The Meddling Kingdom

Abstract

The Meddling Kingdom Theresa Fallon (bio) Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World. By Bethany Allen. New York: Harper, 2023. 336 pp. For far too long, the story of America's approach toward the People's Republic of China (PRC) was based on what I like to call "hopium"—the belief that bringing Beijing into global markets and institutions would expose them to liberal-democratic values, thereby paving the way to the country's democratization. It was a convenient story, especially for the probusiness lobby that eyed the PRC as a place with cheap labor, scant environmental regulations, and no unions. Of course, the net sum from this strategy was something very different. Instead, it created a near peer competitor to the United States, delinked trade from human rights, and inadvertently created a serious challenge (and sometimes spoiler) to the institutions of global governance. The West's addiction to "hopium" had another cost: It bought Beijing time. Axios journalist Bethany Allen's new book, Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World, examines how Beijing has used economic coercion, the promise of its vast market, and strategic positioning inside key international institutions such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations to leverage its position as "it faced a short window of strategic opportunity to pull ahead of a distracted West" (p. xvii). According to Allen, trends have now emerged that suggest that "the era of morality-free trade in the international sphere and the blind veneration of corporate profits in the domestic sphere may not continue indefinitely." [End Page 171] In particular, the economic and political shock of the covid-19 pandemic led to the West's realization of the danger of being overly dependent on PRC supply chains. Similar to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, the Chinese Communist Party's decision to weaponize masks was a wakeup call for world leaders to stop relying on Beijing and start diversifying supply chains. "The global rush for PPE [personal protective equipment] was perhaps the first time the full impact of highly motivated Chinese diaspora communities could be felt in such a tangible way," as people in cities around the world "could not find masks in their local pharmacies" after Chinese diaspora communities bought them up to send back to the PRC, Allen explains. "In January and early February [2020], it was difficult for anyone to foresee that the entire world would soon be starving for PPE and that the individual efforts of people in overseas Chinese communities, when spurred by the top-down guidance of globe-spanning party organizations, would result in $1.2 billion worth of PPE sent back to China within a period of less than two months," writes Allen (p.23). Allen describes the CCP's use of China's diaspora communities as a "dual-function strategy." She writes: Party leaders choose to use—abuse, in fact—legitimate organizations for their own political purposes. Dual-function goes hand in hand with United Front Work, both inside China and beyond its borders, and stems from the party's fundamental belief that its power belongs everywhere. The strategy has obvious ill effects. It casts suspicion on community organization and fans fear of a 'fifth column,' the idea that a significant number of members of a society are secret sleeper agents loyal to a foreign power (p.44). Revelations about Chinese nationals spying for the Party have become more frequent, including in a recent Wall Street Journal story on use of Chinese nationals to spy on U.S. military installations. Intelligencegathering clearly is more important to Beijing than concerns over possibly planting seeds of distrust in diaspora communities. Perhaps stirring this dangerous "fifth-column" pot serves Beijing's interests over the longer term as it strengthens the CCP narrative that there is dangerous prejudice toward Chinese nationals in the United States. But Allen is correct when she argues, "If Beijing truly cared about the well-being of overseas Chinese communities, it would scrap its dual-function strategy once and for all" (p.67). Allen's chapter on Beijing's infiltration of Zoom's video-conferencing services may give readers pause, as...