Taipei, Taipei City, Taiwan
I am an award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent, and author of "Beijing Rules," named by the Financial Times as a Best Business Book of 2023. I currently lead the China investigations and analysis team at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Australia's premier foreign policy think tank. I focus on trade, technology, economy, and national security. I have a long track record of publishing high-impact scoops and enterprise that have launched government investigations, effected major policy changes, and been cited in official genocide designations. I previously served for 4 years as the China reporter at Axios, where I focused on how China projects power and influence beyond its own borders. Before that, I was an editor and writer at Foreign Policy magazine. My book "Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World" (HarperCollins), was listed by the Financial Times as a Best Book of 2023 and was also long-listed for the FT-Schroders Business Book of the Year award. In 2023 I received a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting to fund a series at Axios called "China's Shadow Empires," which included reporting trips to Tanzania, Okinawa and Micronesia. Before joining Axios, I 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 my work on the China Cables project, I received the Robert D. G. Lewis Watchdog Award, the top prize awarded annually by the Society of Professional Journalists DC Dateline Awards, as well as the Investigative Journalism prize in the online category. The China Cables project was also a finalist for the Batten Medal for Courage in Journalism. I have also reported from Russia, Germany, Austria, Tanzania, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, China, Taiwan, Japan, and Indonesia. I was a 2017 Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Germany and a 2016 Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii. I previously spent 4 years in China and 8 years in Washington, DC. I hold a masters degree in East Asia Studies from Yale University and a graduate certificate from the Johns Hopkins SAIS-Nanjing Center. I speak and read Chinese fluently. I am currently based in Taiwan. You can reach me at bethany.allen AT protonmail.com. Check out highlights from my work here. http://bethanyallenebrahimian.com/
I run the China investigations team at ASPI, Australia's premier foreign policy think tank. My team falls under ASPI's Cyber, Technology, and Security Program. Our China investigations team is one of the best OSINT teams in the world, and for years has published ground-breaking reports that have resulted in sweeping policy changes in governments across North America, Europe, and Oceania.
I covered China for Axios, focusing on how China projects power and influence beyond its borders.
I served as ICIJ's lead reporter for the China Cables, a trove of highly classified Chinese government documents which revealed the inner workings of China's detention camps in Xinjiang and the high-tech security state it has built there. In this role, I worked together with over 75 reporters from 17 media outlets in 14 countries. For this project, I received the Robert D. G. Lewis Watchdog Award, the top prize awarded annually by the Society of Professional Journalists DC Dateline Awards.
As a contributing reporter at FP, I published a ground-breaking investigative series that uncovered covert Chinese government influence operations in the United States, at universities, think tanks, media outlets, and student organizations. Before that, I covered China for FP's China channel Tea Leaf Nation, where I worked as an assistant editor frequently writing articles for the website.
I worked as a teaching assistant in Yale's Chinese language department — an extremely rare position for a non-native speaker to hold, as the department usually hired only native Chinese speakers from a large pool of mainland Chinese student candidates to serve as teaching fellows. The department hired me for my excellent pronunciation and grasp of the language, combined with my empathetic ability to explain the language to second-language learners.