Category: China

Rapid Response Mechanism can help counter authoritarian ‘sharp power’

     

China has been accused of engaging in predatory lending aimed at trapping countries in debt, acquiring strategic assets like ports, and spreading corruption and authoritarian values, not least in sub-Saharan Africa,… Read more »

Digital technologies transforming authoritarian arsenal, reshaping democratic politics

     

The growing threat of digital repression is a focus of The Journal of Democracy’s January 2019 issue—available free of charge through 15 February 2019 on Project Muse:    An overview essay by Larry Diamond outlines… Read more »

China’s sharp power gains ‘overtaken by broader trends’

     

China’s ruling Communist Party launched a full-fledged campaign to “tell China’s story well,” spending billions of dollars on propaganda efforts.* Yet while an authoritarian state like China can control political discussion at… Read more »

AI systems accelerating authoritarian resurgence

     

Artificial intelligence systems are showing their potential for abetting repressive regimes and upending the relationship between citizen and state, accelerating a global resurgence of authoritarianism, notes Steven Feldstein, a nonresident fellow… Read more »

New era of international competition: revisionists vs. value-sharing democracies

     

A new era of great power competition pitting authoritarian revisionists against “value-sharing democracies” is one of the scenarios outlined in a new RAND report, Understanding the Emerging Era of International… Read more »

Getting the China challenge right: future of free societies at stake

     

What is at stake in the emerging contest between Washington and Beijing is nothing less than the future prosperity and security of free societies—in Asia and around the world, according… Read more »

The retreat of global democracy stopped – or just paused?

     

Only 4.5% of the world’s people live in a “full democracy,” but the global democratic regression at least paused in 2018, according to the latest edition of The Economist Intelligence… Read more »

‘New Cold War’ with assertively autocratic China? Display West’s democratic unity

     

The international system is currently experiencing a period of transition as economic, institutional and military power is being amassed by China, which is depleting the relative influence and stature of… Read more »

Anti-Uyghur campaign is China’s ‘most intense social-engineering drive in decades’

     

China says it will welcome UN officials to visit Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, following reports that the regime has incarcerated as many as one million Uyghurs in indoctrination camps. Beijing claims UN observers… Read more »

China’s pre-Christmas crackdown raises alarm

     

A recent surge of police action against churches in China has raised concerns the government is getting even tougher on unsanctioned Christian activity, the BBC reports: Among those arrested are… Read more »