Cultivating Friendly Forces: The Chinese Communist Party’s İnfluence Operations İn The Xinjiang Diaspora

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed well-documented and large-scale human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and other indigenous minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) that amount to crimes against humanity. Through its complex united front system, the CCP is actively monitoring members of the diaspora, including Uyghurs, creating databases of actionable intelligence, and mobilising community organisations in the diaspora to counter international criticism of its repressive policies in Xinjiang while promoting its own policies and interests abroad. These organisations are powerful resources in Beijing’s ongoing efforts to reshape the global narrative on Xinjiang, influence political elites abroad, and ultimately control the Chinese diaspora, but they’re also poorly understood. These organisations purport to represent and speak on behalf of ‘Xinjiang’ and its indigenous peoples. They subsume Uyghur and other minority cultures and identities under a nebulous yet hegemonic ‘Chineseness’, which is defined by and connected to the Han-dominated CCP. In reality, these organisations and their leaders play important roles in muting alternative and independent voices from the community while amplifying CCP messaging and spreading disinformation. They exploit the openness of democratic and multicultural countries while assisting the CCP and its proxies to surveil and even persecute members of the Xinjiang diaspora community or individuals who are critical of the CCP’s Xinjiang policies ..