Archived

Last week’s US midterm election furnished us with yet another example of the redemptive power of democracy. It’s a reminder that democracy’s greatest strength is not that it prevents political mistakes but that it gives citizens a way to challenge them and, sometimes, to change course.

Those who insist on applying false equivalence to the United States and China should consider that nothing like that is possible under the regime of President Xi Jinping.

Last month the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian model focused on punishing a French football star for daring to utter the truth about Mao Zedong’s dictatorship more than half a century after his death. Kylian Mbappe’s comment wasn’t a political statement, just a simple response to online references to his dictator-like dominance of games. Yet it received a full-throated CCP-orchestrated backlash.

[...]

Xi Jinping’s expansion of party control and suppression of dissent since becoming Communist Party general secretary in November 2012 have made him China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao, which further explains the enraged response to Mbappe’s comment.

[...]

This has been complemented by the CCP’s expanded control over public life. Under Xi, the party has rolled back previous civic and economic liberalisation, further restricting civil society, academia, independent activism, religious and ethnic groups, speech and media. It has used an increasingly extensive internet censorship and surveillance system and the party-controlled legal system to punish its critics.

[...]

Xi’s tenure has also seen the mass repression in Xinjiang, where the UN human-rights office found large-scale arbitrary detention of Uyghurs, restrictions on religious and other rights, credible allegations of torture or ill-treatment and indications of coercive birth-control and labour practices.

Xi’s China has dismantled Hong Kong’s political opposition by imposing national-security laws that enabled prosecution of pro-democracy figures, disqualifying legislators and changing election rules to restrict who could serve.

[...]

But it’s not only China’s domestic sphere where this increasingly authoritarian model threatens us. For what the party has perfected at home, it exports abroad. Xi’s China supports regimes resisting democratic ideals, helping spread surveillance technology, capacity and state-centred ideas about digital governance across the globe. And China’s securitisation of everything in pursuit of the party’s interests has infected our own systems, undermining open trade and globalisation and reintroducing geostrategic competition to our post-Cold War bliss. The unspoken truth of Xi’s national rejuvenation project is that it must come at other countries’ expense, whether that be territorially, economically or otherwise.

Most visibly egregious and revelatory is Xi’s no-limits partnership with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s kleptocratic strongman (or former strongman). China’s deep assistance to Russia’s imperialist and genocidal ambitions in Ukraine, and its prolonging of Europe’s largest conflict since 1945, is part of an anti-Western axis that seeks to weaken and reshape the global order more systematically than Trump’s America. Xi’s China is currently the only country with the intent and capability to supplant the post-1945 order, and it is laying the foundations for one that gives preference to its authoritarian interests.

[...]

For all the angst about Trump’s America – and there has been plenty to be angsty about – democracy has shown that a government’s worst impulses can be curbed, checked and held accountable. There’s nothing within China that can check Xi’s trajectory. In that sense, if one must compare the two great powers, US democracy, for all its imperfection, offers a far healthier model to which the world should aspire.