Beijing Rules

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.

Based on years of on-the-ground reporting, this book uncovers the playbook of China's economic statecraft:

• Authoritarian Economic Statecraft: Discover the methods the Chinese Communist Party uses to tie corporate profits to political acquiescence, forcing Western companies and governments to play by Beijing's rules.
• Sharp Power and Subnational Engagement: Go inside the CCP's secret efforts to shape American politics, from city halls to Capitol Hill, through spies, sister cities, and covert networks.
• Supply Chain Weaponization: Uncover how the global rush for masks and PPE during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the national security risks of dependency on China's manufacturing base.
• Disinformation Campaigns: Learn how Beijing adopted Russia's playbook to spread conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, discredit Western vaccines, and control the global narrative.
• A Playbook for Democracies: Explore what the U.S. and its allies must do to build a democratic economic statecraft and push back against China's global strategy for illiberalism.