The Lawfare Podcast: China’s Illicit Economies

In the national security world, including on Lawfare, a lot of attention gets paid to China's tech sector and other parts of its economy. Comparatively less attention is paid to China's illicit economies, illegal trade involving China and other countries around the world. But China has been involved in numerous acts of transnational criminal activity with occasionally lax enforcement, and there's a new series of Brookings papers and blog posts about this very subject.

To talk it through. Jacob Schulz sat down with Vanda Felbab-Brown, the director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, and Madiha Afzal, a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. They talked through the project and papers that each of them have written on the subject, including one on illegal wildlife trafficking, one on narcotic precursor trafficking and one on human trafficking.