About All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese

All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese

The All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, abbreviated ACFROC and known in Chinese as Zhonghua Quanguo Guiqiao Qiaojuan Lianhehui, is the national people's organisation linking the Chinese state with returned overseas Chinese, their relatives living in China, and overseas Chinese communities abroad. It was formally established in Beijing on 12 October 1956 and is headquartered at 3 Fuxing Road in the Haidian District of Beijing. Its official website is chinaql.org. The federation holds a National Congress of Returned Overseas Chinese and Their Relatives roughly every five years — the eleventh congress opened at the Great Hall of the People on 31 August 2023 — and it holds twenty-seven seats on the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, China's top political advisory body.

The federation exists to serve a constituency created by emigration and return. For more than a century, Chinese communities overseas — the qiao — have invested in, donated to and maintained family ties with their home counties, principally in Guangdong and Fujian. Returned overseas Chinese, the guiqiao, and the relatives they left behind or rejoined, the qiaojuan, form a recognised constituency in Chinese policy. The ACFROC is their national organisation: it protects their rights and interests, channels overseas Chinese resources toward China's development, and maintains the personal and institutional networks on which China's overseas Chinese work depends.

Antecedents: Yan'an and the liberated areas

The federation's antecedents run through the Communist movement's wartime engagement with overseas Chinese. In 1937 an Office for Overseas Chinese was established in Yan'an, the Communists' wartime capital, and in 1940 the Yan'an Overseas Chinese Congress gathered returned overseas Chinese in support of the resistance against Japan. Overseas Chinese communities, especially in Southeast Asia, were then a vital source of funds, supplies and publicity for China's war effort, and returned overseas Chinese who reached Yan'an were organised as a distinct constituency of the revolution.

After the Second World War, returned overseas Chinese in the Communist-held liberated areas formed their own federation in 1948, the China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese from Liberated Areas. These Yan'an and liberated-area bodies are the institutional ancestors the ACFROC claims: when the national federation was founded in Beijing in 1956, it presented itself as the unification, on a nationwide scale, of organisations that returned overseas Chinese had built for themselves over the previous two decades.

Founding in 1956 under Tan Kah Kee

The All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese was formally established in Beijing on 12 October 1956, when the first National Congress of Returned Overseas Chinese met in the capital. Its first chairman was Tan Kah Kee, known in Mandarin as Chen Jiageng (1874–1961), the Singapore-based rubber and pineapple industrialist who was the most revered overseas Chinese leader of his generation. Tan had led Southeast Asian Chinese fundraising for China's resistance, had visited Yan'an in 1940 and publicly contrasted its discipline with corruption in Chongqing, and had returned to China in 1950 to spend his final years in his home county in Fujian, founding schools and Xiamen University's expansion there.

Tan's chairmanship, from 1956 until his death in Beijing in August 1961, gave the young federation unmatched prestige among overseas communities. Mao Zedong had praised him as the flag of the overseas Chinese and the glory of the nation, and the federation has cultivated his memory ever since: in 2024, marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the ACFROC jointly produced a four-episode documentary, Tan Kah Kee, tracing his school-building, his leadership of the overseas Chinese and the "Tan Kah Kee Spirit" of patriotic devotion to education, whose filming ranged across Fujian, Guangdong, Yunnan, Shaanxi and Beijing. Congress records confirm the lineage the documentary celebrates: the first congress in October 1956, the ninth in December 2013, the tenth concluding on 1 September 2018 and the eleventh in 2023.

Leadership across the decades

After Tan Kah Kee, the federation's chairmen have included Zhuang Xiquan, Zhang Guoji, Zhuang Yanlin, Yang Taifang, Lin Zhaoshu and Lin Jun, a succession that, like Tan's own biography, is heavily drawn from the returned overseas Chinese communities of Fujian and Guangdong and from the ranks of senior overseas-Chinese affairs officials. The chairman through the tenth and into the eleventh congress period was Wan Lijun, who delivered the tenth committee's work report to the eleventh congress in 2023, titled "Unifying Returned Overseas Chinese, Their Relatives, and Overseas Chinese Abroad to Strive for Building a Modern Socialist Country in All Respects." Reference records for the federation note Wang Linggui as its party secretary from 2025, reflecting the paired leadership of chairman and party secretary normal in Chinese people's organisations.

The federation's national congresses are major political occasions. The eleventh congress, held at the Great Hall of the People from 31 August 2023, brought together close to 1,200 returned overseas Chinese residents and their relatives and about 600 overseas Chinese guests from over 100 countries. President Xi Jinping and the other top leaders of the Communist Party and state attended the opening to extend congratulations, Li Xi addressed the gathering on behalf of the CPC Central Committee, and Wang Huning attended the closing, at which the chairman, vice-chairpersons, secretary-general and standing committee of the eleventh committee were announced. The congress called on returned overseas Chinese, their relatives and Chinese people living overseas to contribute to building a modern socialist country and advancing national rejuvenation.

Structure and political representation

The ACFROC heads a nationwide system of federations of returned overseas Chinese at provincial, municipal and county levels, strongest in the traditional qiaoxiang, the home districts of overseas Chinese in Guangdong, Fujian, Hainan and other coastal provinces. Its national congress, held every five years, elects the national committee that leads the federation between congresses. Local federations handle the everyday constituency work: visiting returned overseas Chinese households, assisting relatives, receiving overseas visitors in their ancestral districts and organising the community institutions of the qiaoxiang.

Politically, the federation is one of the constituent organisations of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and it holds twenty-seven seats on the CPPCC National Committee, giving returned overseas Chinese and their relatives a formal channel into China's advisory politics. Its status as a people's organisation led by the Communist Party places it within the united-front system; United States government assessments cited in American reporting identify the federation as an agency of the United Front Work Department, a characterisation that reflects its role in maintaining ties with overseas communities. Within China, its recognised functions are constituency service, rights protection and the mobilisation of overseas Chinese resources for national development.

Institutions: museum, research institute and publishing

The federation maintains a distinctive set of affiliated institutions. The Overseas Chinese History Museum of China in Beijing, which Tan Kah Kee first proposed in 1956, the year of the federation's founding, collects and exhibits the history of Chinese emigration; Tan's museum endeavours in his home district — the civic Overseas Chinese Museum in Xiamen and the open-air "diaspora museum" of his Turtle Garden — laid the foundation of a heritage-building tradition that scholarship traces directly to returned overseas Chinese initiative. The federation's other affiliated bodies include the China Overseas Chinese Research Institute, which studies overseas Chinese history and contemporary communities; the Chinese Overseas Publishing House; and the magazine Hai Nei Yu Hai Wai, "Inside and Outside the Seas," which addresses readers at home and abroad.

Through these institutions the ACFROC acts as custodian of the overseas Chinese story in China. The museum and research institute document the emigration history of the qiaoxiang, the contributions of overseas Chinese to China's wars, revolutions and development, and the biographies of figures such as Tan Kah Kee himself, while the publishing house and magazine carry that narrative to the constituency the federation serves.

The 2018 institutional reform

The federation's responsibilities expanded significantly in the institutional reform of 2018. In that reform, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council was merged into the United Front Work Department, and the ACFROC took over overseas-Chinese liaison responsibilities previously exercised by the Office. The change elevated the federation from a constituency organisation focused principally on returned overseas Chinese and their relatives inside China to a body with a formal role in liaison with overseas Chinese communities worldwide — the constituency the eleventh congress report addressed alongside guiqiao and qiaojuan.

In practice the expanded role shows in the federation's programme language. Reporting on the 2023 congress recorded the federation's plans to develop closer ties with overseas Chinese businesspeople, startup leaders, talented professionals and college students, to establish cooperation platforms for the joint building of the Belt and Road, and to expand channels for attracting investment and talent to China. Overseas committee members of the federation, drawn from overseas communities, participate in its conferences alongside its domestic committees, as they did at the tenth congress in the Great Hall of the People in August and September 2018.

Work with overseas communities

The federation's external work is conducted through visits, receptions and its network of overseas committee members and friendly associations. Its website and Chinese-language reporting document a steady traffic of meetings between federation leaders and regional federations and visiting overseas delegations, including community leaders from the historic Chinatowns of North America and the long-established communities of Southeast Asia. Programmes such as food drives and charitable campaigns run in overseas communities under federation auspices illustrate the service side of that liaison work.

Anniversaries provide the federation's largest stages. Its seventieth anniversary conference was held in Beijing in October 2026, marking seven decades since the 1956 founding congress, and the Tan Kah Kee commemorations of 2024 showed the federation working with banks and media to carry its founding chairman's story to audiences at home and overseas. Such events combine constituency celebration with the federation's core message, repeated in every congress report: that returned overseas Chinese, their relatives and overseas Chinese abroad form one community whose strength and resources the federation exists to pool for the development of the motherland.

Rights protection and constituency service

At home, the federation's founding purpose remains the protection of the legitimate rights and interests of returned overseas Chinese and their relatives. Returned overseas Chinese historically held a distinctive legal and policy status in China, touching property, investment, education and the treatment of families divided by emigration, and local federations have traditionally assisted with the practical problems of that status: returned students and professionals settling in China, elderly returned overseas Chinese, and relatives receiving remittances or hosting visiting family from abroad.

That service work is delivered through the federation system rather than from Beijing alone. Provincial and county federations in the qiaoxiang maintain the household-level knowledge of who has returned, whose relatives are overseas and where help is needed, and the national federation coordinates policy representation, including through its twenty-seven CPPCC seats, when constituency interests are at stake in national policymaking. It is this combination — national political representation, cultural institutions in the capital, and grassroots service in the home districts — that has defined the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese since Tan Kah Kee first chaired it in 1956.

Assessment and significance

The ACFROC occupies a singular place among China's people's organisations because its constituency is defined by movement across borders. No other national federation represents citizens whose families are, by definition, partly outside the country, and the federation's history — from the Yan'an congress of 1940 through the Singapore-funded patriotism of Tan Kah Kee to the Belt and Road liaison work announced in 2023 — mirrors the changing relationship between China and its diaspora.

Seventy years after its founding, the federation remains headquartered at 3 Fuxing Road in Beijing, publishing through chinaql.org, holding its five-yearly congresses in the Great Hall of the People and speaking for returned overseas Chinese and their relatives in the CPPCC. Its eleventh congress report set the tone for its present term: to pool the strength and wisdom of returned overseas Chinese, their relatives and overseas Chinese abroad, and to direct that pooled strength toward China's modernisation — the same bridging task, in contemporary language, for which the federation was created in October 1956.