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Searching... Sugar Grove - Todd Library | Book | HC427.95 .A575 2023 | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
Longlisted for Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Aug.)
Guardian Review
It can be a little dizzying to survey the abrupt shifts in Britain's relationship with China. It is less than eight years since the then chancellor, George Osborne, touted a "golden era" of closer ties, becoming the first serving cabinet minister to visit Xinjiang. That region is now synonymous with the persecution of Uyghurs and other minorities, its vast network of camps a modern-day gulag archipelago. The widely documented atrocities meted out include torture and forced sterilisation. Last month parliament warned that Beijing poses not just a commercial challenge, but an "existential threat" to our democracy. The whiplash in Britain may be particularly extreme, but most western countries have charted a similar policy course over the last decade, slowly coming to the realisation that the neoliberal consensus forged after the fall of the Berlin Wall - that economic opening would lead to political reform - might be wrong. All this makes Beijing Rules a timely read. Bethany Allen, a Tapei-based reporter for Axios, documents how China has wielded extraordinary power beyond its own borders, exploiting western naivety and greed, and weaponising its own fast-growing economy in a bid to reshape the world order. Part of this includes stifling dissent not just at home but abroad; she describes in chilling detail how the online meeting platform Zoom, flush with pandemic cash and success, helped Beijing go after US-based dissidents, arguing that its actions were necessary to comply with Chinese law. The company handed over information stored on US servers about Zoom users connected to Xinjiang and disrupted a meeting about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, even though it was hosted by a US citizen - former student leader Wang Dan - who was in the US at the time. Wang told Allen: "It kind of hurt the democracy in the United States. It's not only an attack on Chinese dissidents. It's an attack on American society. Because Zoom is an American company." (Zoom said a China-based executive was fired over the incident for "violating company policies" and has subsequently said that it will not allow any requests from the Chinese government to affect anyone outside China.) Parts of the book feel like familiar if useful surveys of issues that have been prominent in news coverage over recent years, including the Chinese response to the Covid pandemic, the ramping up of disinformation, and Beijing's reaction to the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement. Allen shows how Beijing has deployed de facto "sanctions" on industries as diverse as Norway's salmon fisheries and America's NBA when governments, companies or individuals cross its red lines. But there are also sections that are likely to be startling to most readers, including one on China's covert political operations overseas. Much of this activity comes under the auspices of the blandly named United Front Work Department, an organisation charged with increasing the Communist party's influence in wider society. Too often it has been dismissed as a dull bureaucratic relic. But its budget, estimated at between $1.4bn and $1.8bn, is testament to its importance. Its activities range from the apparently absurd to the terrifying, whether that's trying to manipulate twin-cities programmes or placing a suspected spy at the heart of the US intelligence community. Lest that sounds too depressing, Beijing Rules also charts how governments from Canberra to Berlin to Ottawa woke up to the threat staring them in the face - albeit belatedly - and ends with a list of suggestions for protecting democracy that reads more like a manifesto than a policy paper. Allen makes a powerful case for more coordinated western intervention, to both support companies in the face of Chinese competition and coercion, and force them to respect the liberal values that have made our economies so powerful in the first place. Because even the biggest corporations are smaller than the Chinese state and its economy, they can be picked off fairly easily when standing alone. "There's nothing wrong with shaming a US company for investing in Xinjiang or self-censoring to please Beijing. But purely placing the blame on individual commercial actors for succumbing to the innovative economic statecraft of a trade superpower is misguided," she writes. "Through new laws, regulations, and multilateral institutions, we need to relink economic and democratic rights, both domestically and internationally." Allen also manages the feat - more difficult than it should be, to judge by the way too many people write and speak - of untangling legitimate concerns about the Chinese government's behaviour from the disturbing rise in racism towards people of East Asian heritage. This discrimination was almost certainly one reason many casual observers, particularly on the left, failed to understand, appreciate or support important policy shifts in the US during the Trump administration. Chinese citizens abroad, and people of Chinese heritage, are "the first and the last victims of this dynamic," she writes. "They are caught in the middle, between a powerful Leninist state with expansive global aims on the one hand and the legitimate fears and illegitimate fear mongering and racism that simmer in host countries on the other." If the past 10 years have been a time of slow awakening to reality - namely that, amid talk of a second cold war, this confrontation with an autocratic superpower will be more complicated and difficult than the last - Allen remains optimistic that the next decade will see liberal democracies try to use that new understanding to defend themselves and their values. As her carefully assembled argument demonstrates, it's essential that they do.
Kirkus Review
A penetrating study of Beijing's strategy to become the dominant global power. There was a time when Western leaders thought that engagement with China would eventually lead to that country becoming more liberal, open, and even democratic. Looking back, that view seems hopelessly naïve. Allen, the China reporter for Axios, has been observing and writing about the country for a long time, and her book is a deep dive into how China is constantly maneuvering to expand its global influence, with an ever growing list of "core interests." The central weapon is the government's control of access to China's enormous market, which it can lock down through punitive tariffs, bureaucratic delays, or outright bans. Nearly every country in the world has felt China's heavy hand. Any Western company wanting to do business in China has to accept Beijing's censorship and avoid controversial statements. At the same time, Chinese companies are effectively under government control, propagating the official line. In an incisive analysis, Allen examines China's covert penetration of the American political system and international agencies such as the World Health Organization. She believes that Beijing has overplayed its hand and is widely seen as an arrogant bully, which gives the West the opportunity to respond at many levels. She makes a series of useful proposals, but a crucial requirement is a change in attitude in the U.S. The left and the right have a surprising amount in common on this issue and should work together instead of making narrow-minded attacks on each other. Allen has shown remarkable courage in writing this book, as the tentacles of the Beijing government are long, powerful, and patient. Hopefully, her work will find its way to policymakers in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. A disturbing, insightful book about China's hidden, multitiered war--and how the West can fight back. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The West has long proclaimed that capitalism ensures democracy, but in the last two decades China has toppled that belief by achieving a flourishing capitalist state under rigid Communist Party rule. The China reporter at Axios, Allen-Ebrahimian reveals what the advent of authoritarian capitalism means for the world. With a 30,000-copy first printing.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | ix |
| 1 The Rise of China's Authoritarian Economic Statecraft | 1 |
| 2 The Global Rush for Masks | 17 |
| 3 Dual-Function Strategy and China's Core Interests | 40 |
| 4 Spies and Sister Cities | 47 |
| 5 Zooming In | 74 |
| 6 WHO and the Party Man | 111 |
| 7 China Adopts Russia's Disinformation Playbook | 128 |
| 8 "Chewing Gum Stuck to the Bottom of China's Shoe" | 145 |
| 9 Hong Kong Outlaws Global Activism | 170 |
| 10 China Vaccinates the World | 190 |
| 11 Building a Democratic Economic Statecraft | 205 |
| Acknowledgments | 241 |
| Notes | 245 |
| Index | 289 |