Earlier this month Taiwan elected Lai Ching-te as its new president. The newly elected president’s support for his country’s independence prompted a sharp rebuke from Beijing, with the Foreign Ministry spokesman saying “whatever changes take place in Taiwan, the basic fact that there is only one China in the world and Taiwan is part of China will not change.” Taiwanese independence is just one point of friction between Taipei and Beijing, but also between Washington and Beijing, the contest between which is increasingly seen as “strategic competition”.
While the United States was focused on Southwest Asia and its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the inexorable rise of China continued uninterrupted. Now, the Chinese Communist Party’s hegemonic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific and growing reach and influence globally are creation tensions between the world’s two-largest economies. Whether this competition remains one of contest or whether it slips into open conflict remains and open question.
Charting Beijing’s rise and increasing global influence is Bethany Allen, the Taipei-based reporter for Axios and author of “Beijing Rules”. Selected as one of the Diplomatic Courier’s best books of the year and long-listed for the Financial Times business book of the year, Allen’s book explores China’s two-decade quest for global dominance and how Beijing’s leaders both coopted and took advantage of Western politicians in pursuit of its goal.
Allen joins CSPC on 25 January to discuss her book, Taiwan’s elections, and the future trajectory of strategic competition between the United States and China with Joshua C. Huminski, the Director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence and Global Affairs. This is an on-the-record conversation at which a light lunch will be provided.
Bethany Allen is the China reporter at Axios. Before joining Axios, she served as the lead reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' China Cables project, a major leak of classified Chinese government documents revealing the inner workings of mass internment camps in Xinjiang. For her work on the China Cables project, Bethany received the Robert D. G. Lewis Watchdog Award. She was previously a staff editor and contributing reporter at Foreign Policy magazine. She holds a masters degree in East Asian studies from Yale University and a graduate certificate from the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. After spending four years in China and eight years in Washington, Bethany is now based in Taipei.