China actively practices human rights abuses and seeks to spread illiberalism

[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]

This is no exaggeration. The infamous Document Number 9, a political directive issued almost a decade ago at the outset of Xi’s presidency, shows that the CCP sees a liberal world order as inherently threatening.6 “Because China and the United States have longstanding conflicts over their different ideologies, social systems, and foreign policies,” a Chinese military document stated in the 1990s, “it will prove impossible to fundamentally improve Sino-U.S. relations.” For decades, in fact, Chinese officials have alleged that Washington has been waging a deliberate, well-orchestrated campaign—a “smokeless World War III,” in Deng Xiaoping’s words—to weaken and fatally subvert the CCP.7 Deng blamed the United States for being behind the “so-called democrats” who dared to protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989.8

Even when the United States has engaged China, the latter’s leaders have detected a plot to topple their regime. In 1998, Deng’s successor Jiang Zemin warned his colleagues that whether the United States was taking a stance of “containment” or “engagement” toward the PRC, Washington’s real goal was to further a “political plot” to “divide our country” and “change our country’s socialist system.”9 After Jiang came Hu Jintao, who spoke to his Foreign Ministry in 2003 of the “grim reality that Western hostile forces are still implementing Westernization and splittist political designs on China.”10

Chinese leaders are wrong if they think that the United States is actively seeking to overthrow the CCP regime. They are not wrong, however, to think that a world rooted in liberal values is one in which their own rule must be perpetually precarious. In an international system built on respect for human rights and a preference for democracy, governments that murder their own citizens risk censure, ostracism, and punishment—as happened to Beijing after Tiananmen Square in 1989 and is happening again today in response to the brutalization of the Uyghur minority. An international system in which democracies are strong, vibrant, and globally engaged is one in which subversive tendencies will continually tempt states ruled by tyrants: In 1989, Tiananmen Square protesters erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty, while those in Hong Kong thirty years later publicly waved American flags and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In what it is and what it does, a hegemonic democracy threatens the Chinese regime.

The resulting insecurity has powerful implications for Beijing’s statecraft. Chinese leaders feel a compulsion to make international norms and institutions friendlier to illiberal rule. They seek to push dangerous liberal influences away from the PRC’s borders: In Beijing’s mind, writes Timothy Heath, a “harmonious Asia” would feature a “political order shaped by Chinese political principles.” The rulers in Beijing feel that they must wrest international authority away from a democratic superpower with a long history of bringing autocracies to ruin. And as an authoritarian China becomes powerful, it inevitably looks to strengthen the forces of illiberalism—and to weaken those of democracy—as a way to enhance its influence and bolster its own model.11 China is doing so, moreover, at a time when the world, and its prevailing distribution of ideological power, presents the CCP with both keen anxieties and tantalizing opportunities.