JESSICA CHEN WEISS is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University and
the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations.92 μ£¥³¤ ¬μμ¬
A World Safe for
Autocracy?
China’s Rise and the Future o Global
Politics
Jessica Chen Weiss
T
he Chinese people, President Xi Jinping proclaimed in 2016,
“are fully conÃdent in oering a China solution to humani-
ty’s search for better social systems.” A year later, he declared
that China was “blazing a new trail for other developing countries to
achieve modernization.” Such claims come as the Chinese Commu-
nist Party (¡) has been extending its reach overseas and reverting
to a more repressive dictatorship under Xi after experimenting with
a somewhat more pluralistic, responsive mode o authoritarianism.
Many Western politicians have watched this authoritarian turn at
home and search for inÁuence abroad and concluded that China is
engaged in a life-and-death attempt to defeat democracy—a struggle
it may even be winning. In Washington, the pendulum has swung
from a consensus supporting engagement with China to one calling
for competition or even containment in a new Cold War, driven in
part by concerns that an emboldened China is seeking to spread its
own model o domestic and international order. Last October, U.S.
Vice President Mike Pence decried China’s “whole-of-government”
eort to inÁuence U.S. domestic politics and policy. In February,
Christopher Wray, the director o the μ, went further: the danger
from China, he said, was “not just a whole-of-government threat but
a whole-of-society threat.” Such warnings reÁect a mounting fear that
China represents a threat not just to speciÃc U.S. interests but also to
the very survival o democracy and the U.S.-led international order.Return to Table of Contents