The Central Institute of Socialism (CIS), the Chinese Communist Party’s training and education facility for its officials, recently saw its very first batch of graduate students receiving Master’s degrees with a major in united front studies. The program is a joint effort between CIS and Shandong University and was launched in 2015.

The united front is an alliance of groups against {communism’s} common enemies. They employ a tactic that socialism and communism have carried out in their revolutionary political and/or military campaigns. The Comintern, an international communist organization that former Soviet communists created in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution first developed the theory.

According to the thesis of the 1922 4th World Congress of the Comintern:

“The united front tactic is simply an initiative whereby the Communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.”

Chinese Communists extensively adopted this tactic during communism’s earlier years, before 1949, when carrying out propaganda and military campaigns against Nationalists. In later years, it also used the united front in its international politics, such as the recent attempts to ally with the European nations and to strike back at the tariffs that the U.S. imposed. According to the Jamestown Foundation, “The United Front Work Department (中共中央统一战线工作部) is the department of the CCP charged with consolidating support for Party policies among non-CCP members, including among individuals of Chinese descent overseas. It is has long been a key, albeit well concealed, element of the CCP’s foreign policy.”

The majority of studies on the united front at CIS include four fields of research: the theory and policy of the united front, China’s system of political parties, the theories of ethnic groups and religions in the united front, China’s traditional political thought, and the culture of the united front. In Shandong University, the program is housed in the School of Political Science and Public Administration, a subsidiary program under Political Science. Since its launch in 2015, the program has recruited 38 doctoral and 50 masters degree students.

Li Jinhe, a professor at CIS, said, “The united front is the study of the laws regarding the governance of the Chinese Communist Party. This is very important.”

Sources:

1. Central Institute of Socialism, July 4, 2018
http://www.zysy.org.cn/a1/a-XDI93M823C37528A39F066
2. Jamestown Foundation, June 19, 2018.
https://jamestown.org/program/understanding-the-role-of-chambers-of-commerce-and-industry-associations-in-united-front-work/

In the online alumni group of a Sino-foreign joint university program in Beijing, news has been spreading about the university stepping up its political education. A former student, who became a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member during college, responded with a “thumbs-up” and said that some foreign teachers once forced their political views upon him and if such a thing were happening today, he would report the foreign teacher to the school.

Voice of America (VOA) did not specify the name of the school or the program, but did mention that the institution cooperates with many U.S. and U.K universities, adopts Western textbooks, and that most of the teachers are foreign. The Communist Party has been quite active in this institution.

In addition to recruiting Party members, the school organizes student CCP members and cadres to participate in “red education.” One year, they traveled to Jiangxi, the center of Communist movement during the revolutionary period from 1927 to 1949. They put on the uniform of the Red Army, carried a rifle, and symbolically walked a segment of the Long March of the Red Army.

One former student, Lin Yuzhou (a pseudonym is used per the interviewee’s request), is also a CCP member. Lin told VOA that she did not think that the content of Western coursework is in conflict with the ideology of the Communist Party. Lin believes that joining the Party is a “very glorious matter and offers a strong sense of belonging.” Many of her fellow students also wanted to join the Party and people’s motivation may be different. “Families or teachers may influence them or they may want to have more choices for their future in China. Government agencies or large state-owned enterprises may give priority to CCP members,” she said.

Staff members of a number of Sino-foreign cooperatively-run schools and institutions told the media that the CCP’s Central Organization Department and the Ministry of Education have, in recent years, been emphasizing the establishment of Party organizations in these schools. They also retain seats for Communist officials on the school’s management board. There are currently more than 2,000 Sino-foreign cooperative education projects in China, most of which are affiliated with local Chinese universities.

The University of Nottingham Ningbo China, an overseas campus of the University of Nottingham, situated in the city of Ningbo in the coastal province of Zhejiang, is one of the few such universities which is an independent legal entity. On the first day that the campus was open, the school established its Communist Party Committee, with the Vice President as the deputy secretary of the Committee. On July 2, 2018, Stephen Morgan, who has served as Nottingham Ningbo’s associate provost since 2016, was removed from its management board for criticizing the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and for being a critic of broader party-backed initiatives in the university, but he has remained on the faculty.

A few days ago, in the Sino-foreign cooperative project where Lin Yuzhou has studied, there was a student CCP branch secretaries and overseas contacts training session. The Party secretary of the college asked these contacts to pay close attention to the ideological dynamics of overseas Party members and maintain timely communications with the college.

Source: Voice of America, July 2, 2018
https://www.voachinese.com/a/china-joint-universities-20180702/4463991.html

According to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Organization Department, at the end of 2017, CCP membership reached 89.5 million, 117,000 more than the year before. The number of the Party’s grassroots organizations increased to 4.6 million, 53,000 higher than the year 2016.

It is said that the CCP has been exerting quantity control so that the annual growth rate of the membership fell by 1.5 percent. In 2017, about 2 million people became new CCP members. Among them, about 1 million or 50.8 percent are working “at the front line of production and work,” 860,000 or 43.4 percent hold a college degree or above, and 1.6 million or 81.4 percent are under 35 years old.

Among the existing 89.5 million CCP members, 43.3 million or 48.3 percent hold a college degree or above, 23.9 million or 26.7 percent are female, and 6.5 million or 7.3 percent are from ethnic minorities.

The grassroots CCP organizations continue to expand across every corner of the country. 99.7 percent of government organizations have CCP organizations installed in them and the proportion among non-governmental institutions is 95.2 percent. About 92.8 percent of the state-owned enterprises and 73.1 percent of the non-public enterprises are covered by CCP branches.

Source: Xinhua News Agency, June 30, 2018
http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2018-06/30/c_1123059502.htm