Beijing Rules

How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World

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.

Informative

One of the better or all the recent books on China, she mostly sticks to facts and doesn’t need to make things more dramatic than they are, reality is interesting enough

Totally worth it!!

We live in a world of misinformation and propaganda but this audiobook breaks down exactly the problem with China and what happens when you trust a totalitarian country for all your country’s needs. Great job on pointing it out.

everything is great except the last chapter

this really is an excellent review on what China has done to take over the world. The last chapter has several suggestions on what could be done in this country to try and compete or block the Chinese movement. given the current climate in Washington, it's really depressing on what it might take to change this Chinese narrative.

Chinese propaganda advocating for bigger govt

The author accepts Chinas numbers on GDP growth and Covid deaths... They claim Western Governments failed to "protect" people like China did...

The new cold war and racist double standards

The book is interesting. It explains the Chinese Communist Party's attempts at infiltrating and influencing the U.S. political institutions. However, what it doesn't bring up is also interesting. How many of our representatives take money from that one ethnostate in the middle east? How many of them actively divert our financial and military resources to that one country, even as it is engaged in ethnic cleansing? My impression is, people like the author are cowards who make a big fuss about China's limited influence, and don't even mention how a tiny nation got us into three unjust wars and made us complicit in genocide.