China poses a threat to democracy and promotes totalitarianism through international leadership

Whereas previous Chinese administrations espoused “stability maintenance,” the focus under Xi is on threat prevention. Chinese documents compare popular outbursts to cancerous tumors that need to be cut out quickly before they spread to vital organs of the state. Ideologies that could rival communism, including liberalism and Islamism, are seen as infectious diseases against which China’s population must be immunized. As Sheena Chestnut Greitens has shown, these medical metaphors justify targeting and “treating” people long before they display threatening symptoms. The clearest illustration is in Xinjiang, where China has extrajudicially locked up more than a million Uyghurs. But China is applying this preventive logic beyond its borders too. Beijing spends billions of dollars annually on an “antidemocratic toolkit” of nongovernmental organizations, media outlets, diplomats, advisors, hackers, and bribes all designed to prop up autocrats and sow discord in democracies. The CCP provides fellow autocracies with guns, money, and protection from UN censure while slapping foreign human-rights advocates with sanctions. Chinese officials offer their authoritarian brethren riot-control gear and advice on building a surveillance state; PRC trade, investment, and loans allow those dictators to avoid Western conditionality regarding anticorruption or good governance. Beijing uses its globe-spanning media organs to tout the accomplishments of illiberal rule while highlighting democratic governments’ flaws and hypocrisies. China works with fellow authoritarian regimes, such as Vladimir Putin’s in Russia, to push autocrat-friendly norms of internet management in international institutions and standards-setting bodies. Beijing also helps other illiberal regimes near or in Central Asia to hound and repress exiles and dissidents. Not least, China is waging a campaign of political and military coercion to destabilize Taiwan, a flourishing nation whose very existence disproves the CCP’s claims that Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. The fundamental problem that Taiwan poses for China, write Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, “comes from Taiwan’s simply being what it is—a modern Chinese society that is economically prosperous and politically democratic.” It might be tempting to dismiss China’s democracy-prevention efforts as “world politics as usual.” After all, autocrats have been colluding to hold liberalism at bay ever since the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia banded together to fight Revolutionary France more than two centuries ago. But China’s ideological assault is especially threatening, for three reasons. First, China’s global reach is more pervasive than that of any prior illiberal power. Its massive economy and 1.4 billion consumers arm it with powerful carrots and sticks to silence free speech far beyond its borders. Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Japan, Lithuania, Norway, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States—plus dozens of private companies and individuals from democratic nations—have recently experienced China’s economic wrath. In many cases, the punishment has been vastly disproportionate to the supposed crime. For example, China slapped steep tariffs on nearly all of Australia’s major exports after Canberra requested an international investigation into the origins of covid-19. In addition to economic weapons, China holds leadership posts in the UN and other major international institutions that give Beijing chances to bend global governance in an illiberal direction. For example, when Belarus violated international norms by forcing down an airliner that was carrying a wanted dissident in 2021, China exercised its authority as head of the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization to shield the brutal Alyaksandr Lukashenka regime from censure. And if diplomacy and economic inducements fail, Beijing can use its navy, now the world’s largest, and conventional missile force to coerce countries into compliance or even to wipe democracies off the map, as China is threatening to do to Taiwan. Second, China’s illiberal campaign capitalizes on a disturbing global trend: As Freedom House reports, authoritarianism has spread during every year since 2006, while democracy has retreated. This “democratic recession” has given China a window of ideological opportunity to promote a vision of a hierarchical and harmonious society and a critique of a disorderly and decadent West. Around the world, public faith in democratic institutions has sunk to lows not seen since the 1930s. The political soil has grown ripe for authoritarianism to take root, and China, Russia, and other authoritarian states are fertilizing this antidemocratic plant with digital disinformation that their propagandists pump into the social-media feeds of billions worldwide. The third and most important factor supercharging China’s efforts is the ongoing digital revolution. The CCP possesses data-collection and messaging power to rival that of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. By combining artificial intelligence (AI) and “big data” with cyber, biometric, and speech- and facial-recognition technologies, Beijing is pioneering a system that will allow dictators to know everything about their subjects—what people are saying and viewing, whom they hang out with, what they like and dislike, and where they are located at any given time—and to discipline citizens instantly by restricting their access to credit, education, employment, medical care, telecommunications, and travel if not to hunt them down for more medieval forms of punishment. This technological revolution threatens to upend the global balance between democracy and authoritarianism by making repression more affordable and effective than ever. Instead of relying on expensive and potentially rebellious armies to brutalize a resentful population, an autocrat will now have more insidious means of control. Millions of spies can be replaced with hundreds of millions of unblinking cameras. Facial-recognition technologies can rapidly sort through video feeds and identify troublemakers. Bots can deliver propaganda tailored to specific groups. Malware can be installed on computers through seemingly innocuous apps or links, and then government hackers can crash the computer networks of dissidents or gather information on their operations. That information, in turn, can be used to coopt resistance movements by bribing their leaders or meeting their more innocuous demands. Alternatively, authorities can print out an AI-assembled list of alleged activists and kill everyone on it. The evil genius of this “digital authoritarianism” is that most people will be seemingly free to go about their daily lives. In truth, however, the state will be constantly censoring everything they see and tracking everything they do. With old-school authoritarianism, one at least knew where the oppression was coming from. But now people can be nudged and cajoled by invisible algorithms delivering personalized content to their phones. In past eras, autocrats had to make tough choices between funding death squads or economic development. Today, however, repression is not only affordable, but also profitable, because “smart-city” technologies that enable tight social control can also be used to fight crime, diagnose diseases, and make the trains run on time. These technologies are a tyrant’s dream. Recognizing this demand, Chinese companies were already selling and operating surveillance systems in more than eighty countries as of 2020. As the CCP feels increasingly threatened at home and abroad, there is every reason to expect Beijing to export digital authoritarianism farther and wider. Many countries already want it, and China has powerful tools to compel those that do not. Want access to the vast PRC market? Let Huawei install the core components of your 5G network. Want a Chinese loan? Accept PRC surveillance technology in your capital city. As more governments partner with Beijing, the reach of China’s surveillance state will grow. Existing autocracies will become more totalitarian, and some democracies will drift into the authoritarian camp. International conflicts will likely proliferate—not merely those of ideas but those of arms, for as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates, dictatorship often turns to blood-and-soil nationalism and violent revanchism. The liberal belief that democracy and peace are destined to spread around the world will be upended. So will the comforting myth that humanity has evolved past the point of mass atrocities, because digital authoritarianism does not displace gulags and genocide; it enables them. When dictatorships ramp up digital repression, they also engage in more torture and murder. Computers and cameras handling everyday surveillance free the regime’s foot soldiers for tasks such as ethnic cleansing and beating dissidents into submission. Xinjiang, with its smart cities and concentration camps, offers a glimpse of this dire future. Democracy Protection China’s ideological offensive is thus at the heart of its effort to reshape the global order. A crucial part of the democratic world’s China strategy, therefore, must involve securing democratic institutions against authoritarian assault. If democracy promotion has a bad name, democracy protection is becoming indispensable. This ideological campaign does not entail seeking regime change in China. Democracy may eventually take hold in that country, but there is little prospect of it anytime soon, and active efforts to destabilize the CCP could be counterproductive and dangerous. During the Cold War, the United States never really tried to overthrow the Soviet government. This was out of concern that doing so might trigger the hot war that Washington hoped to avoid. The same cautionary principle ought to apply today. Democracy protection is an essentially defensive strategy, although in some cases it will require tactics that are more assertive than those which the United States and its allies have been willing to employ to date. At its core, democracy protection requires what military planners call “defending forward”—safeguarding democratic systems by actively weakening an opponent’s ability to damage them. The United States should do whatever it can to shore up democracy at home and abroad, but the immediate priority must be to blast holes in the digital iron curtain that Beijing is drawing around large swaths of the globe. If the world is indeed at an “inflection point” in the struggle between democracy and autocracy, as Biden and Xi seem to think it is, an America that remains on the defensive will not tip the balance. Getting “America’s democratic house in order” is a wonderful idea, but it will take years, if not decades, and would lend only indirect help in halting the spread of autocracy overseas. Forming a giant alliance of democracies is a worthy objective, but might deliver endless debate instead of decisive action. In 2000, the Bill Clinton administration created the “Community of Democracies,” which ultimately included 106 countries. After years of meetings, its sole accomplishment was a bland statement criticizing the 2021 military coup in Burma.