Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian is the author of “Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized its Economy to Confront the World.” She is a China reporter at Axios and received the Robert D.G. Lewis watchdog award, the top prize awarded annually by the society of professional journalists.
Federal Newswire:
Did China close the door on your reporting there?
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian:
Interestingly I think it was a bit of a canary in the coal mine. I was blacklisted, or whatever you want to call it. I was denied a journalist visa in China when I was still based in DC. So I lived in China from 2008-2012 and then I came back to the US and was living in Washington, DC from 2014-2022. I was focused on covering China from Washington DC, but I was still able to go back to China.
I went on a reporting trip there in 2015, one in 2016, one in ‘17, and 2018. I began an investigative series on China's covert political interference in the United States and was the first US journalist to write about that in the United States.
That series was very influential in democratic governments around the world. I know this because government officials from [these] governments began seeking me out as early as 2018, to include the US government, asking me more about my work.
My work began to influence policy in the US and other democratic countries. Now the Chinese government being the Chinese government, there's no transparency. In late 2018 I was hired by Agence France-Presse, AFP, the French newswire, to be their Beijing correspondent. I didn't expect the visa process to go easily or quickly, but after waiting for six months I was able to learn that I would not be receiving a visa. This was the first time in AFP's history that one of their correspondents had not been granted a visa and that was it.
I was never given a reason, and in fact, what happened was it wasn't [that] my visa application wasn't denied, it was just never processed, which is standard.
At the time I was totally crushed. I had dedicated my life [to] this country not because I hated it, which is what the Chinese government wants people to believe about journalists, but because I loved it. You don't dedicate [your] life to the things that you hate, and I had crafted so much of my life around living in China in my 20s. [It] had been an incredibly formative experience.
Also I was concerned that my journalism career was over, because in 2019, this was before news outlets really started hiring or having positions for China reporters outside of China. I had just managed to do it from DC because I'm incredibly stubborn.
It was right around that time in China that the international consortium of investigative journalists was [quietly] looking for someone. They didn't announce it, but they were looking for someone with China investigative experience to lead a project. They wanted someone who wasn't afraid of not being able to go back to China, and so I really fit the bill. I had previously reported from Xinjiang and had covered Muslims in China for a long time, and so they brought me on to lead that project.
Federal Newswire:
How did the China Cables project come about and what were the key findings?
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian:
At the very beginning I was handed a stack of Chinese language documents and that was it. [My immediate questions were,] “What is this? What does it mean?” I just sat with those documents for several weeks in the beginning, reading through them, analyzing every character, trying to figure out what it was that I was looking at.
What it was that I was looking at was three different kinds of documents. Two of them were the bulk of it and one of those was, essentially in Layman's terms, an operating manual for the mass internment camps in Xinjiang. These were marked classified.
China has a three-tier classification system. It was tier two and they were internal documents that had been circulated within the Party and security mechanisms in Xinjiang. That document, what we're calling the operating manual, was 24 pages long, and there were certain parts of it that were extremely alarming.
One part, for example, was where it talked about how to prevent escapes. Now it's really important to know that up to this point there had been reporting on what people thought the camps might be, but it was all externally, it was all survivors or looking at satellite imagery. [We were also] looking at renders that had been posted to try to build them.
This was the first time that we were getting a glimpse from the inside [of] the Chinese Communist Party itself, how it was talking to itself about the camps, but externally, the phrases and the terms that the Party had been using to sell the camps to the outside world. [The terms being] that they were vocational, education, and training centers, [and were] purely voluntary. [These were] a wonderful service and part of the Chinese government's poverty alleviation program in Xinjiang.
These documents said one of the main responsibilities of people running the camps was to prevent escapes. There were very in-depth details about how to prevent escapes. What kinds of vehicles can come in, what can come out, and there was a line about how every corner of the camp, including bathrooms, should be blanketed in surveillance cameras. There was another very chilling line about preventing abnormal deaths.
What university in its internal guidelines has a line about making sure that you prevent abnormal deaths? So clearly these were not voluntary. Clearly the conditions were such that people might die, and in fact, probably had been dying when they weren't supposed to die, which of course begs the question, were there times when people were supposed to die? That was one aspect of it.
The other set of documents were part of reports from something that we now know as IJOP, the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, which is a mass data gathering program in Xinjiang which these internal documents cast as mass data-based predictive policing. As though you can get enough data from enough sources to try to understand when a crime will happen. In this case, what they are calling terrorism and separatism, which of course is not what's actually happening.
There were four reports, and all of these documents were dated June 2017. There were four reports from IJOP from June 2017, and one of them was a report saying “from one day in June to another day in June, so a one week span…there were 2,300 names that were put forward by IJOP” and the word they use is push, like a push notification. There were 2,300 names that were pushed by this mass data gathering platform.
These names were sent out across all the different counties in Xinjiang, to all the different security departments, and of those 2,300 names, approximately 1,600 people were located and assessed and most of them put into vocational training. In the span of one week, 1,600 people's lives had been ruined, and they had but been put into concentration camps.
It was just put there in such a cold, calculated, sterile way, and the rest of that document had six points of analysis analyzing why they weren't able to locate all 2,300 of them. Why weren't they able to round up more people and put them into camps?
That was the work that we were doing, and there's many other points. But the China Cables were incredibly important in building a case for crimes against humanity and genocide, because they put forward irrefutable proof that the Party knew what it was doing. That it was talking to itself about what it was doing, and it was proof for the rest of the world of what it was actually doing in Xinjiang. Those documents in our work have been cited in government reports and UN reports and in legal cases, making the argument for genocide, and have been widely read in democratic governments around the world.
Federal Newswire:
We have a law to block business with entities using forced labor. How is China’s propaganda machine handling this?
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian:
The Xinjiang Forced Labor Prevention Act's passage is such a miracle. It's something that 3-4 years ago we could never even have imagined. I would also say that when the Trump administration sanctioned the XPCC, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, in 2020, that's also something that even just 1-2 years before would have been unthinkable.
It's really been astonishing to see how the US government has [finally] gotten behind this issue. [It understands] the importance of what's happening in Xinjiang and the future of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minority Muslim groups there.
I remember the first time that a top-ranking US official ever said the word “Uyghur” and talked about the persecution of them. I remember very clearly. It was October 2018, it was when Mike Pence was giving the Trump administration's big China speech at the Hudson Institute and he called it out. That was the beginning of the Trump Administration taking on this issue, and it was an interesting interplay in the Trump administration we're all familiar with.
The different factions of China policy within the Trump administration and Trump himself certainly did not care about Uyghurs. But after the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 he took his foot off the brake for the people in the Trump administration who wanted to really pursue the Xinjiang issue and really help the Uyghurs.
After the pandemic we saw an accelerated push from the National Security Council. Across the administration [we saw them] pushing back against the genocide there, getting it labeled genocide, [and] the XPCC sanction and then in Congress the incredible work and the dedication [shown by the] advocates and Uyghur activists. [Day] in and out [they were] pleading their case with lawmakers, and the way that lawmakers really supported, pushed for, and passed it is extraordinary.
As for execution, it has from the beginning been a gargantuan task, and one that cannot be and will never be implemented perfectly. But I think that the pursuit of perfection, in this case, would be an obstacle to improvement…There are several [obstacles, but] in the beginning it was lack of manpower.
To implement such an enormous requirement on companies, it takes more resources than the government initially put forward. Then Congress [in 2020] gave a $28 million allocation to help with the implementation of the act, which was good.
Another issue we're seeing is that on the Chinese government side, they're watching this unfold just like anybody else, and so they've been clamping down on supply chain data. It's always been difficult to trace supply chains, but it's gotten even harder to trace supply chains to Xinjiang, and something that's incredibly concerning that we're also seeing is the criminalization within China of private firms that do the due diligence checks and audits of supply chains.
So you have a catch-22 here where exporters or importers in the US cannot get the audits that they need to show that their products don't have forced labor. However, it's even getting harder to show that products trace back to Xinjiang at all. That's kind of where things are.
Federal Newswire:
Is it dangerous for companies to engage in accounting and transparency on this issue?
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian:
I'm not a big believer in corporate social responsibility, I don't think it's reasonable or possible. I think it's the government's job to regulate companies to pass laws to shape their behavior and change their behavior. It’s not the responsibility of companies to do anything other than follow the laws, and I think that what we've seen in the US in the past…let's say 20 years is a negation on the part of the US government to sufficiently regulate companies and force them to behave in a more moral and politically moral way.
That's exactly what the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is. It's making up for that failure of the US government to put democratic and human rights guardrails on economic behavior. That's exactly what my book is about, how these two things need to be relinked.
Federal Newswire:
What is the message of your book, "Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World?"
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
The question that I had going into this book was “what is the primary power that China will be and is going to be exercising in the 21st century?”
I have spent most of my career as a journalist looking at how China projects power beyond its borders, and I was never satisfied with the way that we talked about it and the words that we were using to describe it. [I was] certainly not satisfied with the policies that people were recommending to try to push back against it.
That's what led me to write this book, and my basic argument and observation is that the Chinese government has actually been incredibly innovative in coming up with ways of gatekeeping its economy: to either punish or reward the behavior of governments, companies, and individuals around the world in such a way that their activity, speech and decisions are shaped to be in line with the Chinese Communist Party's core interests.
That's a kind of power, a kind of economic lever that the US and the West have been very ill-suited to observe and counter.
[The] term that I use to describe this is “authoritarian economic statecraft,” not just economic coercion, because coercion is a stick, but China also uses carrots. Economic statecraft by definition is the use of economic power for geopolitical purposes. We're not talking about how China's using its economy to make its economy bigger or pure trade issues. We're talking about using their economy for political purposes, and I call it authoritarian because the way that China does this is illiberal.
Economic statecraft is nothing new. The US engages in economic statecraft. Every major country engages in economic statecraft, but there are some key differences with the way that the Chinese government does it and the way that the US, the West, and the EU typically do it.
I'll make that a little bit clearer.
The most standard, traditional form of economic statecraft with which we are all familiar is sanctions. Certainly the US uses sanctions and is increasingly using sanctions. My numbers here are not going to be exact but in approximately the year 2000, the US had levied 900 sanctions; now or as of 2022 that number was around 9,000.
There's been a massive rise in US sanctions, and there's also multilateral sanctions issued through and with our allies and partners. Overwhelmingly those sanctions are levied in order to uphold multilateral principles that many people agree will create a better world. This includes nuclear non-proliferation, countering terrorist financing, interpreting and preserving the integrity of the international financial system–through, for example, fighting money laundering–and upholding and punishing violators of human rights, such as dictators.
[Now] there have been exceptions, and this really proves the rule. One exception would be during the Trump administration. The US sanctioned two international criminal court investigators for doing their jobs investigating possible US war crimes in Afghanistan. That was an illiberal use of sanctions, because it was pursuing the US's pure national interest, countering multilateral institutions and countering the democratic and human rights-based system that we have helped set up. But that is rare. The Biden administration lifted those sanctions after President Biden was elected.
China's economic statecraft on the other hand is purely 100% of the time to uphold its own narrow geopolitical interests such as the sovereignty of Taiwan, fighting the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and of course the genocide in Xinjiang.
It's covering up its human rights abuses, and as I argue in my book, stymying an independent scientific inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. That's what makes it authoritarian–the goals and the interests with which China's economic statecraft is deployed are authoritarian and illiberal.
Federal Newswire:
What are some of these “rules” that are an alternative to the liberal world order?
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian:
The list of Beijing's rules has grown over time, but I'll list what we currently have.
You're obviously not allowed to have a robust relationship with Taiwan. Preferably, you never even use the word Taiwan. If you're a company like an airline, a government, a person on Twitter, anybody at most can say Taipei or Chinese Taipei.
But you can never present Taiwan as being independent, as even having de facto independence or anything remotely close to approaching that.
For Hong Kong, you're not allowed to present the reality on the ground. In Hong Kong there is no such thing now as “one country, two systems.” Beijing directly rules Hong Kong and has extended its authoritarianism there. You certainly can't support the pro-democracy movement there.
Daryl Morey, the former manager of the Houston Rockets, learned this very dramatically when in 2019 he tweeted in support of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests and immediately the Chinese market was totally shut off to the Rockets. It's estimated that the loss of streaming revenue, merchandise, and other kinds cost the NBA at least $200 million. There was pressure applied for him to be fired, and he was not.
What we haven't seen in the past four years is really strong outspoken NBA support for Hong Kong or any other human rights issue in China, with the exception of Enes Kanter, who is no longer with the NBA.
Of course you're not allowed to talk about Xinjiang except to say “hasn't the Chinese Communist Party done a wonderful job there [with] poverty alleviation, the Uyghurs are so happy, yay” which was a dramatic change in 2020.
You look at these things and say “well that's really unfortunate for people from Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, the Taiwanese, but they're a pretty small percentage of the global population–this isn't something that the rest of us really have to worry about.” Now I've always disagreed with that. I've always been passionate about these issues. They are certainly important on their own.
What we saw in 2020 was that more or less the Chinese government added free discussion of the origins of the coronavirus onto that list of core interests that you were not allowed to talk about. That was again made dramatically clear when then-Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, in April 2020 made a call at the UN for there to be an independent inquiry into the origins of the pandemic. Very soon after that, the Chinese government slapped tariffs on a whole range of Australian exports to China which terrified people, because Australia had previously been viewed as being very economically dependent on China.
There are many examples of this, and I would say that another expanding core interest area that you're not allowed to talk about freely…[is] criticizing Huawei and bringing [up that they are] a security risk.
The Chinese government has been incredibly consistent over the [past] 25 years now using its economy to enforce this system of punishment and reward. The result of that is it has been incredibly successful, which is to say every single CEO on the planet who has business interests in China knows that they cannot talk about these things freely. Increasingly in fact, Beijing is requiring people to proactively speak in favor of China's interests.
I'll give a couple of examples.
A couple of years ago in 2020 after the Chinese government imposed the draconian national security law in Hong Kong that wiped out its traditional political freedoms, 54 countries signed on to China's Belt and Road Initiative and benefited from China financially. [They] signed a letter and sent it to the UN Human Rights Commission saying that they approved of China's moves in Hong Kong, everything was great, and that Hong Kong's traditional system was being upheld.
Federal Newswire:
What kind of influence operations have the Chinese been conducting in the US?
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian:
I'll say that the first and last targets and victims of China's extra territorial censorship are overseas Chinese communities, because that’s what China fears. The reason for that is what China fears more than anything else is an overseas pro-democracy movement that ends up seeping back into China, supplanting the power of the Chinese Communist Party.
They're afraid of their own people or even several generations later, of their own people. The Chinese language communities and Chinese communities in the US have been [experiencing] various kinds of suppression.
I'm going to say [there is] an optimistic note here, which is that now the FBI has an office of transnational repression that has been investigating and pursuing many cases of surveillance, harassment, and suppression targeted at Chinese communities in the United States. They've been issuing indictments and arresting people and putting them on trial for acting as agents of the Chinese state and for suppressing and curtailing the democratic rights of people in Chinese communities here. That is really good, because indictments make it public so that we know what's happening.
In a society in which we've seen a huge wave of anti-Asian racism and violence, I think that kind of messaging helps underscore to people that Chinese Americans are, in many cases, the vulnerable members of society, not the people to be feared.
A second point that I'll make is in terms of how China influences American society and narratives through elite capture. This targets Chinese Americans, but I would say much more than that and much more importantly, that it targets anybody of any background as long as they have power and money.
We've talked about the primary mechanism of this, which is access to China's economy and access to perks and prestige. If you look as far back as the 1990’s, it’s emphasized how long China has been doing this.
President Clinton ran on a platform of “butchers of Beijing,” a really tough China platform. Within two years of him taking office, he decided to delink trade and human rights so that the US could have a more robust trade relationship with China.
We know now that he did that under the extensive lobbying of the US business community, because they saw dollar signs. They wanted money, and in any Western capital city in the world it is often the business community that serves as a de facto pro-Beijing lobby.
You can see this so clearly in media interviews with people like Ray Dalio in Germany, the CEO of Volkswagen. You ask them about Xinjiang and they're like “what? I don't know anything about what's going on in Xinjiang.”
Volkswagen has a factory in Xinjiang. Read the headlines, of course they knew, but they're not allowed to talk about it or else it'll cost them money, and they know that.
In my book I talk about how we can push back against this and fight China's economic statecraft.
One key way to do it is to separate the power and money from politics in the US. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do right now in the US, because we're so polarized. But if we could have campaign finance reform, if we could overturn Citizens United...and if we could have fairer registration platforms at the state level, these kinds of things would have a strong impact on how much the business community in the US can influence US politics in a pro-Beijing way.
Federal Newswire:
Do you think that something should be done to shame people who get caught carrying water for the Chinese government?
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian:
I actually totally disagree with that, because transparency has not been functional.
In fact, what we're seeing in the world in general and in the US in particular is that when people have enough incentive to ignore naming and shaming, there's no mechanism to change their behavior.
For example, look at Elon Musk. We all know what's happening in Xinjiang, but he wants access to the EV market in China, and so he opened a showroom in Xinjiang in the middle of all those accusations of genocide, and no one could stop him.
I think that naming and shaming does not work in the long run. What works are laws, and I think we need to have more regulation about what businesses can do, rather than expecting them to be [pure].
We have the richest, most powerful authoritarian one-party state in the world versus individual businesses. Of course those individual businesses are going to kowtow over and over again. It's not reasonable to expect them to do otherwise. What we have to do is through regulations put the power of the US government behind those companies to make it a fair playing field.
Federal Newswire:
How can we go find your book, research, and other commentary?
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian:
Follow me on Twitter @BethanyAllenEbr, and you can go to the Axios website and subscribe to my newsletter, "Axios China." You can go to Amazon and search for “Beijing Rules” to buy my book.
