My Personal Experience With the CCP’s “United Front” Work: They Said I Could Return to Any Department—Except the State Council
With the recent exposure of a recorded phone call in which the CCP tried to recruit someone for overseas propaganda work, the topic of the Chinese Communist Party's united front efforts has been making the rounds in Chinese-speaking circles over the past couple of days. I thought I'd share my own story—one I've never made public before.
Many years ago, around 2007, a few years after I had fled China and sought asylum in Australia, the CCP’s state security agents repeatedly approached my mother, pressuring her to get in touch with me. At first, they wanted me to return to China, promising that if I agreed, I could choose any position I wanted—anywhere except back in the State Council system, where I worked before.
When that didn't work, they had my mother suggest meeting me in a third country. I turned it down.
Later, they offered to buy a plane ticket for my mother so she could visit me in Australia. As soon as I heard about it, I immediately reported it to Australian security authorities. I was worried that if she came, she might be followed by CCP spies.
The Australian security officials took my report seriously. They sent someone to meet with me in person and even said that if Chinese agents wanted to meet me in Australia, it would be fine to pretend to go along with it.
I asked what they had in mind. They explained that they wanted to observe how Chinese operatives behave in Australia—who they meet with, how they operate—and they could watch from the shadows.
After thinking it over, I declined. I wasn't comfortable acting as an “agent”, no matter who it was for, and I was also concerned it could put my mother in danger.
In the end, my mother did come to Australia to see me, but she bought her own ticket. Whether anyone followed her or not, I don't know—I never asked.
The Chinese state security agents kept pressuring my mother to hand over my contact details. In the end, feeling she had no choice, she gave them my email address.
Soon after, a state security officer from my hometown, Mianyang, contacted me—probably at the division-chief level. He came across as very friendly, playing up our shared hometown connection and so on. He also seemed quite "refined" and well-read.
In my reply, I wrote: If you want to talk to me, you should probably first understand what's in my head. Over the years, the books I've read the most are Zhuan Falun and Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.
So, please read those two books first. If you have time afterward, you might also take a look at my memoir, Witnessing History: One Woman's Fight for Freedom and Falun Gong. Then we can have a conversation.
After that, he never wrote back. And from then on, the CCP stopped sending people to "united front" me or threaten me in any way.
Yes—not even threats. They'd already played their strongest card, arresting my family, and when that didn't work, they dropped all the other tactics.
Of course, there are always plenty of "wumao" commenters under my online posts, and there will probably be a lot under this one too. But what I mean is that in real life, they vanished.
12/22/2025
