Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina As a young reporter, SHANTHI KALATHIL had a front-row seat to the rise of China. Now, as one of President JOE BIDEN’s leading officials on democracy and human rights, she finds herself with a chance to shape the country she once covered. Kalathil is the lead organizer of the Biden administration’s “Summit for Democracy” that begins tomorrow and convenes over 100 governments around the world and is a centerpiece of the administration’s strategy to counter China. It’s a responsibility, rooted, in part, in the work she put in as a journalist some 24 years ago. In the summer of 1997, Kalathil was based in Hong Kong for the Asian Wall Street Journal. While there, she covered the hand-off of sovereignty of the region from the United Kingdom to China and the protests prompted by China taking firmer control. “Perched on the balcony of Hong Kong's Legislative Council building above more than a thousand supporters, pro-democracy leader Martin Lee vowed that he and other elected legislators whom China had kicked out of power would ‘continue to be the voice of Hong Kong,’" read the lede of her story from June 30th of that year. “The people in Hong Kong at the time were really preoccupied about ‘what is this going to mean for our way of life,’” recalls JON HILSENRATH, a Journal editor who worked with Kalathil in Hong Kong at the time. “On the one hand, China's economy was booming, and some people saw it as a business opportunity. On the other hand, there were a lot of people who were hedging their bets, trying to get citizenship in other places, because there was a great deal of uncertainty about how China was going to run the place and a lot of skepticism about whether China was going to live up to its promises to keep Hong Kong a democratic place.” That experience has had far-reaching consequences for Kalathil personally. “It was hugely eye-opening and a moment that caused her to change her career from journalism,” a current colleague of hers said of Kalathil’s experience in Hong Kong, who noted she decided to go to graduate school instead of continuing to be a reporter. The White House did not make Kalathil available for comment. The daughter of Indian and Taiwanese immigrants who sometimes reported from China because of her language skills, Kalathil attended the London School of Economics in the late 90’s where she focused, in part, on comparative politics: in particular, autocracies versus democracies. It’s a topic that she has leaned into her entire career and one that has become a central foreign policy plank for the president she now serves. In 2003, she co-wrote a book, “Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule,” that bucked the conventional wisdom of the time that held the internet would promote democracies and hurt autocracies around the globe by virtue of empowering people. While that could happen in some cases, she wrote, “other uses of the Internet reinforce authoritarian rule, and many authoritarian regimes are proactively promoting the development of an Internet that serves state-defined interests rather than challenging them.” Kalathil has bounced around the U.S. foreign policy establishment with gigs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Council on Foreign Relations, the World Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. She also married JON WOLFSTHAL, senior director at the National Security Council for arms control and nonproliferation during the Obama administration. MARCUS BRAUCHLI , the co-founder of North Base Media and former Washington Post editor, worked with Kalathil at the Journal in Hong Kong. He also has worked with her since to set up international conferences and described her as a person with a “very strong moral core.” “She's the sort of person who is very low key and effective, and doesn't leave a long trail of embarrassing anecdotes to tell,” he added, upon being asked if he had any good stories to relay. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you DESTINE J. HICKS, associate director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. Or you can text/Signal Alex at 8183240098. | 
