Beijing Rules
How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
An acclaimed journalist on contemporary China lays bare the country's two-decade quest for global dominance and how the Chinese Communist Party coopted what Western leaders have long considered their most powerful tool in the fight for liberal democracy—capitalism—to expand its illiberal influence worldwide.
Bethany Allen, the award-winning China reporter for Axios, shows that by tying profits to political acquiescence the Chinese Communist Party is forcing companies and governments around the world to accept its rules. The coronavirus pandemic marked the first time that the Party deployed its tool kit of economic coercion on an issue directly related to the health and well-being of quite literally every person in the world. But Western democracies aren’t helpless victims in Beijing’s game. The West created the conditions for the rise of authoritarian capitalism by divorcing political values from market structures.
Written by one of the first American journalists to expose China's covert influence operations in the United States, Beijing Rules includes headline-making stories of Western institutions bowing to Beijing’s pressure—a glimpse of what America’s future may look like should liberal democracy come firmly under the thumb of authoritarian capitalism. Grounded in deep investigative reporting, it sounds the alarm about what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we now take for granted.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
China uses its enormous market and financial clout to coerce foreign countries and companies into complying with its geopolitical agenda, according to this savvy debut. Allen, the China correspondent for Axios, surveys the Chinese government's "authoritarian economic statecraft" during the Covid-19 pandemic: exploiting the world's distraction to impose authoritarian rule on Hong Kong; demanding that Zoom, whose research-and-development operation is in China, shut down meetings involving Chinese pro-democracy dissidents; using face-mask exports to strong-arm foreign governments into praising China; and other international pressure campaigns. She sets all this amid a critique of the Western neoliberal belief that capitalism will automatically nudge China toward liberal democracy. Without countervailing incentives from their own governments, she argues, Western corporations acquiesce to Beijing's dictates, lobby for pro-Chinese policies, and censor criticism of the Chinese government on media platforms. Allen's elegantly written investigation blends economic history with vivid reporting on such players as Chinese spy Christine Fang, who allegedly spread Beijing's influence by seducing California congressman Eric Swalwell and other politicians. Less cogent is her reform program, a grab bag of vague proposals including international trade regulations, diversification of supply chains, and using "algorithms to prioritize fair and fact-based content." Still, it's a startling and timely panorama of Chinese economic subversion.
