Democracy is incompatible with China’s domestic autocracy – means revisionism is real
Beckley, associate professor of political science at Tufts University and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Brands, Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2023
[Michael and Hal, “China’s Threat to Global Democracy” Journal of Democracy, vol. 34, issue 1, pgs. 65-79, January 2023, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/chinas-threat-to-global-democracy/ Accessed 7.22.24 GDI-HB]
The Sources of Chinese Conduct
In some ways, China’s bid for primacy in Asia and globally is a new chapter in the history’s oldest story: As countries grow more powerful, they become more interested in reshaping the world. Rising states seek influence, respect, and power; they discover vital interests in places that were simply beyond their reach before. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a rising Germany demanded its “place in the sun”; after the Civil War, a reunified and economically ascendant United States of America tossed its rivals out of the Western Hemisphere and began throwing its weight around globally. As the great realist scholar Nicholas Spykman wrote, “the number of cases in which a strong dynamic state has stopped expanding . . . or has set modest limits to its power aims has been very few indeed.”4 Given how rapidly China’s power has increased over the past four decades, it would be very odd if Beijing was not asserting itself overseas.
Yet China is moved by more than the cold logic of geopolitics. It is also reaching for glory as a matter of historical destiny. China’s leaders view themselves as heirs to a Chinese state that was a superpower for most of recorded history. A series of Chinese empires claimed “all under heaven” as their mandate and commanded deference from smaller states along the imperial periphery. In Beijing’s view, a U.S.-led world in which China is a second-tier power is not the historical norm but a profoundly galling exception. That order was created after the Second World War, at the tail end of a “century of humiliation” during which rapacious foreign powers had plundered a divided China. The CCP’s mandate is to set history aright by returning China to the top of the heap.
And then there is the ideological imperative. A strong, proud China might still pose problems for Washington even if a liberal-democratic government held sway in Beijing. That China is ruled by autocrats committed to ruthlessly suppressing liberalism at home turbocharges Chinese revisionism globally. A deeply authoritarian state can never feel secure in its own rule because it does not enjoy the freely given consent of the governed; it can never feel safe in a world dominated by democracies because liberal international norms challenge illiberal domestic practices. “Autocracies,” writes China scholar Minxin Pei, “simply are incapable of practicing liberalism abroad while maintaining authoritarianism at home.”5