The Chinese ambassador to Canada and the mayor of Victoria, B.C., recently met to discuss how to deepen relationships between China and the B.C. capital through platforms such as “friendship cities.” The move came as a number of governments around the world are severing such subnational ties with the communist regime, which are also called twin, sister, or partnership cities.
Cong Peiwu met with Mayor Marianne Alto in Victoria on June 27, where the two “exchanged in-depth views on the development of friendly relations between China and Victoria,” according to a June 30 Chinese-language press release from the embassy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The two parties “expressed their willingness to make good use of platforms such as friendship cities to deepen exchanges and cooperation in a wide range of fields, promote mutual understanding and friendship, and better create benefits for the people of both sides,” the press release said.
The Epoch Times reached out to Ms. Alto’s office for comment but didn’t hear back.
Victoria currently has a twin-city relationship with Suzhou, a major economic centre in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province, established in July 1980 through Victoria’s Twin City program.
It also has three other twin cities: Napier, New Zealand; Morioka, Japan; and Khabarovsk, Russia. However, Victoria has suspended its sister-city relationship with Khabarovsk as of March 2022 until such time as Russia ceases hostilities in Ukraine.
The concept of sister cities dates back to 1956, when U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower proposed forming this type of person-to-person “citizen diplomacy“ partnership between individual U.S. communities and foreign cities in order to facilitate cultural, educational, and business cooperation on a subnational level.
In Canada, over 160 cities have sister-city relationships with foreign municipalities, with dozens twinned with a Chinese city or town. Besides Victoria, some of the other cities are Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Regina, Richmond, Saskatoon, Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg.
United Front
China has proactively sought twinning relationships with foreign countries since Tianjin, one of the country’s largest cities, paired with Kobe, Japan, in 1973. By 2019, roughly 2,600 Chinese municipalities had foreign sister cities or provinces, including about 200 in the United States and over 700 in Europe, according to open-source information.The sister-cities programs increasingly expanded from friendly exchanges to the economic, cultural, and educational arenas beginning in the late 1970s. In the era of “reform and opening-up“ that followed the decade-long Cultural Revolution launched by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1966, as the economic strength of Chinese cities grew, the work of the programs also saw great development.
At the same time, the programs work to open doors to ongoing influence by the CCP, which has historically mobilized overseas Chinese communities to advance its interests.
Leaked government documents have revealed some of the go-betweens who have helped the Chinese regime establish its sister-cities programs with other countries, reported The Epoch Times in November 2020. These include a Chinese-Australian trade association, a Chinese national who had completed studies in Spain, and a Chinese-American community leader.
The sister-cities programs in China are managed by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), a Beijing-led civil organization. In 1992, the CPAFFC launched the China International Friendly City Federation to further advance the program.
While the CPAFFC describes its mission as promoting friendship and mutual understanding between the Chinese people and foreign nations, a number of studies and media reports have indicated that it is an arm of the United Front Work Department (UFWD).
The UFWD is the CCP’s primary agency involved in foreign interference, according to a June 2020 study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
In October 2020, the U.S. State Department issued a press release stating that the CPAFFC has “sought to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote the PRC’s global agenda.”
In a 2022 report, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center issued a warning to government and business leaders, citing the CPAFFC as part of the UFWD.
Global Agenda
China, as a developing country receiving resources from sister cities in the developed world, benefits greatly from foreign investments, cultural exchanges, and direct assistance. Victoria, for example, has developed a water treatment project in sister city Suzhou with assistance from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), including exchanges and a funding channel.However, the Chinese regime has also been using the sister-cities programs to advance its global agenda, such as pushing for universal recognition of its territorial claim over Taiwan. Beijing has fiercely opposed any official recognition of or engagement with the self-ruled island by foreign countries.
For example, the CPAFFC’s Sister Cities Work Management Regulation stipulates that if a foreign city has a twinning agreement with a Taiwanese city, it must adhere to Beijing’s “One China” policy and “pledge that in its engagement with [China], it won’t raise the political issues of ‘Two Chinas’ or ’One China, One Taiwan.'” The regulation is posted on the official website of the government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
In 2006, when Irvine County, California, signed a sister-city agreement with the Xuhui District in Shanghai, Irvine authorities were required to agree not to send official city delegations to Taiwan, fly the Taiwanese flag, play the Taiwanese national anthem, or attend Taiwanese National Day celebrations, reported The Associated Press.
Beijing has also made use of the sister-cities programs to advance its geopolitical strategy, touting establishment of over 700 twin cities with countries that have signed up for its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Experts such as Scott Powell, senior fellow with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, have warned about the CCP’s strategic expansion of the BRI in the developing world and of the “elite capture” strategy involved.
Election Interference
In many democratic nations, local governments often have power over important issues that are independent of the national authorities, such as real estate development plans, agricultural land sales, infrastructure projects, and educational institutions. This makes local authorities important targets of the CCP’s foreign influence campaign through the sister-city relationship.Vancouver has a sister-city relationship with Guangzhou, capital of China’s southeastern Guangdong Province. In November 2021, when then-Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart proposed to partner with Kaohsiung, a city in southern Taiwan, under a Friendship City Program, the consul general of the Chinese Consulate in Vancouver publicly lashed out at the decision.
In addition, a consulate spokesperson said at a press conference that it is “an inherent requirement” for Canada to uphold the “One China” policy. China’s state media and Chinese-language media in Canada also posted harsh articles criticizing Stewart for breaching “international consensus” of the policy.
Mr. Stewart was defeated in Vancouver’s municipal election a year later, in October 2022. In an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail this June, titled “Canada has left itself vulnerable to election interference at the provincial and city level,” he wrote that Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) officers had warned him about foreign interference at the civic level five months before the election.
The Globe had reported in March this year that China’s Vancouver consulate actively interfered in the city’s 2022 municipal election and sought to elect pro-Beijing politicians to city council, citing a CSIS report viewed by the media outlet.
Cutting Ties
In recent years, more and more cities have terminated their sister-city partnerships with their Chinese counterparts amid growing public awareness of the CCP’s interference and influence activities.Prague, Czech Republic, in October 2019 ended its sister-city agreement with the Chinese capital Beijing over the Chinese regime’s requirement to follow the “One China” policy. The next January, Prague signed a sister-city agreement with Taipei, the Taiwanese capital.
Sweden, which in 2016 had 49 twin-city partnerships with China, terminated 21 and paused five others in the five years that followed, according to a May 2022 article by Swedish media outlet Dagens Nyheter. The development came following a decline in bilateral ties, after China detained Gui Minhai, a China-born Swedish publisher of books critical of China’s leaders. Mr. Gui vanished in Thailand in 2015 and later appeared in custody in mainland China.
In the October 2020 U.S. State Department statement, besides describing the CPAFFC as “a Beijing-based organization tasked with co-opting subnational governments,” then-U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo announced discontinuation of an agreement with Beijing to create a U.S.-China National Governors Forum on promoting subnational cooperation. Mr. Pompeo noted that the CPAFFC’s malign actions had undermined the forum’s original well-intentioned purpose.
In the Netherlands, at least eight municipalities and two provinces have broken ties with their Chinese counterparts over the past two years, and more Dutch cities are preparing to do so, according to a May 2023 report by NL Times. Some city authorities have cited the communist regime’s human rights abuses as one of the main reasons, the report said.
In April 2023, seven U.S. Republican senators co-sponsored the “Sister City Transparency Act,” which would order a federal government report to shed light on sister-city partnerships, including assessing the risk to U.S. communities and institutions, identifying oversight practices in place, and reviewing best practices to ensure transparency.
In July 2022, 19 Hongkonger groups around the world launched a joint campaign urging 163 cities in seven countries, including Canada, to sever sister-city relationships with the Beijing regime, citing the CCP’s record of human rights abuses and non-compliance with international treaties.
