China’s strategy of foreign interference, known as the “united front”, consists of a network of institutions and individuals directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao Zedong called united front work a ‘magic weapon’ and credited it as one of three key tactics which helped the CCP come to power (the others are armed struggle and Party discipline). United front work is a crucial part of the CCP’s covert work (隐蔽战线工作), both internally and externally. United front work is a task of all party members and party–state–military–market agencies, not simply one organisation.

This paper analyses the CCP’s united front work role in intelligence activities, situating CCP united front practices in historical context and comparing them with the Soviet Union’s political warfare and espionage model. The research highlights continuities and divergences in tactics, ideology, and institutionalisation. It evaluates contemporary Sino-Russian collaboration in foreign interference and disinformation, identifying methodological overlaps and strategic complementarities. The analysis triangulates Chinese-language primary sources, classified policy documents, and internal discussion materials with open-source writings by Chinese scholars and policymakers, supplemented by English-language secondary sources and cross-language interviews and writings on Soviet and Russian active measures.

CCP united front work remains a foundational, multi-actor approach embedded in both covert and overt statecraft with enduring implications for intelligence operations and international political competition. The paper argues that understanding these linkages is essential for assessing China’s influence strategies and their impact on intelligence studies and national security policy.

About the Speaker

Professor Anne-Marie Brady FRSNZ is a specialist on the Chinese Communist Party (domestic politics and foreign policy), polar politics, Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal (Taylor and Francis Publishers). She has published ten books and over fifty sole-authored scholarly papers. She has written more than 60 opeds on her research for newspapers such as the New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Times, The Diplomat. In addition to her duties at the University of Canterbury, Professor Brady holds a number of honorary roles. She was a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC from 2014 to 2025. In 2014 she was appointed to a two-year term on the World Economic Forum's Global Action Council on the Arctic. She is an advisor to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).

Professor Brady's books include Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), Looking North, Looking South: China, Taiwan and the South Pacific (World Scientific, 2010); China's Thought Management (Routledge, 2012), The Emerging Politics of Antarctica (Routledge, 2013), China as a Polar Great Power (Cambridge University Press and Wilson Press, 2017), and Small States and the Changing Global Order: New Zealand Faces the Future (Springer, 2019). Her 2017 conference paper 'Magic Weapons: China's foreign influence activities under Xi Jinping' helped to spark a global conversation on China's foreign interference and espionage activities, as well as legislative change. Professor Brady's groundbreaking, policy-relevant, research demonstrates the important role of the academic as "critic and conscience" in a modern democracy.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.

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