voted for KMT chairman Ma, who won a second term promising closer ties with Beijing, the official said, citing an internal survey.
This year, the airlift might not be enough to turn the tide in the most important mayoral run-off in Taipei. Final opinion polls published by Taiwan’s leading media outlets showed that KMT mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) is trailing independent rival Ko Wen-je (柯文哲). A victory for Ko would mark the first time in 16 years that the KMT has not ruled the capital.
However, Beijing is not giving up. More than a dozen airlines, including China Airlines and Chinese state-owned Air China, have agreed to provide discounted flights to Taiwan at the end of November, according to a notice sent to members by ATIEM. The Beijing-based organization lists China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) as an honorary chairman on its Web site.
A senior official at China Airlines said that “with tickets selling at 50 percent off, airlines will incur losses.” However, the carrier would nevertheless “100 percent meet the demand from Taiwanese businessmen.”
China Airlines spokesman Jeffrey Kuo (郭興長) said the company was offering “promotional tickets for all flights” because November was “the low season.”
Air China did not respond to questions sent by fax and e-mail to its Beijing office.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said it was aware that Taiwanese businesspeople wanted to vote in the elections. ATIEM had negotiated with airlines to allow them to fly home, it said.
Chen He-tai (陳合泰), president of the Taiwan Merchant Association in Shenzhen, said the Taiwanese business community in China was “China’s best public relations tool.”
“There are seven to eight votes in my family,” he said. “And am I not the one who decides to whom those votes go?”
The United Front has also been working to penetrate other layers of Taiwanese society. As part of an operation called Collecting Stars, it has targeted military veterans in Taiwan, inviting them to China for visits. In May 2012, retired Taiwanese and Chinese generals who were once sworn enemies met for an invitational golf tournament in Zhejiang, United Front documents show.
Outreach to students takes the form of summer camps, corporate internships and discover-your-roots tours to China.
Tsai Ting-yu, a 15-year-old junior-high school student who joined a trip in 2013 and last year, said she attended classes with her Chinese hosts and visited popular tourist sites, including the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City.
“Before the trips, I kind of resisted the idea of China. But through the programs I got to know them better and that resistance gradually disappeared,” Tsai said.
She said she is now considering pursuing an undergraduate degree in China.
Additional reporting by Benjamin Kang Lim and John Ruwitch
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