Chinese hegemony decidedly resists liberalism – collapses the LIO and backslides into autocracy.

Indeed, liberal internationalism may have played a causal role in extending the ‘third wave of democratization’ that rolled from the mid-1970s through to the 1990s.43 During a good deal of that struggle, Washington actively worked against democratization in much of the developing world, to the point of backing coups in a number of countries that put anti-communist autocrats in power.44 But as the superior fitness of democratic capitalism to communism or state socialism became evident in the 1980s—a fitness enhanced by the LIO—US administrations began to drop their autocratic clients and to strike bargains with centre-left parties, as they had done in Europe earlier in the Cold War.45 Furthermore, lobbyists and Congress put pressure on administrations to make continuing close relations with security partners conditional on the latters' implementing human rights and other reforms.46 Late in the Cold War, then, authoritarian states evidently felt some pressure to move into the liberal democratic international niche.

As for the Soviet Union, owing to inadequacies in its communist political economy, here too the ideological balance of power began to tilt towards democracy in the 1980s, leading first to Gorbachev's reforms and then to the state's collapse in 1991. In the 1990s, much of the world—including countries such as Brazil and democratic India, that had long been partial ‘members’, belonging to the IMF and accepting western investment—joined the LIO wholeheartedly. There appeared no alternative to its combination of market economics, democracy and multilateralism.47

China: building a niche that selects for autocracy

Liberal internationalism has itself evolved since the 1990s, to the point where some of its features no longer select for democracy.48 Our subject, however, is the effects on international order of the ongoing rise of China. Beginning with the accession to power of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China began moving towards the liberal international niche. It adopted market mechanisms for most of its economy, yet resisted pressures to become a constitutional democracy—pressures to which the Soviet Union succumbed and which eventually dissolved that country. Still, China's leaders continue to feel those pressures today and have set about neutralizing them.

From the disasters of Mao Zedong's rule and the comparative successes of smaller east Asian neighbours such as South Korea and Taiwan, Deng recognized that China must begin to participate in the global capitalist economy. It must liberalize its domestic economy, welcome (but regulate) foreign investment, and export material goods rather than revolution. Deng never intended for China to become a liberal democracy; he was adamant that the ruling Communist Party must retain its monopoly on political power. Entering the liberal niche, then, was risky, for it was designed to select for multiparty constitutional democracy, not just market economics. Still, in the late 1980s Deng permitted reformers led by Hu Yaobang to loosen some party controls over speech and the press. And, after the Soviet Union moved into the liberal niche in the late 1980s and liberalized its political system even more, the risk to the CCP became manifest with the Tiananmen Square protests of May 1989.

Deng, Li Peng and the CCP saw off the threat with the massacre of 4 June 1989, the purging of reformers such as Hu and Zhao Ziyang, and the reimposition of party control over civil society. In 1992, Deng's ‘southern tour’ restarted economic liberalization, but party control over politics has persisted and even tightened since then. The CCP's general strategy has been to sustain its legitimacy with high economic growth and nationalism, the combination of which is supposed to weaken any drive for democratization.49 Coupled with high levels of surveillance and punishment, and severe limits on civil society, these measures have helped keep the regime in place. In recent years, the government has turned the internet and social media from threats to supports, harnessing them to enhance surveillance and control.50

What kind of domestic regime does China have? Article I of the country's constitution labels it a ‘socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants’. Article III refers to ‘democratic centralism’.51 Western analysts label it authoritarian capitalist,52 fragmented–authoritarian,53 Market-Leninist,54 democratic–meritocratic,55 or simply the ‘Beijing Consensus’.56 There is at best a developing ideology to articulate and justify the regime's principles. ‘Market-Leninist’ is an especially helpful label for capturing both the fact that China's economy is roughly 60 per cent privately owned,57 and the fact that the CCP acts to forestall the emergence of any domestic political competitor.

However we characterize China's regime, it has successfully resisted the LIO's selection pressure to become a liberal democracy. Indeed, opinion polls show that most Chinese believe that China is a democracy in its own right, and an especially well-governed one.58 It is proving adept at using new digital technologies to entrench its power.59 Still, the CCP remains worried about the durability of public and elite support for the party-state regime. A sharp and sustained slowing of economic growth, coupled with a significant rise in support for multiparty democracy (or some other alternative regime), would endanger authoritarian capitalism. It is the latter threat that the party believes the LIO presents. Indeed, Xi and the current leadership evidently regard liberalism as the most serious ideological threat to the regime. Document No. 9, circulated in the party in 2013, spells out various principles of liberal democracy—‘the separation of powers, the multi-party system, general elections, independent judiciaries, nationalised armies, and other characteristics’—and calls them not only alien to China, but liable to bring about division, disorder, and a ‘colour revolution’ such as those that have occurred in other autocracies.60 Beijing's ruthless weakening of Hong Kong's autonomy in 2020–2021 is further evidence of this worry about what liberal ideas and actors would do to CCP rule and to China's national unity.

CCP officials explicitly state that the LIO is biased against China and seek to decrease that bias. Nadège Rolland notes that official discourse about international order frequently uses the phrase ‘unfair and unreasonable’ (bu gongzheng, bu heli). Chinese officials distinguish ‘international order’ from ‘world order’. International order is the legal system that recognizes the sovereign equality of all states, and China accepts it as legitimate. World order, however, is unfair because it is a Pax Americana that seeks to maintain the dominance of the West and to keep China and other less developed countries down. It is unreasonable because it aims to impose western values and institutions on countries to which they are ill suited; for instance, the revolutions of the Arab Spring brought disorder and extremism to an entire region.61

China's government, then, would like to make the international system fairer and more reasonable towards its own system.62 On the whole, its methods of niche construction are not as direct as those of the United States after the Second World War. China is not building military alliances with other autocratic states to defend against possible American attack and intimidation. It is not using overt or covert force to promote Market-Leninism or to roll back liberal democracy in foreign lands. Its methods are less lethal. One route is increased efforts to integrate foreign economies with China's economy, for which the primary mechanism is the BRI. The seaports, airports, railways, highways, pipelines and power grids constructed under this programme are designed to increase China's trade with dozens of countries. Clearly Xi and the party envisage the BRI as a way to ensure long-term economic growth for China. But the BRI would do more. In so far as it succeeds, it will make host countries dependent on China—through indebtedness, trans-shipment and imports—which in turn could make those host countries less beholden to the wealthy democracies, thereby reducing pressure on China to democratize its political system. Participants in the BRI include some liberal democracies, such as Italy and Portugal, which shows that the boundaries between the LIO and the potential ACIO will be blurred; Beijing's object is to weaken any opposition to its domestic institutions and practices, and making at least some of the democracies dependent on its investment can only help. The BRI also strengthens China's state-owned infrastructure-building sector, which in turn helps make its strong-state model more robust.63

A second area of Chinese niche construction is international institutions and norms. Beijing is building some multilateral institutions of its own, and attempting to modify others, to help weaken potential dissent from China's regime. The 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights is clearly a liberal document, enumerating a single set of universal rights. China is labouring to make human rights relative rather than universal. Its 2017 South–South Human Rights Forum produced a Beijing Declaration stating that human rights must take into account regional, national and historical contexts.64 The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), established by China in 2013, is officially neutral towards the political institutions of borrower states, in direct contrast to the older international financial institutions such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, which have used leverage to try to liberalize the political as well as the economic institutions of borrowers.65 In technical areas as well, China is trying to modify international rules and norms. Of the 15 UN special agencies, four are currently headed by Chinese nationals: the International Telecommunication Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the UN Industrial Development Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization. These UN agencies historically embody a norm of service to the putative global good rather than the political interests of any one nation. According to Melanie Hart, China sometimes goes against that international norm and serves Chinese nationalism by trying to deny Taiwanese and Uighurs recognition or a voice. In the area of global internet governance, China is pressing at the UN for a norm of national sovereignty that would permit censorship rather than the borderless laissez-faire norm that the United States has championed.66

Third, Beijing is trying to export elements of its model of government. It is bringing officials of less developed countries to China for training in how to develop an economy while maintaining a single party in power. The Baise Executive Leadership Academy in Guanxi Province, founded in 2017, has trained more than 1,000 ASEAN officials in such topics as ‘how to “guide public opinion” online when there are emergencies, and how to alleviate poverty in a “targeted” way’. Beijing has focused particular attention on Cambodia. The Chinese government also trains judges and police officers from member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).67 Hundreds of African officials have been trained in China on extending state control over civil society through, for example, censorship of social media. China has exported its advanced surveillance technology to a number of states in Africa and Latin America, which plan to use the cameras and storage to monitor citizens.68

Finally, China, like the United States before it, works to build and use soft power. Here, the party's path has not been as straightforward, for the consumer goods that China exports—particularly digital hardware—enable individual consumerism as much as anything the United States ever exported. China's cultural exports, particularly in music, film and sport, do not come close to rivalling those of the United States, although China is using its market leverage to alter movies and censor athletes and team owners to favour a Chinese point of view.69 With cooperation from university campuses, Beijing has established hundreds of Confucius Institutes in a dozens of countries to educate people in Chinese languages, culture and history.70 These institutes have, however, been perceived on some campuses as propaganda engines uninterested in the free exchange of ideas, and some have been shut down.71 Recent surveys of Chinese scholars and officials suggest a lack of confidence in the country's ability to outdo the United States in terms of soft power.72 Still, China is building a narrative of benevolence around the BRI, depicting it not as the bid for empire perceived by suspicious foreigners, but as an immense goodwill plan to develop economies and bring peoples together for the benefit of all.73 Beijing has also leveraged its relative success in taming the COVID-19 pandemic into a narrative about the superiority of its domestic system.74