Company Details

• Description  :   Strategy Risks works with companies, financial institutions, and nonprofits to help them quantify and manage their risk exposure. The company was founded in 2021 and is based in New York, United States.
• Industry :   Business Services
• Location :   New York, NY, USA
• Employee Count :   1 - 50

Strategy Risks' Top Executives

• Isaac Stone Fish  /   Founder And Chief Executive Officer
  • • Isaac founded Strategy Risks because he believes firms and institutions need to better understand, manage and reduce their China risk. He shares these perspectives and insights as a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, an on-air contributor to CBSNews, a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a columnist on China risk at Barron’s. Previously Isaac served as a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, Foreign Policy magazine’s Asia Editor, and as a Beijing correspondent for Newsweek. He has also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Politico, The Daily Beast, and Time, and served as an international affairs analyst for PRI’s The World. His views on China have been quoted in most major English language news outlets, and in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese media.
    • Isaac lived in China for seven years, speaks fluent Mandarin, and has visited every Chinese province, special autonomous region, and municipality. His book, America Second: How America’s Elites Are Making China Stronger, on the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in America – and how to push back without being racist or McCarthyist – was published in February 2022. An adjunct at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Truman National Security Project fellow, Isaac is a regular speaker and lecturer at conferences and events around the world.
• Roxanne Khazarian   /   Chief Legal Officer
  • • Roxanne Khazarian is a senior legal, risk management, investment and finance and licensing executive with years of success as an in-house business partner across a global platform and a diverse range of industries. She has served on non-profit boards and supported boards for public companies, including in her roles as SVP, General Counsel at Gibson Guitar, and as General Counsel & Secretary of Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. She has also consulted for private equity, SaaS, sports, entertainment and lifestyle ventures and start-ups, a VC backed SaaS provider and private equity owned healthcare finance start-up.
    • Previously, she was the General Counsel of Gerald Holdings LLC, a $10 billion a year international commodities trader and financing house based in Stamford, Connecticut. In this role, she was responsible for legal support for day-to-day operations and structured trade, financing and development projects worldwide generated through the US headquarters office and its subsidiary and associated offices in the UK, Switzerland, China, Hong Kong, Russia and Singapore among others.
• Piper Lounsbury   /   Chief Operating Officer
  • • Piper is the Chief Research and Development Officer at Strategy Risks. For over 25 years, Piper has advised CEOs of multinational companies and start-ups, U.S. government officials and members of Congress, investors, and non-profit leaders on the business implications of working with China. Piper has over ten years of experience working within China leading diverse research and consulting teams, most recently as Executive Director of United Technologies and head of its China operation. She has held various management roles in high-tech companies such as The Boeing Company and served for several years at the U.S.- China Business Council in both Washington, DC and Beijing, China.
    • Piper graduated from Middlebury College and received her MBA from Norwich University. She is highly-proficient in Mandarin Chinese.
• Melissa Chen   /   Managing Director
  • • • Melissa Chen is the Managing Director overseeing investor relations at Strategy Risks. Having co-founded Ideas Beyond Borders and FAIR, she brings six years of experience in fundraising, development, and non-profit management to her new role. In 2022, she co-chaired the finance committee for Michael Shellenberger’s run for governor of California.
      • She is also a contributing editor at The Spectator (World edition), writing a column that focuses on China, geopolitics, and human rights violations, and has appeared on Fox News, Sky News, The Joe Rogan Experience, Reason TV, The John Stossel Show etc., to bring attention to the true nature of the CCP and the complicity of American corporations and institutions in abetting the rise of a geopolitical rival that continues to erode civil liberties in Hong Kong, threaten Taiwan and repress the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
      • Melissa previously worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a genome researcher after reading computational biology at Boston University. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Ideas Beyond Borders, Environmental Progress and the Lifeboat Foundation.

HONG KONG — Charlie Custer, a filmmaker and blogger, is back in the United States. Left China. Couldn’t take it any more. Bad air. Unsafe food. And there was a nasty-scary spat with a government journalist.

Mark Kitto, a Welshman and a resident of China for 16 years, he’s going, too. “I won’t be rushing back either,” he says. “I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream.”

The artist Ai Weiwei cannot leave. The authorities won’t let him. After his studio was demolished in Shanghai, he relocated to Beijing, which he calls “a city of violence.”

“You will see migrants’ schools closed,” he said of Beijing in a Newsweek essay last year. “You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches — and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence. 

“This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.”

And China’s nightmare-cities are expanding. There are now more than 40 Chinese cities with populations over a million. In a dozen years, there will be more than 220 such cities, according to McKinsey projections cited in a new Foreign Policy series on China’s urban woes.

Tales from weary, wheezing expatriates might be written off by many Chinese as so much spoiled-Westerner whining. And the rants of a famously cranky artist might well be easily dismissed. But anecdotal evidence is evidence, too. (For some less subjective evidence on air quality, however, one need only consult the hourly readings from the monitoring station at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The latest one is below.) 

Domestic protests against environmental insults are growing — there were two large and bloody riots last month alone — and many Chinese with the means to do so are heading for the hills. Literally. Our colleague Didi Kirsten Tatlow, in a recent lament about Beijing’s air and water pollution, said wealthy Beijingers are buying getaway homes in the fresh-aired mountains outside the capital. 

Shi Yigong, a molecular biologist who left Princeton University in 2008 to return to Beijing, complained in a blog post last December that air pollution was the single “most upsetting and painful thing” about life in China. 

Beijing, meanwhile, is hardly the worst of China’s urban centers. Isaac Stone Fish, an associate editor at Foreign Policy who has lived, studied and traveled widely in China, singles out Harbin for particular scorn. Harbin’s population: a mere 6 million.

Mr. Stone Fish bemoans the “soulless apartment blocks and the creepy concrete dormitories” that surround the Harbin Institute of Technology. Underground bomb shelters have been turned into massive shopping malls. “The post offices, banks, and counterfeit DVD stores looked like run-down versions of the ones in Beijing.” The city has not renamed Stalin Park. 

And for $8, Mr. Stone Fish says, your guide at Harbin’s Siberian Tiger Park will lob a chicken at the waiting tigers. “For $300, he’ll release a cow.”

Mr. Custer, well-known to daily China-watchers for his posts on the ChinaGeeks and Tech in Asia blogs, has just finished filming a documentary about Chinese children who are kidnapped and sold. (The trailer for the film, “Living With Dead Hearts,” is here.)

In his farewell post, he says there are (unexplained) personal reasons behind his departure, but he also cites air pollution and uncertain food safety. He insists a recent dispute with Yang Rui, a high-profile and well-connected news anchor for CCTV, China’s state television network, did not prompt his departure.

Mostly, Mr. Custer has been unhappy with the air and the food in Beijing. Here is an excerpt from his essay, slightly condensed for space:

• It’s almost cliché to complain about the air quality in Beijing; it’s terrible and everyone knows it. People here just deal as best they can. Some wear masks outside, and those wealthy enough buy expensive air filters for their homes. Most people just grin and breathe it. I wore masks from time to time, but for the most part, I just breathed it in, too. 

• The other big reason — and this applies to all of China, really — is food safety. Things have simply gotten to the point that it’s impossible to feel confident that what you’re eating is healthy, or even real, unless you’re on a farm.

• Buying only imported food is a solution, but it’s a highly expensive one; above my means, and above the means of the vast majority of Chinese. 

• Of course, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t affected by China’s political situation. For someone who truly believes China would be better served by a system that afforded its people, at the very least, a free press and the true rule of law, this has been a depressing couple of years. Depressing, soul-crushing and occasionally terrifying. 

• But if I’m honest with myself, even with the political situation, I really think I’d be staying in Beijing if I felt like I could breathe safely.

“You’ll Never Be Chinese,” Mr. Kitto’s illuminating essay in Prospect magazine, recounts his efforts to build businesses in China, projects that led to run-ins with ruthless competitors, various courts and corrupt bureaucracies. He also decries a worsening political and social climate in China.

But he says there is “one overriding reason I must leave China. I want to give my children a decent education.” 

Schools in China “do not produce well-rounded, sociable, self-reliant young people with inquiring minds,” he writes. “They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take ‘business studies.’ Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.”

In his evaluation of life in urban China, Mr. Ai is concerned most with the diminishing green spaces, an eroded sense of community and a lack of fresh political air. 

“Where is the humanity in Beijing?” says Mr. Ai in a new interviewwith Jonathan Landreth. “Who can remember the corner where he went to school, or can touch a particular old piece of wall? Can you remember anything here? There’s nothing left.” 

Still, the burly artist seems to have found a kind of sanctuary.

“Twitter is my city,” he says, “my favorite city.”

HONG KONG — China was at the center of one of the harshest exchanges during the U.S. presidential debate on Tuesday night, with President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, both flashing their tough-on-Beijing credentials. But the politician who really knows about China was not on the stage, although he had tried to be.

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who campaigned for the Republican nomination, has solid connections to both candidates: He served as the U.S. ambassador to China under Mr. Obama until April 2011, and when Mr. Huntsman abandoned his campaign in January, he immediately endorsed Mr. Romney.

As they prep and role-play for their final debate, both candidates might do well to recruit Mr. Huntsman to get a lay of the land on China. The debate, set for Monday in Boca Raton, Florida, will focus on foreign policy issues, with China one of the selected topics. 

In a fascinating new interview with Isaac Stone Fish of Foreign Policy magazine, Mr. Huntsman was asked about the differences between the two candidates in their approach to China. 

“Well, they differ in some senses in the levers of power that are being pulled,” he said. “I think Obama has chosen more the soft levers of power, and Romney is at least articulating some of the hard levers of power, where in reality, we need a combination of both. 

“During campaign season, you never want to talk about anything except the hard levers of power. But we’re also trying to get over 10 years of war in the Middle East that have set us back enormously economically and diplomatically, and in terms of loss of life. And that’s a reality that we’re not having a conversation about.”

Mr. Huntsman told Mr. Stone Fish that China had canceled his visa as he was preparing to travel there last month to make a speech. After the interview was published, however, Mr. Huntsman’s office on Thursday sent this statement: “The governor’s invitation to speak, not his visa, was rescinded for political reasons. The governor misspoke in the interview, citing a canceled visa when he meant to say canceled invitation.” 

“Why? Because I talk too much about human rights and American values, and they know that,” Mr. Huntsman, who speaks Mandarin, said in the interview. “And at a time of leadership realignment, the biggest deal in 10 years for them, they didn’t want the former U.S. ambassador saying stuff that might create a narrative that they would have to fight. I understand that. 

“But when the transition is done, the crazy American ambassador will be let back in, and I can say whatever I want. As they used to tell me when I was over there was ‘Women zhongguo ye you zhengzhi’ — ‘We have politics too in China.’ ”

Mr. Huntsman said he was subsequently approved for entry to attend a board meeting in China. 

A condensed excerpt from Mr. Stone Fish’s interview:

• Q:   Put yourself in the shoes of the moderator at the upcoming foreign-policy debate on Oct. 22. What do you think he should ask about China? 

• A:   What are the core philosophical drivers that inform the thinking of the candidates? What are our national interests at play? How do we maximize our position in the Asia-Pacific region, understanding that China is the centerpiece geographically. And fourth, given that it is the relationship of the 21st century, how do we intend to sustain the cyclicality that is inherent in a large, complicated relationship? 

• Q:   Are you surprised that China hasn’t become a bigger issue in the campaign? 

• A:   Beyond it being used as a political tool rhetorically, we’ve had very little talk of China at a time when we ought to be having a substantive conversation, because it is the relationship that will matter the most in the 21st century. 

• Q:   What’s your understanding of what Chinese officials think about all this rhetoric and what’s behind it? Do they see this as one of the downsides of democracy, or of Americans playing into the fears of American decline? 

• A:   I think it’s happened for so long that they’ve grown to expect it during the election season. I think it affected them more in the earlier years, but now they’ve grown accustomed to the political cycle, just as we’ve grown accustomed to the leadership cycles in China, where they do the same thing to us. We just have a bigger megaphone. And they tend to be a little more sensitive, because face still matters a whole lot in terms of human interaction. 

The current U.S. ambassador to China, Gary F. Locke, revealed Wednesday that he had traveled last month to a Tibetan area of western China where “dozens of Tibetans disaffected with Chinese rule have set themselves on fire,” as my colleague Edward Wong reported. 

Mr. Locke visited two Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Aba Prefecture of Sichuan Province. He went there, he told The Times, “to see it for myself.”

The visit, which came during a wider trip to Chongqing, was noteworthy if only for the fact that Beijing permitted it. The area is tightly controlled by Chinese security forces and the issue of Tibetan autonomy and Buddhist activism is a highly sensitive one for Beijing. 

Mr. Locke only revealed his trip on Wednesday. And for those belonging to the there-are-no-coincidences-in-politics school of thought, it was five years ago on Wednesday — Oct. 17, 2007 — that the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington. 

The award was met with fury and outrage from Beijing, and one senior official called it a “farce.” The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who has lived in exile since 1959, is particularly reviled by the leadership in Beijing. 

President George W. Bush attended the elaborate ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda and called the Dalai Lama “a man of faith and sincerity and peace.” 

• Correction: October 19, 2012 :   A previous version of this post cited a remark -- in a verbatim interview published by Foreign Policy magazine -- that was made by the former ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr., saying that his visa to China had been canceled due to political reasons. After the interview was published, Mr. Huntsman's office sent this revision of his remarks: "The governor's invitation to speak, not his visa, was rescinded for political reasons. The governor misspoke in the interview, citing a canceled visa when he meant to say canceled invitation." The Rendezvous post and headline have been revised to include and reflect Mr. Huntsman's statement. 

HONG KONG — According to a Chinese article widely circulated on the Internet, the Obama-Xi summit meeting last weekend has made Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan jealous. Published in People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, the article crows that President Xi Jinping got a two-day informal meeting with President Obama, while Abe’s visit to Washington in February resulted in only a “lunch reception.”

The People’s Daily is not the only Chinese media outlet to play up the angle of Japan losing ground after the summit. Du Ping, a prominent Chinese commentator, told Phoenix TV of Hong Kong that the meeting in California made Japan worried that Obama and Xi “would reach a secret” agreement on the fate of the disputed islands in the East China Sea that Japan administers but Beijing claims as Chinese territory. An article on the Chinese news Web site The Observer was even blunter: “Japan worries the United States will betray it,” and change its stance on the islands, which China calls the Diaoyu and Japan calls the Senkaku.

Of course, Chinese media commentary needs to be taken with a big dose of skepticism. Nevertheless, behind the speculation about Tokyo’s miffed feelings over American-Chinese relations lie the realities of diplomatic horse-trading and the evolving demands of realpolitik. Japan has reason to be concerned that the Obama-Xi summit weakened the U.S. commitment to defending Japan, especially over the tiny islets.

In recent years, China has become increasingly aggressive in the waters to its south and east, areas that are outside of what has traditionally been its territory. Beijing has claimed ownership over a wide area of the South China Sea, including maritime and island territories claimed by five Southeast Asian nations and Taiwan. Chinese military ships have come dangerously close to firing on a Japanese naval vessel in waters near the Senkaku. The U.S. pivot to Asia, announced in late 2011, reassured many of China’s neighbors of America’s dedication to the region, yet China seems unwilling to back down on its territorial claims.

The summit meeting raised many questions about whether Washington’s support for Japan trumps other regional interests. Will the United States continue to support Japan in its battle over a small group of islands in the East China Sea?

After the summit, the outgoing U.S. national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, told reporters that Obama pushed Xi to de-escalate tensions in the East China Sea, stating that “the parties should seek to have conversations about this through diplomatic channels and not through actions.” That’s far less encouraging than reiterating that the islands fall under the U.S.-Japan security treaty obligations, as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel did in April. (Hagel also repeated that the United States “does not take a position on the ultimate sovereignty of the islands.”)

Perhaps more importantly, would the United States trade its unfettered support of Japan for support from China on dealing with North Korea? The idea is not as outlandish as it may sound. Obama appeared to further convince Xi on the need to rein in Pyongyang. Is protecting a group of small islands in the East China Sea more important than preventing North Korea from being able to shoot missiles at the United States?

The Chinese media, like the American press, used this summit as a chance to reminisce on the short list of past breakthrough meetings between the two countries — Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, for example, and Deng Xiaoping’s goodwill visit to the United States in 1979. The People’s Daily article, however, focused on how these summits lessened American support for Japan.

Such “alliance predicaments,” as the article calls them, are not limited to Japan. Nixon’s rapprochement with China, for example, set off an intense and eventually unsuccessful call for Washington to stand by its Cold War ally Taiwan instead of recognizing China.

If China does seize the Diaoyu islands, it wouldn’t be the first time in recent history that it seized the territory of a U.S. ally. China already de facto administers the Scarborough Shoal, roughly 200 miles from Manila, which until 2012 belonged to the Philippines. After a two-month standoff, Washington brokered a deal for both sides to withdraw — but the Chinese didn’t honor it.

In a German Marshall Fund conference last weekend in Tokyo attended by high-ranking current and former Japan government officials, the consensus was that America would not go to war with China over the Philippines. And according to a January Congressional Research Service report, the United States is obligated to defend the Senkaku islands because they are administered by Japan. At the conference Satoshi Morimoto, Japan’s defense minister from July to December 2012, told me that he fears Chinese sailors will land on the island and plant a Chinese flag, staking claim to the territory.

In an interview last year, I asked a former high-ranking administration official if the United States would defend Taiwan in the face of a Chinese attack. “That’s what it’s useful for them to believe,” he told me, adding that it was “profoundly important” that the United States manage the relationship to not allow it to reach that point. His answer holds true for the Senkaku as well.

If China does seize the islands and puts them under de facto Chinese control, would the United States risk a war to take them back?

Isaac Stone Fish is an associate editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

The Chinese Communist Party manipulates its statistics. This is neither an opinion nor a revelation: it’s a simple fact, critical to understanding China today. Chairman Xi Jinping demands that Chinese journalists prioritize loyalty to the Party over truth or accuracy. Li Keqiang, who now runs China’s economy as the premier, once smilingly told the U.S. ambassador that most Chinese statistics are “for reference only,” and that statistics on gross domestic product especially are “man-made.”

Up until a few months ago, this felt like a domestic Chinese issue. Sure, American investment firms have always struggled with finding accurate data. American journalists have sometimes repeated misleading Chinese statistics. But the stakes are far higher today. American media outlets should add an asterisk after Chinese statistics, to inform readers that the numbers they are reading cannot be verified, and should therefore be questioned.

Why? In the coronavirus era, Chinese statistics endanger Americans. The coronavirus outbreak originated in China, and the country faced the earliest and possibly the worst ravaging from the disease. Misunderstanding the speed at which coronavirus spread in China and the current rate of infection there impairs understanding of how the disease affects Americans. Major American news outlets such as the The Post have done an excellent job covering China and the coronavirus. And yet, just over the past week, major outlets — including, among others, Reuters, The Post and Bloomberg — have occasionally reported Chinese statistics without mentioning or even implying their unreliability.

A March 18 New York Times piece about Chinese soft power claimed that daily cases in China were “dwindling into the single digits,” while a March 27 Wall Street Journal article averred that the United States had overtaken China in confirmed cases — to name but two examples. By promoting Chinese statistics, American news outlets are unwittingly spreading Chinese propaganda and bolstering Beijing’s claim that it should serve as a global model to the world.

I propose that American publications affix an asterisk at the end of any sentence that relies on a Chinese statistic. It’s only a small distraction, and it reminds readers to interrogate the information they’re reading. Publications could choose to institute the convention across their stories, or they could only do so where it matters the most to readers today: in coronavirus coverage. Instead of headlines blaring “U.S. Virus Cases Top World,” for example, editors could temper the hyperbole with “U.S. Virus Cases Top World.*” A note at the bottom of the article could provide the context: The Party often manipulates statistics, and with the worsening media environment in China, the publication cannot in good faith claim that U.S. virus cases surpass China’s.

How do we know China’s coronavirus statistics are inaccurate? Consider one egregious example. In northwest China’s region of Xinjiang, authorities claim that by April 5, a total of only 76 people have contracted the disease, and only three have died, in a population of roughly 24.5 million. On the same day, the United States reported a total of 304,826 cases and 7,616 deaths among 331 million people. In other words, Beijing claims that, on a per capita basis, roughly 300 times as many people have contracted the disease, and more than 180 times as many have died, in the United States than in Xinjiang. Everything is possible. But claiming that the region where an estimated 1 million Muslims are imprisoned in concentration camps is far safer from the coronavirus than the United States strains credulity.

Chinese statistics are growing more and more untrustworthy. Over the past two months, Beijing has moved against the two foreign groups that provide the most accurate auditing of the Party’s numbers. After moving against the Wall Street Journal in February, Beijing decided to expel nearly all of the American journalists from the Wall Street Journal, The Post and the New York Times. (Disclosure: Some of the expelled journalists are my friends.)

In early April, the Foreign Ministry also urged foreign diplomats to stay away from Beijing. While diplomats rarely publicly disclose the information they receive, they act as important sources for foreign journalists in China and as crucial transmitters of information about China to their home country. The expulsions have a ripple effect. They remind people in the Party bureaucracy, and in Chinese companies and media outlets, of the dangers of divulging sensitive information to foreigners. And they serve as a warning to the remaining diplomats and journalists that probing too deeply could get one chastised or expelled.

The asterisk could be a permanent change. Or it could be a temporary measure, as it also serves as a reminder of the Party’s treatment of American journalists. The Post, the Times and the Journal can maintain this style convention until Beijing reinstates their journalists. Other news outlets can join in solidarity as well, until Beijing reinstates the visas and welcomes the journalists back. The return of the American reporters won’t necessarily improve the quality of Chinese statistics. But it will serve as a signal from Beijing that it values at least some accountability, and it will improve the quality of the information those papers publish about China, rendering the asterisk less needed.

There’s already enough distrust in the United States about the quality of American reporting. Why not add an asterisk — and remind people that facts matter?

On Jan. 14, Chinese state media published a letter from Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping to Starbucks chairman emeritus Howard Schultz that some could interpret as an open-minded plea for help. “I hope Starbucks will make active efforts to promote China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation and the development of bilateral relations,” Xi wrote. For U.S. business leaders with large exposures to China — Starbucks has more than 4,700 stores there — what’s wrong with promoting cooperation?

A lot, it turns out. Xi isn’t asking Schultz and his peers to embark on an apolitical, humanitarian mission. He is asking them to lobby for Beijing. In President-elect Joe Biden’s Washington, that could have serious strategic, legal and ethical implications. And especially for the many business leaders with political aspirations like Schultz, who publicly considered running for president in 2020, it could do serious damage to their electability. (Contacted for a response, Starbucks declined to comment but noted that Schultz no longer has an active role with the company. Schultz didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Businesses and their leaders often plead Beijing’s case and problematic ways. Sometimes the lobbying is more concrete. In December, the New York Times reported that both Apple and Nike had lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which mandates more supply-chain transparency. (Nike and Apple both denied the charge.) And sometimes it’s more subtle, but equally pernicious, such as when U.S. business leaders parrot Chinese Communist Party propaganda. The problem with praising Beijing for lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, the way BlackRock chief executive Laurence D. Fink and others do, is not in the veracity of the statement but in its implication. Saying Beijing has “lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty” is like saying “all lives matter”: It’s a political slogan, not a statement of fact.

Xi’s courting of Schultz is just the most prominent example of a massive charm offensive. Chinese officials are publicly and privately attempting to persuade U.S. business leaders to lobby for China in the Biden administration – or, at the very least, not to lobby against it. Sometimes the calls are indirect. A few weeks ago, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman acknowledged Biden’s victory and reminded Americans to “focus on cooperation” to “promote the sound and steady development of bilateral ties,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. In a December video call, Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged the heads of companies such as General Motors, Caterpillar and Qualcomm to “achieve a smooth transition of China-U.S. relations.”

Businesses lobbying for communist-controlled China is nothing new. It’s part of a long tradition that goes back to Henry Kissinger, who Chinese officials understood would lobby for Beijing after he set up his consulting firm Kissinger Associates in 1982. “Nobody,” Kissinger wrote in 1985, “is more sentimental about China than I am or more dedicated to close relationships.”

But there are two major differences between now and, say, the turn of the century, when U.S. businesses such as Boeing and IBM collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying to get China into the World Trade Organization. The first is the growing repressiveness of the Chinese Communist Party, especially in the northwest Chinese region of Xinjiang, where party officials have imprisoned roughly 1 million Muslims and others in concentration camps. The second is the growing bipartisan awareness in Washington that China poses an economic and perhaps military threat to the United States.

Business leaders such as Schultz, who has long courted Xi, are wading into dangerous territory. In 1938, Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) amid an outcry over Nazis quietly hiring American lobbyists. The law requires those representing the interests of foreign powers in a “political or quasi-political” capacity to publicly register with the Justice Department. In early January, the former senator turned consultant Barbara Boxer registered to lobby for Hikvision, a Chinese company sanctioned by the Trump administration for providing some of the surveillance architecture in concentration camps in Xinjiang. After the news became public, the Biden administration returned the $500 she donated for the upcoming inauguration, and Boxer, citing the “intense response,” deregistered and will stop representing Hikvision.

There have long been discussions of more stringent enforcement of FARA. If the Biden administration decides to do so, business leaders who lobby for Beijing could face a difficult choice: Registering with FARA could create a scandal. Not registering could be illegal.

The Biden administration has vowed to take a tough line with China, but Biden’s team occasionally sends mixed signals. When I read rumors in December that Walt Disney Executive Chairman Robert Iger (whose company made “Mulan,” a film that partnered with propaganda departments in Xinjiang), was being considered for U.S. ambassador to China, I almost had a heart attack. But countering Beijing’s influence in the United States will likely be a topic of intense focus for the Biden administration.

In the wake of the deadly riot at the Capitol that President Trump incited, dozens of major U.S. companies said they will review or pause their political donations to Republicans who voted against certifying the election results. Business leaders need to tread carefully. If you won’t lobby for the Republican Party, don’t lobby for the Communist Party.