Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World

Written by Bethany Allen

Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller

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.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780063057449

Bethany Allen

Bethany Allen is the China reporter at Axios. She previously worked as the lead reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' China Cables project, as a national security correspondent for the Daily Beast, and as a reporter and editor at Foreign Policy magazine. In 2020 she received the Robert D. G. Lewis Watchdog Award and was a finalist for the Batten Medal for Courage in Journalism. A fluent Mandarin speaker, she previously lived China for four years. She now lives in Taipei.

Reviews for Beijing Rules

[RAMIS · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Informative and well researched book,Good one by Bethany Allen ..

[DAvid · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The book is pedantic and Left leaning throughout. Instead of trying to remain neutral the author simply jumps on board the "Trump bad" band wagon by either saying or implying that all that he did was wrong. In fact what he did was try and address the issue of China's bullying head on as opposed to just nodding and trying to be quiet as some Democrat administrations have done and still do.
She used a very real subject with worldwide implications as a political platform. Very sad to see.
The book was not poorly written and well edited. I am just glad I only took it in via the audio version while running instead of actual spending time reading it.