Supplant the current world order. I am cliff may, founder and president and were pleased to have your so im the person some tuning and live for this conversation. In the economic realm the Chinese Communist party bullies companies and governments to follow beijings rules, which benefit china to the detriment of all others. To discuss how the west can resist chinas illiberal influence and safeguard u. S. National security we are proud to be joined by bethany allenebrahimian, china report and also the recent published book beijing rules chinas quest for global influence. Also joining us are liza tobin conceded director for economy at the special competitive studies project, and former china director on the National Security council. And scott kieff the Stephenson Research professor at Gw Law School and found of strategies llc. During the Obama Administration sentiment if confirmed him as commissioner of the u. S. International trade commission. Todays discussion with moderate by craig singleton, senior fellow here at fdd. Before we dive in just a few words about spd. For more than 20 years now fdd has operated a fiercely independent nonpartisan Research Institute exclusively focusio on National Security and foreign policies, appoint both pride and principle. We do not accept foreign funding we never haver and we never wil. For more on a work to visit our website, fdd. Org and follow us on twitter at fdd. Thats enough from me. Craig over to you and panel. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much for the work under docket thank you for joining us today in person or virtually. Lets dive right in. Bethany, its wonderful to hae you back in d. C. , even if just for a few weeks. Many congratulations on your excellent book the night. Was a great summer read. I think all of the sort of devoured it really fast. I want to talk about something that wee talked about for a few years, andt thats the idea tht when china joined the World Trade Organization it was this idea that he was going to become this trustworthy partner in trade, that free markets and democracy were some of inseparable. But if yours, book sort of detas it didnt really work out that way. Yet. I mean i think its understandable. Its easy to look back now for me and say we were so naive. How could wech have granted the Chinese Communist party this kind of the loan of trust . Granting them access based on the promise of future reform, a promise of future behavior. But the 90s was such a decade of optimism. And i think it makes sense to see that perhaps the Chinese Government would have gone the way of moscow, or some of the other come just a wave of democracy we saw. But thats not what happened. So instead we see is that as the chinese economy got more and more integrated with the economs around the world, instead the Chinese Government became very good, they came up with these really innovative, quite creative new levers to pull use all of its economic weight to shape behavior beyond its borders, to shape the decisions of individuals, companies and governments to bring them more in line with the Chinese Communist partys court interest. You could call this a kind of a global authoritarian sanctions regime, although those mechanisms, most of them, are not traditional sanctions. I think its a faceted perspective. Indie book you sort of piece it all together and one of the things you mention in chennai is chinas use of the fact of sanctions, from everything targeting the nba to norwegian fishery industry. Fasting. But you also talk about how sometimes chinas emphasis on money and aid has sort of been counterproductive to think is interesting because there theres a narrative out there that china is winning over all of these countries. What does it look like in places like africa . Yeah. So i just got back from a trip in july to tanzania and what y chapters is not ethiopia. Ill run through my takeaways from my chapter that ethiopia. The world health organization, ahead of it is oh, dear. Back at the beginning of the pandemic and the Trump Administration supercritical of him because he seemed to echo beijings talking points about the pandemic or. Key phrase the response right in the middle of the Chinese Governments basically cover of this. It was really striking. And so people talked about his background as ethiopia is Health Minister peer but actually what i look to i him about and what i think is a lot more relevant for how his initial reaction to the pandemic of the head of the w. H. O. Was his role of ethiopia has foreign minister which position he held from around 20122016 african years right, and, in fact, when he was foreign minister of ethiopia that was the peak, the pinnacle of ethiopia is close relationship with china. They still have close relationship with china but his job as foreign minister was to steward the close relationship with beijing. And in 2014 he went to beijing and he had, he jointly announced with his chinese counterpart a comprehensive, a new, alerting little above thehe relationship, comprehensive strategic partnership. He was himself raise politically in a oneparty state in ethiopia and thats howow he relayed that to beijing that paper looky the Chinese Government was really reaching out, ethiopia giving them tons of infrastructure and assistance, really answer decades doing that, it shape his behavior and his approach to china because he knew that he had, he couldnt criticize him them publicly. Thats what we see in his, and how he guided the w. H. O. I think an early months of the pandemic that was, and it was obviously the wrong decision but i think emotionally harmful way that he couldnt be honest about what was happening in china. But, heres the place where it changes. That eventually didnt work. I dont actually think that ted gross rose is an agent of china. I think that he was shaped by his longstanding relationship with beijing to try to get his weight in a way that they could accept. Whats encouraging about this is that when it didnt work, with the w. H. O. Was not able to get scientist indochina for independent mission to understand origins of the coronavirus, and when he became more critical of china and actually censored him, his work in china he changed his pack, he changed his tactics. He ended up being more independent than certainly the Chinese Government wanted him to be. At so whats the big take away here . Yes, the Chinese Government can throw money at people. Can throw all kinds of loans and assistance as Foreign Governments and i can often work. But it doesnt always work because there are independent institutions and at the end of the day Foreign Government individuals actors they have the own agency and they are not chinese citizens. Predictablealways how chinas influence strategies will work out. I think thats encouraging for the u. S. Is not to give up, to continue to try to engage. Thats a great point and you mention your trip to africa. I needed this great exclusive about the establishment t of ccp Party Schools in different parts of the world, tanzania be an example in judah and start to the rhetoric reinforce and sort of amplify about this ideology infused order and how its taking hold in parts of the global south, highly encourage able to check out that the recent exclusive and axios. Itwa was great and im not sure you were able to go to tanzania again anytime soon hopefully your passport and a go. I want to bring in our other panelist. Liza and scott thank you for joining us. Its great to have you here. Bethany is a book i think paint some pretty stark image of what you call and above the stern chinese brute force economics. I love that phrase. Im going to start distillate i think in the think tank world. We both worked in government. We are both out of government now. Are you a little more optimistic or less optimistic of the sort of, on this issue now that you were out. Thanks so much for having me here, craig. This is a great event on the feel really lucky to be sitting next to anthony winter book he met in early august i downloaded on my phone right away and listen to it on my commute and got through it really quickly because what bethany got so many things right and i think this issue of chinas economic coercion and the weaponization of the economy has been getting growing attention in washington and around the world over the last 10 years, probably since they fired that first shot against japan in 2011 with the rare earths export incident. But i think bethany very skillfully avoids a couple of traps and tropes that are true of a lot of the analysis out there of either on the one side people often paint china with a rureally broad brush and kind of put, you know, basically attach the same level of skepticism to any kind of Economic Activity or entity, out of china. And so that of course isnt right. On the other side failing to acknowledge the longterm strategy that the ccp has been pursuing for a long time to achieve global dominance. I think bethany does a fantastic job of not falling into either trap and getting a really vivid an accurate depiction of the problem that neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic. Another thing xi gets right is acknowledging that in the United States we have used economic coercion as well and given a very careful assessment of how our use of economic coercion and economic power is similar or different to beijings, without falling into the trap of what about is him that kind pervades a lot of the analysis out there. So butue did get to your questi, i more optimistic. I left government almost two years ago and when youre in policy, you spin may be 90 of your time in bandwidth staring at really big problems very close up picture kind oft right up against your nose and the toolkit thatee you have availabe often seems much too small, much to finite, and these policy tools, trade tools, diplomacy, other things often seem kind of clunky and not wellsuited to this large complexation of chinas weaponization. Since leaving government i have had the opportunity to engage a lot more with thete private sector, particularly technologists who are doing really exciting things. Im getting just a couple of points of encouragement are, i think theres been a real seachange in a couple of the major Power Centers in the u. S. Economy. So if you kind of break it down for a statistically, main street, wall street and Silicon Valley. I think a s main street and Silicon Valley there is now a broad recognition of this challenge, and companies and investors and technologies just aree starting to make this into their play. Theres a lot more work to do, but id say especially on the third power center, wall street, where they still need to be brought along and sort of aligned with the national interest. But that is an encouraging shift over a few years ago. And then also kind of getting back to that small, clunky, find that government took it in a private sector theres just so much exciting work being done to find workarounds to some of these challenges like the dependence we have on china for processing critical minerals. Its a really thorny challenge but companies are out there doing interesting things on recycling rare earths that we have writer, developing alternatives toah lithium and things of that nature. Told agree. Its fascinating because when we both think of it you think you have this buffet of policy options, but because you are literally drinking from the firehose every single day, i think its sort of, it sort of limits our ability to think about new tools that didnt work, didnt exist in the cold war when you talk about Great Power Competition and the ruled of technology in this debate. We have to start to sort of expand open applicable bit. Scott, i want to turn to a little bit because youve had the opportunity to see this both in government many years in government but also in the academic domain at George Washington university where ua professor. You will really i think at the front of the line blending your experience both in tack and law to talk about chinese law fair and how the chinese are sorted using courts and particularly even patent courts to their advantage. I was wondering how do you see law fair fitting into beijing rules . Thank you so much for bringing us together for this conversation and congratulations on the work you all are doing, and congratulations to our great author on this great book. You know, i think as we all struggle together with the topics weve been discussing so far, it gives us a a chance to remember a few things. We cant emotionally and intellectually tolerate, we can hold, we can survive, we can maybe even thrive with just a little bit of complexity, that things dont have to be all of one or all of another. And so i think that the question you are asking gives us a chance to get a little more comfortable with the discomfort in the middle on some things. So whatt do i mean by that . Heres an example. One could hold at the same time two ideas. You can walk and chew gum. We could be huge fans of the Chinese People. We could be optimistic about the chinese country and government, and fine in its past and hope for in its future with good reasons, lots of opportunity to collaborate. While at the same time observing what a socalled hawk would observe, a serious present threat backed up, demonstrated by significant, dangerous to us behavior, and spoken about openly by their government, sometimes its okay when someone is acting against your interests, showing you that theyre acting against your interests, telling you that there deliberately acting against your interests. Sometimes its okay to take them at the word, to believe them. Thats okay. We can believe people. So we can look at another middle zone. It is true, it is good for everyone that the chinese professional bureaucrats in their courts, in their agencies, the courts and agencies that wrestle with important technologies like biotech. We had a pandemic. Ai, machine learning, data science. We live in a hightech world. Also lowtech, lithium, copper. And everything in between. These professional commercial oriented tribunals are becoming in very good and powerful ways topnotch worldclass in the way they use legal rules, in the way they use economic analysis, in the way they function professionally as lawyers, judges and administrators. And they are also becoming much more fair in the sense that they come in a typical lawsuit between party a and part b, will these days pay much less attention to the identities of party a court party b, and favor one over the other, even if one is a nonChinese Party a work party b and the other is a Chinese Party a work party b. Well, that all sounds really great, but you could applaud all ofd that and still want to avoid those tribunals like the plague, if you do business outside of china and would like to keep your information, your ip productive to you. Why is that . Well, throughout the u. S. , european, korean, japanese, indian, central and south american, african, southeast asian, middle east north african regions, thats a lot of the world, Court Systems and agencies operate, generally, to varying degrees of success. We are not perfect, with a bunch of fairly enforced, reasonably enforced rules. For example, if a judge in the u. S. Court while hearing a case between two parties learns that something about party a a war party b would be relevant to the fda, or the sdc or even the doj, that law clerk for that judge or that staff in the judges chambers will, in fact, be punished if they pick up the phone and call the other agency. If that judge or that law clerk trades on that information, they can go to jail for that and with lots of cases where individual Court Employees are, in fact, called out by name and powerfully sanctioned for picking up the phone and doing that. F great powers, competition and under a system of civil fusion, are quite openly, demonstrably, powerfully reminded that. If they dont make that phone call, they go to jail or worse, and their family too and everyone they know and, you know, consequences tend to drive outcomes. So it shouldnt surprise us that generally in us Court Systems, cour generally british Court Systems and so forth, korean, japanese, theres lots of but in chinese systems, theres a whole lot of so we have to live with those realities in our mind and not take it personally and not make it personal. Its not that there is no opportunity for future positive engagement with china the chinese economy and government but we have to be careful. We have to observe the real operating environment we are in with them. The things they control and behaviors they demonstrate and the words they tell us about tthose demonstrated behaviors, its okay to believe what we see and what they say. Its interesting your comments, its not just what chinas legal system is doing at the borders. Extrajudicial that s applied to not just chinese citizens abroad. But the chinese diaspora, its sort of abroad. And so i think the evolution that weve sort of watched in hong kong is really demonstrated relative of this. Sometimes, sometimes fast sort of push and pull. And in your book, you do give a great chapter on sort of hong kong and extrajudicial question. How do you sort of see this policy inside of china playing out in practice in places . Hong kong yeah. So the National Security law when it was, it was the text of the draft the text of the law was released the same moment it was implemented shining example of democracy. There. And it was i cant remember it was june was it june 1st or may 31st. July july 1st right around there 2020. And it was midnight in hong kong, but it was noon in dc, which is where i was and it dropped right at noon for me. And i remember through the that, you know, text of the law and b