The Daily Signal - 'China's Economy Is The Foundation of Much of Its Power Projection Around The World,' Author Says

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

The People's Republic of China "has used the power of its economy beyond its borders to push its illiberal and authoritarian geopolitical objectives and to change the behavior of individuals, governments, companies, and multilateral institutions," says Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, author of "Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World." "The reason I chose to focus on China's economic power is that I have covered China's power projection beyond its borders as a beat for about seven years, and I found that underlying much of China's power is its economic power," says Allen-Ebrahimian, who is the China reporter for Axios.  "Whether that's its diplomatic power, it's still, to this day, a lot of the foundation of that is its economic power, what we tend to call extraterritorial censorship," says Allen-Ebrahimian, who has lived in Taiwan since August 2022, adding: I mean, the NBA and Hollywood studios will self-censor. This is an extension of China's economic power. And so I found that at least, I would say, until the first half of the 21st century, China's economy is the foundation of much of its power projection around the world.Allen-Ebrahimian joins today's episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss her new book and what she has seen as the biggest change that China has undergone since she lived there in 2004 and then again from 2008 to 2012.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, September 26th. I'm Samantha Sherris. And joining today's episode is Bethany Allen Ibrahimian, who is the China reporter for Axios and author of the new book, Beijing Rules, How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World. Bethany, who lives in Taiwan, joins today's show to discuss how, as her book title suggests, China has weaponized its economy to confront the world, how living, living in Taiwan, joins

in Taiwan and the threat of the Chinese Communist Party has changed since she started living there in 2022 and much more. We'll get to our conversation right after this. Looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues from America's outpost here in Washington, sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. You'll get top conservative research, a rundown of important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online and hot takes from our experts. Sign up at heritage.org slash agenda or at the link in the show notes. Bethany Allen, Ibrahimian, is joining today's episode of the Daily Signal podcast.

Bethany is the China reporter for Axios and author of the brand new book, Beijing Rules, How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World. Bethany, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Now, as I just mentioned, you have a new bookout titled, Bejian, Beijing rules, how China weaponized its economy to confront the world. First and foremost, tell us a little bit about the book and why you decided to write it. Yes.

So as the book titles suggest, what I am focusing on is the type of world that the Chinese government is trying to create the rules that it wants to impose and has in fact quite successfully imposed around the world. And so what I look at primarily is. is economic power, the ways, quite innovative ways, in fact, that the Chinese government has used the power of its economy beyond its borders to push its illiberal and authoritarian geopolitical objectives and to change the behavior of individuals,

governments, companies, and multilateral institutions. The reason I chose to focus on China's economic power is that I have covered China's power projection beyond its borders as a beat for about seven years. And I found that underlying much of China's power is its economic power. Whether that's its diplomatic power, you know, it's still, to this day, a lot of the foundation of that is its economic power. What we tend to call extraterritorial censorship, the need that the NBA and Hollywood Studios will self-censor, this is an extension of China's economic power. And so I,

I found that, you know, at least I would say until, you know, the first half of the 21st century, China's economy is the foundation of much of its power projection around the world. Now, can you walk us through some examples of, you know, how China, as the title says, weaponized its economy to confront the world? Yeah, there's many well-known examples. And I also go through in the book some lesser-known examples, but ones that we're all familiar with would be, well, probably all familiar with would be, for example, at the beginning of the pandemic, when then Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, call for an independent inquiry into the origins

of the coronavirus. That was in April 2020. And very shortly thereafter, the Chinese government slapped a bunch of tariffs on all kinds of Australian imports, including wine, coal, barley, very transparently to punish the Australian government, to punish Morrison, for making this call for, you know, basic scientific fact-finding. This is something that relates to the health and the well-being of literally every single person on the planet. Every time there's a pandemic, we need to know how it started. And so the Chinese government was attempting to block this and to punish Australia for that. Other examples would be the NBA, so in 2019, when Darry, who was then the manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted in support of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protest.

And immediately, the NBA lost contracts in the Chinese market, the Chinese streaming websites, stopped showing NBA games, Chinese e-commerce websites, stopped selling Houston Rockets swag. It's estimated that the NBA lost about $200 million dollars. and revenue. And there are so many examples affecting retail companies, hotels, airlines, governments, celebrities, authors, academics, you name it. Now, something that I thought was interesting. The last chapter of your book is titled Building a Democratic Economic State Craft. Can you walk us through some of the recommendations that you highlight in this chapter and how they can be achieved?

I have two different types or two different buckets of recommendations. And one of them is we could put it under the category of adopting industrial policy or putting guardrails on economic behavior in order to promote U.S. national security and the national security of our allies and partners. And this is the area that the U.S. and other like-minded governments have already been taking concrete actions to work towards starting with the Trump. administration continuing into the Biden administration, you know, the EU really getting more on board now. And this is, you know, things like putting sanctions or other kinds of trade restrictions

on Chinese companies that have ties to the PLA. Or, you know, as we've seen Wallway, blocking Huawei from 5G networks, something that we haven't seen that is very important and more and more what people are calling for is to create some kind of mutual economic defense treaty or organization or agreement where like-minded countries can come to each other's aid if one of their industries or their government or overall their trade sector overall is targeted by Chinese government economic coercion that hasn't happened yet it's it's a very difficult thing to do but there are there's a lot There are a lot more people talking about it now. However, the other bucket of recommendations,

and I make 14 separate commendations, are to accomplish what I describe as putting democratic guardrails back on economic behavior, which is something that I feel that the US and other democratic countries have really ignored to our detriment for the past 40 years. And this is based on the understanding that economic behavior,

that trade and that money itself is morally neutral, but will be used to project the values of the people who control it. What we have now in the world, the situation in which the Chinese government has been extremely proactive in putting authoritarian guardrails on international economic behavior.

But we haven't seen very much of a countervailing democratic pushback to push back against those authoritarian values, values and you know and try to push back with our own democratic values so some of my recommendations on this and because of the political nature of them in our current environment in the US I think would be very difficult to adopt some of them but just to put them out there one of them is campaign finance reform so trying to get corporate money out of US politics so that it's not money shaping our

policies but rather the democratic voting populace another one that is I think more achievable, would be putting sanctions on Chinese companies that have been deeply complicit in constructing the censorship ecosystem, the censorship architecture inside of China. Why would that matter to put sanctions on Chinese companies for doing that? Because it would create a halo of deterrence around U.S. companies and other foreign companies who would otherwise maybe have joint ventures with these Chinese companies, or would otherwise, you know, maybe perhaps be self-censoring to get into the Chinese market, it would create an aura, you know, of, of illegality or a halo of deterrence around self-censorship

to censor on behalf of an authoritarian foreign government. And one final recommendation, again, I have 14 specific ones, but one more I'll share, is to have a FARA structure, so a foreign agents registration act type of structure on the state level in the U.S. Right now, the Foreign Agents Registration Act is that it's only for the federal government. And this requires public disclosures from any person or entity or individual who is lobbying on behalf of a foreign government or entity. It doesn't ban that behavior. It merely requires public disclosures so that we know who is really behind some of these lobbying efforts.

but those do not exist on the state level in any state. And so to have a basic level of transparency about who is trying to influence our state-level government officials and lawmakers, it's very important for each state to come up with a system and to implement a system that would work in their state. Now, these Democratic guardrails that you were just, you know, talking to us about and what you write about in the book, what are some of the consequences if they aren't put in place? Well, these are things that we have already been seeing and has seen that in fact for a very long time in the U.S. and to talk about the influence of money in politics, which is something that I don't think anyone really wants that in the U.S. You know, if you talk to anyone who cares about our democratic politics, you know, our democracy, nobody wants politicians to be spending all of their time trying to raise money, but it's how our system is.

And what that has created, and there's lots of records of this from the 90s, is that the business community, in the business communities in the U.S., the corporate community, has basically functioned as a pro-B Beijing lobby and has worked to water down policies towards China, has tried to reduce some of these sort of national security and democratic guardrails in terms of our economic relationship with China. And this is, you know, something that isn't motivated by, you know, democratic values, but rather is motivated purely by money. And I think if we can work on getting some of that out, it can help the policymaking environment focus more on what is actually good for our country and good for our values. Now, I also wanted to highlight that you live in Taiwan. And, you know, over the last couple of years, and even more recently, we've really seen a heightened aggression from China toward Taiwan.

Just recently, China flew over 100 military planes toward the island. You know, based on your experience living there, how has living in Taiwan and the threat of the Chinese Communist Party changed, you know, since you moved there? I'll leave you with or I'll, I have lots of thoughts on this. And I think I'll highlight maybe three main thoughts. And the very most important one, the first one, if anyone remembers anything on this podcast, I want people to know. that it is a little bit, I know this sounds counterintuitive, but it is a little bit of a red herring to focus on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a military invasion or a military attack on Taiwan. This is a little bit of a red herring. Let me explain what I mean by that. The Chinese government has

many forms of coercion in its toolkit, including economic and diplomatic, of course, military and cyber, it would be more than China's Vietnam if it were to try to launch some kind of amphibious assault on Taiwan. Many people I spoke, I speak to who have a lot of knowledge in this area, say that this would absolutely be the Chinese government's last resort. But the U.S. discussion focuses about 90% on the threat of an actual military invasion. And as long as we're doing, we are not coming up with deterrence for other forms of Chinese government. coercion, such as economic coercion or diplomatic coercion. So I would lay out a scenario that is, I think, much more likely under which the Chinese

government, at a certain moment of domestic vulnerability in Taiwan, simultaneously levies multiple forms of coercion, such as maybe an economic blockade, combines with a lot of very intense political and diplomatic pressure and essentially forces the Taiwanese government to sign over some degree of sovereignty. This is a much more likely scenario. And I think that in Washington D specifically, it is incredibly important that U.S. government officials and people at think tanks start gaming out these scenarios, talking about them, and pushing the U.S. government to have very clear forms of deterrence, China, if you do an economic blockade, we will do this. Because right now as it stands, if something like that happened, the U.S. toolkit would be essentially zero.

That's my most important takeaway. And then my second most of my second sort of main takeaway is that in Taiwan, people don't really feel like they're under siege, but sort of average Taiwanese person, you know, if you look at headlines in D.C., it seems as though surely people in Taiwan are a constant sense of crisis. And mostly that is not true. Mostly people just think China's been threatening us for 75 years. They've never done anything. They're never going to do anything. And I think that in Taiwan, that narrative is outdated and that people in Taiwan have an insufficient sense of crisis. Now, I also wanted to ask you about you previously lived in China from 2008 to 2012. Now looking in from the outside, what have you seen as the biggest change that China has

undergone? Yeah, you know, I was actually first in China for a few months, even earlier than that, in 2004 for a study program. And then I went back in 2008. In 2004 and also in 2008, and less and less, the longer I lived there, there was this sense of openness and optimism. and an openness to democratic ideas and an admiration, a really strong admiration for democracy and a clear hope that China could become politically more open. And people were, it was safer for Chinese people to have warm and close friendships with Americans, for example. And 2004 was such a positive time to be in China.

And for that and other reasons. And what we have seen under the last few years of Fujintao and, you know, very dramatically under Xi Jinping, is that because of the way that the Chinese government has really fanned the flames of anti-Western sentiment and anti-American sentiment and nationalism, while simultaneously creating an almost totalitarian and very paranoid security states, many Chinese people truly feel very angry at the U.S., feel a sense of superiority to the West, believe that the Chinese government has a better model, and also know that there's a growing risk associated with, you know, closeness with Americans and admiration for even non-political American ideals. And that is such a shame, because, you know, there's 1.4 billion Chinese people. As with, you know, any very diverse populace,

they're all different. But Chinese people are so hospitable, so loving towards their families. You know, they want what other people in the world want, which is to be happy and to be free. And, you know, there's so many close people to people ties historically between, you know, the U.S. and China. And I think it is a, it's really quite a tragedy of the way that, that Xi Jinping has worked to sever that and create bitterness between. you know, to the Chinese people and other people groups in the world, where really there shouldn't be. There should be friendship. And that's just to me a deep, leads to a deep sense of sadness. Now, Bethany, just before we go, any final thoughts? And also, how can our listeners follow your work at Axios?

Well, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which is once weekly, comes out on Wednesdays, the Axios China newsletter. You can just type in Axios China subscribe, and it'll take you. to the right website. You can also follow me on Twitter at Bethany Allen EBR, follow me on LinkedIn. And for final thoughts, I would just say that as we are increasingly focused on the challenge and the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, I hope that everyone remembers that at the end of the day, you know, the Chinese people are good and fundamentally want the same things that Americans want, and to keep their well-being in mind too. Absolutely, Bethany, thank you so much for joining us.

I will definitely leave a link to your book in the show notes for audience members who want to take a look. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your interest and for your time. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode of the Daily Signal podcast. Thanks so much for listening to my interview with Bethany Allen e. Bohemium. Make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast and help us reach even more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We read and appreciate all of your feedback.

Thanks again for listening. Have a great Tuesday and we'll be back with you all this afternoon for top news. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheras. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.