United Front Work Department

United Front Work Department
中共中央统战部

Formation	1942
Type	Department directly reporting to the Central Committee
Headquarters	135 Fuyou Street, Xicheng District, Beijing
Location	Beijing
Head	Sun Chunlan**
Executive deputy head	Zhang Yijiong*
Deputy heads	Wang Zhengwei**, Quan Zhezhu, Chen Xiqing, Tassu, Lin Zhimin, Yin Wanxiang
Discipline Secretary	Su Bo
Parent organization	Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
Website	www.zytzb.cn
**Sub-national rank *Full minister-level rank

The United Front Work Department (UFWD) (Chinese: 中共中央统战部) is an agency under the command of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Its main function is to manage relations with the non-Communist Party elite, including individuals and organizations holding social, commercial, or academic influence, or who represent important interest groups, both inside and outside China. In so doing, the UFWD seeks to ensure that these groups are supportive of and useful to Communist Party rule.

The United Front Work Department was created during the Chinese civil war, and was reestablished in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping.

United front policies were most used in two periods before Liberation, namely from 1924 to 1927, and from 1936 to 1945, when the CCP cooperated with the Nationalist Party ostensibly to defeat the Japanese. The simplest formulation of UF work in the period was to "rally as many allies as possible in order to... defeat a common enemy."

In the early years the CCP also used United Front policies to cooperate with "disaffected warlords, religious believers, ethnic minorities, Overseas Chinese, and "minor parties and groups," that is front groups for the Communist Party to appear democratic. The Party's united front strategies were effective against the Nationalists, when combined with military force, "ideological work," and alliance building, which eventually isolated the enemy.

The Party communist agitators were able to persuade "minor parties and groups" in China that the Nationalists were "illegitimate and repressive while the CCP embodied progress, unity, and democracy."

After seizing power the communists continued to deploy united front strategies to train new communist intellectuals, "and, using thought reform based on criticism, began the transformation of the old society intellectuals." This involved violent elimination of what were termed "bourgeois and idealistic political beliefs," to install faith in "class struggle and revolutionary change." The CCP required the intellectuals to have "faith in class struggle and revolutionary change."

In the late 1970s the policy was used for the common cause of economic reform. From there the Party expanded the scope of its work internationally during the reform era, and again following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The department includes a bureau tasked with handling Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and overseas affairs, and articulates the importance of using overseas Chinese populations to promote reunification. It played an important role in building support for "One country, two systems" in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s, operating under the name of the "Coordination Department." The UFWD has been critically described as serving to co-opt non-Communist community leaders outside China, and "using them to neutralize Party critics," sometimes coercively.