Xi targets tech elites for Communist Party outreach push

Chinese President Xi Jinping

If Chinese technology tycoons such as Jack Ma and Lei Jun didn’t already realize their special significance to the Communist Party, Xi Jinping has made it official.
The Chinese president for the first time Wednesday designated “representatives of new media” as a key focus for the ruling party’s outreach, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. The move elevates elites in China’s booming Internet sector to a level of strategic importance on par with ethnic minority leaders or Taiwan’s political parties.
Technology leaders should “demonstrate positive energy in purifying cyberspace,” Xi said at the end of the party’s first national United Front conference in almost a decade, Xinhua reported. He called for regular contact with new media representatives to build support for the party’s agenda.
“The addition shows the party is treating the Internet and new media as strategically important,” said Qiao Mu, a media studies professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. “It also indicates a change of tactics. The so-called united front work takes a different, softer approach from the usual crackdowns.”
United front efforts date back to the early days of the Communist Party and aim to spread influence and build support outside its ranks. The agency came under new leadership in December, after its previous minister, Ling Jihua – a former top aide to ex-President Hu Jintao – was removed and detained on corruption allegations.
Technology has received increasing Communist Party attention as China’s Internet ballooned to almost 650 million users and Ma’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the e-commerce giant, and Lei’s Xiaomi Corp., China’s biggest mobile phone maker, grew to industry leaders. Xi has created the Cyberspace Administration of China to strengthen censorship of the country’s Internet, as Premier Li Keqiang pushes policies to encourage more young Chinese to found startups.
Chen Tong, a vice president for Xiaomi; Zhu Guang, a vice president for search engine Baidu Inc.; and Chen Danqing, a vice president for video site Youku Tudou Inc., were among the technology executives who attended a seminar on “new social classes” this week that was also organized by the United Front Work Department. It was the first time technology leaders, who made up one-third of attendees, were invited to such an event, the department said on its official WeChat account.
Qian Gang, director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, said expanding the united front to include technology elites formalizes an existing outreach campaign by leaders in Beijing. “The party has already been ’uniting’ big bosses anyway,” he said.
The conference came against the backdrop of mounting challenges to the party’s agenda, including pro-democracy protests last year in Hong Kong, ethnic unrest in the far western region of Xinjiang and pushback against closer ties in Taiwan.
In addition to new media representatives, Xi also selected Chinese graduates returning from overseas universities and non-party intellectuals as “new areas of effort” for the party, according to Xinhua.
In his speech, Xi vowed to “develop the widest patriotic united front” to support “the great Chinese renaissance.” Ting Shi, Bloomberg