"China’s Economic Statecraft and the US Response" - by CWP alum Audrye Wong
Economic interdependence has facilitated China’s use of economic statecraft—the manipulation of trade or investment ties for political purposes. Globalization and China’s integration in the world economy certainly brought about many material benefits and enabled more rapid growth for many countries, China included; at the same time, increasing strategic concerns and great-power competition have sharpened the policy dilemmas of managing China’s geoeconomic heft alongside continued economic openness. This chapter focuses on Beijing’s use of positive inducements, analyzing the choices and effectiveness of such tools, before turning to assess the scope and impacts of US policy responses. While China’s economic statecraft has altered the strategic calculations for many countries and could have far-reaching implications for the trajectory of great-power competition, Chinese influence is not a foregone conclusion. Beijing has encountered considerable pushback and often shot itself in the foot. At the same time, the diffuse benefits of economic interdependence—that often arise quite naturally—remain a powerful draw that requires Washington to offer concrete alternative or complementary economic opportunities. US-led investment initiatives have ramped up in recent years, providing a promising multilateral basis to change the economic statecraft landscape, but the ability of the US to stay in the game
Audrye Wong is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she is focusing on China’s foreign policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, economic statecraft, and how authoritarian states use informational tools to alter public discourse and shape political processes in democracies—what she calls “informational statecraft.” Concurrently she is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California.
Previously, Dr. Wong was a Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Postdoctoral Fellow in a joint program of the Harvard Kennedy School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program. She has also held affiliations with Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Wilson Center, the Brookings Institution, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is fluent in Mandarin.
Dr. Wong is working on a book on the strategies and effectiveness of economic inducements, as well as other projects on China’s overseas propaganda and foreign influence activities. She has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals and the popular press, including in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, Asian Security, the China Quarterly, Project Syndicate, and Foreign Affairs.
Dr. Wong received a PhD in security studies from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her MA and AB are also from Princeton.
Photo Credit: Lessons from the New Cold War - Brands, Hal Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
