Decode Beijing's Economic Statecraft — and Act on It

If you work at the intersection of China policy, economic security, and strategic decision-making, you already know the frustration. The volume of analysis on China is enormous — and most of it is either too shallow to act on, too ideologically freighted to trust, or too disconnected from institutional mechanics to explain what Beijing will actually do next.

You can read every major think-tank report published this year and still walk out of a principals meeting unable to answer the question that actually matters: Given what we know about how China's system works, what is the credible range of responses to this move, and what should we do about it?

That gap — between descriptive analysis and actionable strategic framework — is what this seminar exists to close.

I built this curriculum because the professionals I most respect kept running into the same wall. They understood the headlines. They had exposure to the bilateral relationship. What they lacked was a structured analytical architecture: a way to map China's economic security toolbox systematically, assess threat credibility with defensible methodology, and design derisking or deterrence responses that account for the full complexity of the exposure.

So we start with the strategic logic — not as background, but as foundation. Understanding why Beijing equates industrial control with national survival, how the Party-state coordinates economic actors, and where official doctrine diverges from operational reality is not preliminary material. It is the interpretive key to everything that follows. From there, we move through the full architecture of China's instruments — industrial policy, innovation control, coercion mechanisms, sanction-proofing, escalation ladders — and into applied analysis: case studies, exposure diagnostics, derisking frameworks, and the hard questions around red lines and managed competition.

This seminar will not tell you what to think about China. It will give you the tools to think about it more precisely, more completely, and more usefully than you could before. If that is the standard you hold your professional analysis to, I think you will find this worth your time. I hope to see you in the seminar room.