Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian is an award-winning investigative journalist and geoeconomics expert focused on China’s global influence, foreign policy, trade, and technology. She is currently Head of China Investigations at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Australia’s leading foreign policy think tank, and is based in Taiwan.

Allen-Ebrahimian is the author of Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World(HarperCollins), named by the Financial Times as one of the Best Books of 2023 and long-listed for the FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year. Her reporting is widely recognized for high-impact scoops and deeply sourced investigations that have shaped national and international policy debates.

Previously, she served as China reporter at Axios, where she covered Beijing’s use of economic power to project influence abroad. Before that, she was a staff editor and reporter at Foreign Policy magazine and the lead reporter on the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ “China Cables” project, which exposed the inner workings of mass internment camps in Xinjiang. That work earned multiple major journalism awards, including the Robert D. G. Lewis Watchdog Award, and was a finalist for the Batten Medal for Courage in Journalism.

Her investigations have uncovered Chinese intelligence operations, extraterritorial repression, technology censorship, and covert political and economic influence across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. In 2023, she received a Pulitzer Center reporting grant for her Axios series “China’s Shadow Empires.”

Allen-Ebrahimian has reported extensively from East Asia, Europe, Russia, and the United States, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She is a frequent commentator on NPR, CNN, BBC, C-SPAN, and other international media, and has spoken at leading institutions including the Council on Foreign Relations, CSIS, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and the Atlantic Council.

She holds a Master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Yale University, a graduate certificate from the Johns Hopkins SAIS–Nanjing Center, lived in China for four years, and speaks and reads Chinese fluently.