Cheng Ganyuan, a former operative for a Chinese undercover agency that specializes in infiltration and subterfuge, has seen plenty of ups and downs throughout his 80 years.
This August, he published a memoir describing his decade-long career at the United Front Work Department, which Mao Zedong once called a “holy grail” of the Chinese communist political program. It targets non-communists, including foreign people and institutions.
The United Front is an organization that has no equivalent in Western countries. But it has served its creators effectively by “utilizing weaknesses in human nature” for the nearly seven decades of its existence.
According to Cheng, missions undertaken by the United Front “target people, not information.”
Its operatives “collect intelligence about you and your circumstances, him and his circumstances, and devise ways to bring you over to their side,” Cheng said. His remarks were published by the Chinese Democratic Education Foundation, a San Francisco-based NGO that promotes democracy in China, and which held the event publicizing his book.
Cheng’s memoir, called “Unmasking the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department,” focuses on the United Front’s role as a communist weapon of “political subterfuge” furthering its “stratagems of deception.” He goes into depth to describe how the agency infiltrates foreign democratic parties and institutions, and how it co-opts religions as well as ethnic minorities to organize and direct them for the Party’s own ends.
