The name Shein is probably unknown to a large part of the population, while the brand is a big hit among younger people: as a particularly low-priced fashion provider, the company is asserting itself worldwide in a market that H&M, Primark, Zara and Uniqlo had actually long since divided up among themselves. The secret lies in the digital sales model. The Chinese company simply masters the use of AI better than its competitors, as Frank Sieren reports. The working conditions under which T-shirts are made for €1.99? No one knows. Shein is known for its lack of transparency.
The Communist Party’s United Front also prefers to operate in secret. Its task is to promote Chinese positions abroad and to sow doubt about the statements of critics. Marcel Grzanna describes the work of the secretive organization in our series on the centennial of the CP. He warns that it is gaining influence in Germany and Europe.
The US is visibly backing Taiwan. Secretary of State Blinken has now announced talks on free trade with the island ahead of the G7 summit later this week, stressing that it must be able to defend itself. This debunks the fiction that the two countries have no diplomatic relations. Beijing reacted accordingly with an outcry – just as expected from the China-critical Biden administration.
After decades of rearmament, China’s military arsenal has reached a technically highly sophisticated level with considerable destructive power. However, instead of intercontinental ballistic missiles, stealth bombers, or aircraft carriers, President Xi Jinping declared the United Labor Front, as Xi put it a few years ago, as the “magic weapon” of the People’s Republic.
This department, also called the United Front and attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, is a weapon of a different kind. Rather than destroy or kill, it does the contrary: shaping. Namely, it shapes the perception of the political system of the People’s Republic and public opinion about the Party’s policies at home and abroad. The United Front is almost as old as the party itself and is used intensively wherever doubts arise about the legitimacy of the CP, where criticism of its policies is voiced, and where resistance to its authoritarian rule is threatened. It operates through a ramification of organizations directly or indirectly affiliated with the party-state, as well as through international contacts in influential levels of politics, business, and society.
Its structure unites 13 sub-departments dedicated to different focuses and target groups – including religion, ethnic groups, foreign policy, intellectuals, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Since 2017, You Quan has been the director in charge of the United Front. He is a member of the CP Central Committee and has been on the US State Department’s sanctions list since January this year for his role in implementing the National Security Act for Hong Kong.
Scholars, in particular, are often confronted with the workings of the secretive organization. “The United Front is a kind of management tool of the Chinese Communist Party to ensure that, on the one hand, non-members are brought into line with the party and, on the other, negative voices are marginalized,” says Ralph Weber, a Professor at the European Institute of the University of Basel. He himself had this experience immediately after the publication of a study at the end of last year.
In it, Weber analyzed the growing sphere of influence of the United Front and its methods in his native Switzerland: According to the paper, Chinese actors are integrating themselves into the Swiss system like a “root network” and creating dependency with economic contracts and favors. In response, the Chinese embassy in Switzerland described this as underhanded. State media in China reported on Weber and accused him of damaging relations between the two countries with the study.
The importance of the United Front as a tool of the CP has increased significantly in recent years: more money, more staff. In 2018, the Foreign Bureau for Chinese Affairs, another organ of the party-state, was placed under its control. With it came the control of the China News Service – a news agency whose size is exceeded only by the main press organ Xinhua.
Party leader Xi stressed the growing need for the United Front in response to the reshaping of the global security architecture. “Presently, our situation and our mission have undergone significant change. The larger the change, the more the United Front must be developed under the new situation, the more united front work must be carried out,” Xi said. For example, the organization should target “the responsible representatives of social media” to enable those to “allow them to struggle to purify cyberspace.” This refers to the unconditional control of content and access to the Internet.
As the People’s Republic’s geostrategic orientation grows, the United Front has long been drawn to all corners of the globe. “Abroad, the United Front wants to inspire the Chinese diaspora with enthusiasm for the motherland and present the authoritarian People’s Republic to the rest of the world as a normal and trustworthy partner,” says Weber. It is concerned, for example, with blurring the boundaries between democratic and authoritarian systems to such an extent that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find starting points for criticism of the dictatorship that does not reflect on one’s own political system. In principle, this applies to Germany just as much as to Switzerland, albeit to different degrees.
Here and there, the United Front is subtle. It does not throw around propaganda slogans or provoke confrontations with critics. Its strategy is to build close relationships with foreign figures with opinion power. It does not necessarily make its own appearance but enlists the help of Chinese organizations and associations operating in the host country. For Chinese students or business people, on the other hand, it sets up a regulatory framework and ensures the appropriate supervision through a close network of informants. If it deems it necessary, it calls in other institutions of the power apparatus.
Human rights lawyers warn against this invisible arm of the apparatus. “If necessary, the United Front cooperates with agents of Chinese state security, who can increase the pressure on critics. This works, for example, by reminding Chinese expatriates that they still have relatives in China,” Teng Biao, a Chinese lawyer living in exile in the United States, told China.Table. According to Teng, the United Front is very effective in its efforts. It succeeds in neutralizing dissent against the system among Chinese expatriates to a large extent and in winning over important foreign personalities for image cultivation.
This often happens without the people concerned even knowing that they are providing valuable services to the United Front. “A popular tactic is to butter up foreigners and call them true friends of China until you can use them as advocates for your own purposes,” says Teng. Many foreigners don’t realize that they are a tool of Chinese propaganda. “They are made to believe that they are among the few who really understand China’s supposedly true concerns.”
Targets are psychologically influenced by getting them involved in Chinese affairs, making them feel that they, in particular, are creating a win-win solution through their involvement. Even high-ranking diplomats are persuaded “that their unique understanding of China is evidenced by their ability to keep things calm and untroubled. They do this because it works – for China,” former Canadian Ambassador to China David Mulroney said of his successor John McCallum’s case. McCallum had undermined the Canadian government’s position when he publicly called the then arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Canada “politically motivated.” Meng had been arrested on behalf of the US on espionage charges and has been under house arrest ever since.
The United Front also uses close, personal business relationships of foreigners to China in its favor. In practice, this looks like the case of the Chinese-Swedish publisher’s daughter Angela Gui. Her father is in prison in China, even though he is a Swedish citizen – because he published books critical of the party in Hong Kong. After a few interviews with Swedish media about her father’s disappearance, Angela Gui was warned by a Sri Lankan businessman who lives in Scandinavia and has close business ties to China not to talk to any more media. She would never see her father again, was the supposedly well-intentioned “advice.” Gui, however, took it as a threat.
Also present at that conversation in a Stockholm hotel were the Sri Lankan man’s Chinese business partner and the former Swedish ambassador to Beijing, Anna Lindstedt. Lindstedt had arranged the meeting and advised Angela Gui to agree. For this, the diplomat had to stand trial in a Swedish court last year – but was acquitted of exceeding her jurisdiction as ambassador. It was accepted that she had acted with the best of intentions to help a Swedish citizen out of Chinese custody. The fact that she was also representing the interests of the People’s Republic did not play a role in the trial.
Government agencies are also taking notice now. “It is precisely the nature of United Front work to seek influence through connections that are difficult to publically prove“ judges a 2018 report by the US-China Commission. “Making those who seek to identify the negative effects of such influence vulnerable to accusations of prejudice.”
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) speaks of a “divisive effect of the Labor Front” and recommends that governments look more closely at the means of interference by Chinese actors. They should better understand the strategy behind it and deal with it accordingly. “Countermeasures should involve law enforcement, legislative reform, deterrence, and capacity building across relevant areas of government,” ASPI suggests.
For years, the governments have undoubtedly been far too naive in neglecting the analysis of the Chinese apparatus with all its ramifications. But dealing with the United Front is by no means their business alone. The United Front touches too much on the relations of ordinary people with one another. This development was kicked off by the Communist Party itself. Xi Jinping, for example, declared Chinese foreign students to be a valuable resource for united front work. That all Chinese students thus represent the interests of the party is simply wrong, according to researcher Ralph Weber. “The tragedy is that the influence of the United Front puts quite a lot of Chinese abroad under general suspicion. That is perfidious and wrong.” For the United Front, however, this is a thoroughly desirable outcome. Because where people trust each other less, there is great scope for manipulation.
It was just under 32 years ago. Matthias Claussen was standing on a rooftop terrace with the vice mayor of Shanghai, and the men were looking across the Huangpu River toward Pudong. “What we saw,” Claussen recalls, was like a “swamp of croaking frogs.” And the German business people smiled mildly when the Shanghai official predicted that Pudong would be home to one of the world’s most modern residential and business centers. “I lacked the imagination for it at the time,” Claussen says today – and does not conceal his high regard for the building achievements of the Chinese over the past three decades. “They have managed to turn a bitterly poor country into a world power.”
The Melchers trading house, where Matthias Claussen was managing partner until his retirement, has experienced this process like hardly any other German company. Initially based in Hong Kong, Melchers opened its first office in Beijing in 1980, a year after China was opened up by Deng Xiaoping. Only Mannesmann got there before Melchers. And business was humming from day one. “The Chinese were busting our chops, wanting machines, equipment, spare parts,” Claussen once admitted publicly. With around 1,300 employees in Asia, Melchers now makes about half of its sales in China, around €300 million. The business consists of imports, exports, own brands, and the accompaniment of mainly medium-sized companies of all kinds to the People’s Republic and the entire Asian region.
The recipe for the success of the company, which was founded in 1806 and is still owner-managed today: permanent adaptation to changing market conditions and intensive cultivation of networks. While Melchers initially traded major brands such as Sony in China and managed direct exports from the country, today, more and more services around the globe complete the business.
How do you do business with communists? Experienced trader Matthias Claussen, now 68, takes a predictably pragmatic view. He has come to know the Chinese as reliable business people, that’s what counts for him. And someone like him stays out of politics. However, he is not indifferent to it. For a long time, Claussen, a market economist, thought it was unthinkable that a socialist regime could set out in the 1980s to industrialize such a vast country – and quite obviously succeed in doing so. For him, the market and democracy were mutually dependent.
Today Matthias Claussen is skeptical about the increasing centralization of power in Xi Jinping’s “one-man dictatorship.” He also criticizes the regime’s treatment of the Uyghur minority. Meanwhile, Claussen does not think much of a withdrawal of Western companies for political and moral reasons or of sanctions against Beijing. Would a policy that leads to ever further alienation benefit the people on the ground, Claussen asks, and answered for himself: “It benefits no one.”
The Bremen businessman is thus relaxed about the current tensions in Europe’s relationship with China. His company has been in China since 1866, survived two world wars and the isolation under Mao Zedong. “We have experienced all the ups and downs,” Claussen says. Antje Sirleschtov
The herd of wild Asian elephants, which is currently on the move in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, has taken a break just outside the metropolis of Kunming and allowed itself a nap in the grass. According to authorities, of the 15 elephants, one male is currently away from the herd. The animals have destroyed numerous fields on their more than 500-kilometer route and have repeatedly terrified people. It is unclear when and why exactly the animals left their habitat in the Mengyangzi Nature Reserve in Xishuangbanna. Asian elephants are under state protection in China. Hundreds of security forces are trying to divert the herd.
The name Shein is probably unknown to a large part of the population, while the brand is a big hit among younger people: as a particularly low-priced fashion provider, the company is asserting itself worldwide in a market that H&M, Primark, Zara and Uniqlo had actually long since divided up among themselves. The secret lies in the digital sales model. The Chinese company simply masters the use of AI better than its competitors, as Frank Sieren reports. The working conditions under which T-shirts are made for €1.99? No one knows. Shein is known for its lack of transparency.
The Communist Party’s United Front also prefers to operate in secret. Its task is to promote Chinese positions abroad and to sow doubt about the statements of critics. Marcel Grzanna describes the work of the secretive organization in our series on the centennial of the CP. He warns that it is gaining influence in Germany and Europe.
The US is visibly backing Taiwan. Secretary of State Blinken has now announced talks on free trade with the island ahead of the G7 summit later this week, stressing that it must be able to defend itself. This debunks the fiction that the two countries have no diplomatic relations. Beijing reacted accordingly with an outcry – just as expected from the China-critical Biden administration.
After decades of rearmament, China’s military arsenal has reached a technically highly sophisticated level with considerable destructive power. However, instead of intercontinental ballistic missiles, stealth bombers, or aircraft carriers, President Xi Jinping declared the United Labor Front, as Xi put it a few years ago, as the “magic weapon” of the People’s Republic.
This department, also called the United Front and attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, is a weapon of a different kind. Rather than destroy or kill, it does the contrary: shaping. Namely, it shapes the perception of the political system of the People’s Republic and public opinion about the Party’s policies at home and abroad. The United Front is almost as old as the party itself and is used intensively wherever doubts arise about the legitimacy of the CP, where criticism of its policies is voiced, and where resistance to its authoritarian rule is threatened. It operates through a ramification of organizations directly or indirectly affiliated with the party-state, as well as through international contacts in influential levels of politics, business, and society.
Its structure unites 13 sub-departments dedicated to different focuses and target groups – including religion, ethnic groups, foreign policy, intellectuals, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Since 2017, You Quan has been the director in charge of the United Front. He is a member of the CP Central Committee and has been on the US State Department’s sanctions list since January this year for his role in implementing the National Security Act for Hong Kong.
Scholars, in particular, are often confronted with the workings of the secretive organization. “The United Front is a kind of management tool of the Chinese Communist Party to ensure that, on the one hand, non-members are brought into line with the party and, on the other, negative voices are marginalized,” says Ralph Weber, a Professor at the European Institute of the University of Basel. He himself had this experience immediately after the publication of a study at the end of last year.
In it, Weber analyzed the growing sphere of influence of the United Front and its methods in his native Switzerland: According to the paper, Chinese actors are integrating themselves into the Swiss system like a “root network” and creating dependency with economic contracts and favors. In response, the Chinese embassy in Switzerland described this as underhanded. State media in China reported on Weber and accused him of damaging relations between the two countries with the study.
The importance of the United Front as a tool of the CP has increased significantly in recent years: more money, more staff. In 2018, the Foreign Bureau for Chinese Affairs, another organ of the party-state, was placed under its control. With it came the control of the China News Service – a news agency whose size is exceeded only by the main press organ Xinhua.
Party leader Xi stressed the growing need for the United Front in response to the reshaping of the global security architecture. “Presently, our situation and our mission have undergone significant change. The larger the change, the more the United Front must be developed under the new situation, the more united front work must be carried out,” Xi said. For example, the organization should target “the responsible representatives of social media” to enable those to “allow them to struggle to purify cyberspace.” This refers to the unconditional control of content and access to the Internet.
As the People’s Republic’s geostrategic orientation grows, the United Front has long been drawn to all corners of the globe. “Abroad, the United Front wants to inspire the Chinese diaspora with enthusiasm for the motherland and present the authoritarian People’s Republic to the rest of the world as a normal and trustworthy partner,” says Weber. It is concerned, for example, with blurring the boundaries between democratic and authoritarian systems to such an extent that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find starting points for criticism of the dictatorship that does not reflect on one’s own political system. In principle, this applies to Germany just as much as to Switzerland, albeit to different degrees.
Here and there, the United Front is subtle. It does not throw around propaganda slogans or provoke confrontations with critics. Its strategy is to build close relationships with foreign figures with opinion power. It does not necessarily make its own appearance but enlists the help of Chinese organizations and associations operating in the host country. For Chinese students or business people, on the other hand, it sets up a regulatory framework and ensures the appropriate supervision through a close network of informants. If it deems it necessary, it calls in other institutions of the power apparatus.
Human rights lawyers warn against this invisible arm of the apparatus. “If necessary, the United Front cooperates with agents of Chinese state security, who can increase the pressure on critics. This works, for example, by reminding Chinese expatriates that they still have relatives in China,” Teng Biao, a Chinese lawyer living in exile in the United States, told China.Table. According to Teng, the United Front is very effective in its efforts. It succeeds in neutralizing dissent against the system among Chinese expatriates to a large extent and in winning over important foreign personalities for image cultivation.
This often happens without the people concerned even knowing that they are providing valuable services to the United Front. “A popular tactic is to butter up foreigners and call them true friends of China until you can use them as advocates for your own purposes,” says Teng. Many foreigners don’t realize that they are a tool of Chinese propaganda. “They are made to believe that they are among the few who really understand China’s supposedly true concerns.”
Targets are psychologically influenced by getting them involved in Chinese affairs, making them feel that they, in particular, are creating a win-win solution through their involvement. Even high-ranking diplomats are persuaded “that their unique understanding of China is evidenced by their ability to keep things calm and untroubled. They do this because it works – for China,” former Canadian Ambassador to China David Mulroney said of his successor John McCallum’s case. McCallum had undermined the Canadian government’s position when he publicly called the then arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Canada “politically motivated.” Meng had been arrested on behalf of the US on espionage charges and has been under house arrest ever since.
The United Front also uses close, personal business relationships of foreigners to China in its favor. In practice, this looks like the case of the Chinese-Swedish publisher’s daughter Angela Gui. Her father is in prison in China, even though he is a Swedish citizen – because he published books critical of the party in Hong Kong. After a few interviews with Swedish media about her father’s disappearance, Angela Gui was warned by a Sri Lankan businessman who lives in Scandinavia and has close business ties to China not to talk to any more media. She would never see her father again, was the supposedly well-intentioned “advice.” Gui, however, took it as a threat.
Also present at that conversation in a Stockholm hotel were the Sri Lankan man’s Chinese business partner and the former Swedish ambassador to Beijing, Anna Lindstedt. Lindstedt had arranged the meeting and advised Angela Gui to agree. For this, the diplomat had to stand trial in a Swedish court last year – but was acquitted of exceeding her jurisdiction as ambassador. It was accepted that she had acted with the best of intentions to help a Swedish citizen out of Chinese custody. The fact that she was also representing the interests of the People’s Republic did not play a role in the trial.
Government agencies are also taking notice now. “It is precisely the nature of United Front work to seek influence through connections that are difficult to publically prove“ judges a 2018 report by the US-China Commission. “Making those who seek to identify the negative effects of such influence vulnerable to accusations of prejudice.”
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) speaks of a “divisive effect of the Labor Front” and recommends that governments look more closely at the means of interference by Chinese actors. They should better understand the strategy behind it and deal with it accordingly. “Countermeasures should involve law enforcement, legislative reform, deterrence, and capacity building across relevant areas of government,” ASPI suggests.
For years, the governments have undoubtedly been far too naive in neglecting the analysis of the Chinese apparatus with all its ramifications. But dealing with the United Front is by no means their business alone. The United Front touches too much on the relations of ordinary people with one another. This development was kicked off by the Communist Party itself. Xi Jinping, for example, declared Chinese foreign students to be a valuable resource for united front work. That all Chinese students thus represent the interests of the party is simply wrong, according to researcher Ralph Weber. “The tragedy is that the influence of the United Front puts quite a lot of Chinese abroad under general suspicion. That is perfidious and wrong.” For the United Front, however, this is a thoroughly desirable outcome. Because where people trust each other less, there is great scope for manipulation.
It was just under 32 years ago. Matthias Claussen was standing on a rooftop terrace with the vice mayor of Shanghai, and the men were looking across the Huangpu River toward Pudong. “What we saw,” Claussen recalls, was like a “swamp of croaking frogs.” And the German business people smiled mildly when the Shanghai official predicted that Pudong would be home to one of the world’s most modern residential and business centers. “I lacked the imagination for it at the time,” Claussen says today – and does not conceal his high regard for the building achievements of the Chinese over the past three decades. “They have managed to turn a bitterly poor country into a world power.”
The Melchers trading house, where Matthias Claussen was managing partner until his retirement, has experienced this process like hardly any other German company. Initially based in Hong Kong, Melchers opened its first office in Beijing in 1980, a year after China was opened up by Deng Xiaoping. Only Mannesmann got there before Melchers. And business was humming from day one. “The Chinese were busting our chops, wanting machines, equipment, spare parts,” Claussen once admitted publicly. With around 1,300 employees in Asia, Melchers now makes about half of its sales in China, around €300 million. The business consists of imports, exports, own brands, and the accompaniment of mainly medium-sized companies of all kinds to the People’s Republic and the entire Asian region.
The recipe for the success of the company, which was founded in 1806 and is still owner-managed today: permanent adaptation to changing market conditions and intensive cultivation of networks. While Melchers initially traded major brands such as Sony in China and managed direct exports from the country, today, more and more services around the globe complete the business.
How do you do business with communists? Experienced trader Matthias Claussen, now 68, takes a predictably pragmatic view. He has come to know the Chinese as reliable business people, that’s what counts for him. And someone like him stays out of politics. However, he is not indifferent to it. For a long time, Claussen, a market economist, thought it was unthinkable that a socialist regime could set out in the 1980s to industrialize such a vast country – and quite obviously succeed in doing so. For him, the market and democracy were mutually dependent.
Today Matthias Claussen is skeptical about the increasing centralization of power in Xi Jinping’s “one-man dictatorship.” He also criticizes the regime’s treatment of the Uyghur minority. Meanwhile, Claussen does not think much of a withdrawal of Western companies for political and moral reasons or of sanctions against Beijing. Would a policy that leads to ever further alienation benefit the people on the ground, Claussen asks, and answered for himself: “It benefits no one.”
The Bremen businessman is thus relaxed about the current tensions in Europe’s relationship with China. His company has been in China since 1866, survived two world wars and the isolation under Mao Zedong. “We have experienced all the ups and downs,” Claussen says. Antje Sirleschtov
The herd of wild Asian elephants, which is currently on the move in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, has taken a break just outside the metropolis of Kunming and allowed itself a nap in the grass. According to authorities, of the 15 elephants, one male is currently away from the herd. The animals have destroyed numerous fields on their more than 500-kilometer route and have repeatedly terrified people. It is unclear when and why exactly the animals left their habitat in the Mengyangzi Nature Reserve in Xishuangbanna. Asian elephants are under state protection in China. Hundreds of security forces are trying to divert the herd.
