China’s Threat to Global Democracy

An increasingly powerful yet anxious China is undertaking an extreme program to make the world safe for autocracy, and to corrupt and destroy democracies. Democracy promotion may be out of style in U.S. foreign policy today, but democracy prevention most certainly remains at the very heart of the Chinese game plan today.

Competitions between great powers have commonly also been competitions of ideas since ancient times. The Peloponnesian War was not simply a clash between a regnant Sparta and a rising Athens but also pitted a liberal, seagoing protodemocracy that saw itself as the "school of Hellas" against a militarized, agrarian slave state. This is the same situation with the ideological threat which revolutionary France posed to the European order being equally serious as the military one. The run-up to the Second World War was fought between fascist powers and democracies; the Cold War pitted superpowers against one another, dividing much of the world along ideological lines.

Given that this is the essence of foreign policy-to make the world safe for a specific way of life-it is not very surprising how intermingled ideology and geopolitics actually are. Many analysts accept a priori that U.S. foreign policy is driven by idealistic impulses. Even hardcore international-relations "realists" concede the importance of ideology when they bemoan the grip that liberal passions have on Washington's statecraft. Curiously, though, there has been more resistance to the idea that there may be an ideological component to the grand strategy of America's chief rival-the People's Republic of China (PRC). Beijing is not making any "grand strategic effort to undermine democracy and spread autocracy," writes one leading Sinologist. Its foreign policy is based on "pragmatic decisions about Chinese interests."1 Realists say that China plays Realpolitik while America ignores John Quincy Adams's 1821 advice to go "not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Other analysts suggest that it is a distraction or even a "delusion" to emphasize the ideological aspects of Sino-American rivalry at the expense of Beijing's military and economic challenge.2

Wrapped up with this belief in the superiority of an autocratic Chinese model is deep insecurity: the PRC is a brutally illiberal regime in a world led by a liberal hegemon, a circumstance from which the CCP draws a sense of pervasive danger and a strong desire to refashion the world order so that the PRC's particular form of government is not just protected but privileged. That is why a strong but nervous Chinese regime is now undertaking a muscular attempt to make the world safe for autocracy and to undermine and corrupt democracies. Democracy promotion may be out of fashion in U.S. foreign policy, but what the scholar Jason Brownlee calls "democracy prevention" is very much at the center of Chinese strategy today.

The Sources of Chinese Conduct

In many ways, China's bid for primacy in Asia and globally represents a new chapter in history's oldest story-the one in which countries grow more powerful and become more interested in reshaping the world. The rising states seek influence and respect; they discover vital interests in places that were simply beyond their reach before. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a rising Germany demanded its "place in the sun"; after the Civil War, a reunified and economically ascendant United States of America tossed its rivals out of the Western Hemisphere and began throwing its weight around globally. As the great realist scholar Nicholas Spykman wrote, "the number of cases in which a strong dynamic state has stopped expanding. "can truly be said to have been satisfied with, or to have set modest limits to its power aims has been very few indeed."4 Given the rapid rise in China's power over the last four decades, it would be exceptionally strange if Beijing was not flexing its muscle abroad.Yet China is moved by more than the cold logic of geopolitics. It is also reaching for glory as a matter of historical destiny.The Chinese leadership regards itself as heir to a Chinese state which, for the greater part of recorded history, was itself a superpower. Successive Chinese empires laid claim to "all under heaven" as their mandate and expected homage from lesser states on the imperial periphery.

Viewed through the prism of Beijing's perspective, a U.S.-dominated world in which China plays second fiddle is not the norm but a deeply grating aberration. That order was created after the Second World War, at the tail end of a "century of humiliation" during which rapacious foreign powers had plundered a divided China. The CCP's mandate is to set history aright by returning China to the top of the heap. And then there's the ideological imperative: A confident, proud China might still be a headache for Washington even if a liberal-democratic government were in charge in Beijing. The fact that China is ruled by autocrats committed to ruthlessly suppressing liberalism at home turbocharges Chinese revisionism globally.