WEALTH OF EXPERTISE: One professor said that China’s ‘united front’ tactics have been accelerated, and Taiwan knows how they work better than any other nation

Taipei Times
Date: Jul 26, 2018
By: Staff writer, with CNA

China experts on Tuesday drew attention to Beijing’s efforts to undermine liberal democracies and highlighted Taiwan’s role in finding strategies to mitigate them.

The “united front” tactics and interference engaged in by China are simply part of the routine day-to-day operations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said Peter Mattis, a research fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in the US.

“They are not special activities. They are not covert actions. They are not something done outside of the normal policy channels,” Mattis said at the Ketagalan Forum: 2018 Asia-Pacific Security Dialogue. “These are in fact things that are operated within the CCP’s policy guidances and normal activities of the party.”

What it has been doing to undermine democracy and intervene in foreign states “is simply the party’s way of interacting with the world,” Mattis said, citing former party chairman Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) description of “united front” work as mobilizing the CCP’s “friends to strike at [the party’s] enemies.”
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