China uses its global power to export authoritarian

The second category of antidemocratic actions are those that take place in developing countries. Unlike in the developed world, where China’s political and economic coercion and “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy have engendered a growing backlash, Beijing has received a warmer welcome in many developing countries, where elites hope to learn from a political system that has enabled China’s transformation into the world’s second-largest economy. In a growing number of fragile democracies, Beijing has captured small coteries of corrupt elites and helped them centralize power by insulating them from the demands of civil society and deploying Chinese technology to repress their citizens and help them maintain power indefinitely. This is how the CCP is exporting authoritarianism around the globe: not through seminars on Marxist ideology, as some analysts have claimed, but through a broad range of antidemocratic activities. China does so less out of a desire to spread its ideology than to expand its influence and economic advantage. Its favored partners are not fervent adherents of Marxism-Leninism but rather officials, business leaders, media tycoons, and others who view the adoption of a nondemocratic governance model that concentrates power in the hands of the few—and shuts out the many—as a route to long-term influence. This preference for antidemocratic collaborators, coupled with China’s opaque and corrupt investment practices, further corrodes democratic institutions, as murky deals struck by Chinese banks and state-owned enterprises encourage a more corrupt and unaccountable class of political elites all too eager to undermine their country’s long-term prosperity in return for personal gain. China offers more than simple inspiration for a nondemocratic governance model: it provides the tools, training, and resources that permit leaders to ignore democratic countries’ demands for good governance and respect for individual rights as a condition of aid and investment. The CCP regularly conducts large-scale training programs for foreign officials on how to guide public opinion, control civil society, and implement Chinese-style cybersecurity policies in their home countries. A growing number of countries have drawn inspiration from China to pursue laws controlling social media or to build Internet firewalls modeled on China’s own “Great Firewall.” China also provides increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology and internal security training to established authoritarian and fragile democratic governments, enabling them to better suppress dissent and control their own citizens. In countries such as Uganda and Zambia, CCP-linked organizations have shared technology and training with autocratic and autocratic-leaning governments, allowing them to monitor their citizens, muzzle media and civil society, and impose repressive Internet rules. The CCP has also engaged in more explicit political intervention by interfering directly in the political processes of other sovereign countries to support China-friendly politicians and policies and by co-opting local civic groups and journalists to stymie negative portrayals of China’s international engagement and to protect its ties to corrupt local elites. These efforts are not intended to overthrow democracies or other ideologically dissimilar regimes but to help ensure that China-friendly policies and investment climates will prevail regardless of who is in power. Nevertheless, such efforts erode the accountability of leaders to their citizens, weaken the independence of the media and civil society, and ultimately tilt the playing field to favor illiberal leaders looking to import elements of China’s model of governance into their countries’ political systems. This kind of political encroachment maintains the form of a democratic system while hollowing out the actual substance of a functioning democracy from the inside, making the slide toward authoritarianism harder to detect. It should come as no surprise that the CCP’s vision of successful governance has no room for independent checks on state power, such as a substantive civil society or healthy opposition. In the model that Beijing is selling and that more and more countries are buying, dissent is not a legitimate expression of individual interests but an attempt to sabotage collective nation-building efforts. Opposition, in other words, is not political participation but state subversion. The popularization of these ideas in a growing number of developing countries is helping the CCP realize its vision for a revised global order in which a plurality of governance models—democratic and authoritarian alike—can exist as equally legitimate political choices. The last category of international antidemocratic actions involves those aimed at weakening international institutions that instill democratic norms and creating new ones that do not, thereby neutering the liberal presumptions that prevail in the current global order. China uses the clout it has gained by consolidating influence in UN agencies to ensure institutional alignment with Chinese priorities: it has wielded its authority in the International Telecommunications Union, for instance, to promote policies that facilitate the authoritarian use of technology to repress citizens. Beijing’s efforts to topple the current liberal order—which China views as an obstacle to its emergence as a great power—are unprecedented. China is enshrining its own ideological concepts and foreign policy strategies into international statements of consensus, substituting Chinese concepts, such as the “right to development” and “Internet sovereignty,” for more widely held values. It is also promoting its own view of human rights, in which governments can cite supposedly unique local conditions to justify disregard for individual or minority rights and in which civil or political rights are secondary to so-called economic and social rights. Taken together, Beijing’s illiberal efforts undercut democracy in the developed world, the developing world, and in international institutions amount to an assault on the norms, rules, and ethics by which the world is governed. They threaten to usher in an increasingly undemocratic world populated by regimes that are beholden to Beijing and unsympathetic to the interests of the United States and its allies. Such regimes would be less accountable to their populations, less committed to individual rights, less responsible to international institutions that uphold democratic norms and universal values, and more dedicated to controlling and suppressing information. In short, if Beijing isn’t trying to remake the world in its image, it is trying to make the world friendlier to its interests—and more welcoming to the rise of authoritarianism in general.