It can be a little dizzying to survey the abrupt shifts in Britain’s relationship with China. It is less than eight years since the then chancellor, George Osborne, touted a “golden era” of closer ties, becoming the first serving cabinet minister to visit Xinjiang.
That region is now synonymous with the persecution of Uyghurs and other minorities, its vast network of camps a modern-day gulag archipelago. The widely documented atrocities meted out include torture and forced sterilisation. Last month parliament warned that Beijing poses not just a commercial challenge, but an “existential threat” to our democracy.
The whiplash in Britain may be particularly extreme, but most western countries have charted a similar policy course over the last decade, slowly coming to the realisation that the neoliberal consensus forged after the fall of the Berlin Wall – that economic opening would lead to political reform – might be wrong.
All this makes Beijing Rules a timely read. Bethany Allen, a Tapei-based reporter for Axios, documents how China has wielded extraordinary power beyond its own borders, exploiting western naivety and greed, and weaponising its own fast-growing economy in a bid to reshape the world order.
Part of this includes stifling dissent not just at home but abroad; she describes in chilling detail how the online meeting platform Zoom, flush with pandemic cash and success, helped Beijing go after US-based dissidents, arguing that its actions were necessary to comply with Chinese law. The company handed over information stored on US servers about Zoom users connected to Xinjiang and disrupted a meeting about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, even though it was hosted by a US citizen – former student leader Wang Dan – who was in the US at the time. Wang told Allen: “It kind of hurt the democracy in the United States. It’s not only an attack on Chinese dissidents. It’s an attack on American society. Because Zoom is an American company.” (Zoom said a China-based executive was fired over the incident for “violating company policies” and has subsequently said that it will not allow any requests from the Chinese government to affect anyone outside China.)
Parts of the book feel like familiar if useful surveys of issues that have been prominent in news coverage over recent years, including the Chinese response to the Covid pandemic, the ramping up of disinformation, and Beijing’s reaction to the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement. Allen shows how Beijing has deployed de facto “sanctions” on industries as diverse as Norway’s salmon fisheries and America’s NBA when governments, companies or individuals cross its red lines.
But there are also sections that are likely to be startling to most readers, including one on China’s covert political operations overseas. Much of this activity comes under the auspices of the blandly named United Front Work Department, an organisation charged with increasing the Communist party’s influence in wider society. Too often it has been dismissed as a dull bureaucratic relic. But its budget, estimated at between $1.4bn and $1.8bn, is testament to its importance. Its activities range from the apparently absurd to the terrifying, whether that’s trying to manipulate twin-cities programmes or placing a suspected spy at the heart of the US intelligence community.
Lest that sounds too depressing, Beijing Rules also charts how governments from Canberra to Berlin to Ottawa woke up to the threat staring them in the face – albeit belatedly – and ends with a list of suggestions for protecting democracy that reads more like a manifesto than a policy paper. Allen makes a powerful case for more coordinated western intervention, to both support companies in the face of Chinese competition and coercion, and force them to respect the liberal values that have made our economies so powerful in the first place. Because even the biggest corporations are smaller than the Chinese state and its economy, they can be picked off fairly easily when standing alone.
“There’s nothing wrong with shaming a US company for investing in Xinjiang or self-censoring to please Beijing. But purely placing the blame on individual commercial actors for succumbing to the innovative economic statecraft of a trade superpower is misguided,” she writes.
“Through new laws, regulations, and multilateral institutions, we need to relink economic and democratic rights, both domestically and internationally.”
Allen also manages the feat – more difficult than it should be, to judge by the way too many people write and speak – of untangling legitimate concerns about the Chinese government’s behaviour from the disturbing rise in racism towards people of East Asian heritage. This discrimination was almost certainly one reason many casual observers, particularly on the left, failed to understand, appreciate or support important policy shifts in the US during the Trump administration.
Chinese citizens abroad, and people of Chinese heritage, are “the first and the last victims of this dynamic,” she writes. “They are caught in the middle, between a powerful Leninist state with expansive global aims on the one hand and the legitimate fears and illegitimate fear mongering and racism that simmer in host countries on the other.”
If the past 10 years have been a time of slow awakening to reality – namely that, amid talk of a second cold war, this confrontation with an autocratic superpower will be more complicated and difficult than the last – Allen remains optimistic that the next decade will see liberal democracies try to use that new understanding to defend themselves and their values. As her carefully assembled argument demonstrates, it’s essential that they do.
• Beijing Rules: China’s Quest for Global Influence by Bethany Allen is published by John Murray. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
