The Collapse of Modernization Theory in China
The Chinese Experience That Challenges the Universality of Liberalism
For decades, the dominant expectation among Western political scientists, policymakers, economists, and businesspeople was that sustained economic development would ultimately produce political liberalization. Rooted in the modernization thesis of Seymour Martin Lipset and echoed by academics such as Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama, this view held that rising income, education, and integration with global markets would create a middle class inclined toward political pluralism, accountability, and the rule of law.
Crucially, this assumption extended well beyond academia. It informed the engagement strategies of Western governments from the late Cold War through the early 2000s. When the United States backed China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the Clinton administration argued that participation in global markets would “bring China into the family of nations,” foster rule-of-law norms, and empower a reform-minded middle class. The same conviction animated bipartisan U.S. policy through the George W. Bush years, when officials urged Beijing to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the liberal international order, euphemistic for gradual political convergence through economic interdependence.
Corporate and civil society actors shared this outlook. Multinationals investing in China framed commerce as a civilizing force, assuming that exposure to global business standards, internet access, and consumer choice would naturally loosen the hegemonic political control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Western NGOs and think tanks promoted legal reform, transparency initiatives, and local governance training under the belief that technocratic professionalization would expand autonomous civic space. Across these arenas, the underlying faith was that integration would produce liberalization — that the CCP could manage markets for a time but not forever resist the social and political transformations prosperity would unleash.
When it comes to China, those predictions have not materialized, and long-held assumptions have proven false. Instead, China has confounded Western strategists by achieving spectacular growth without political opening. Over the last four decades, it has become the world’s second-largest economy, an innovation hub, a global trading power, and, increasingly, a military heavyweight — at least regionally. At the same time, the CCP has not only survived but consolidated control in a manner suggesting its grip on power is stronger than ever. Far from liberalizing, the regime has engineered an advanced form of authoritarianism that pairs market dynamism with ideological rigidity and pervasive state supervision.
This outcome defies the structural and historical expectations that have long underpinned Western approaches to political development. If postwar Europe, East Asia, and Latin America seemed to confirm the modernization sequence from industrialization to democratization, the endurance of China’s system lay bare its limitations. The Chinese case thus compels fundamental questions: What if modernization and liberalization are not inherently linked? What if growth, innovation, and global engagement can reinforce rather than weaken one-party rule? And what do these possibilities imply for the remainder of the 21st century
The CCP’s durability rests on a deliberate synthesis of control and adaptation. Rather than yielding to the political consequences of modernization, the Party has reengineered authoritarian governance to absorb change on its own terms, reforming institutions, exploiting technology, and selectively borrowing liberal language to reinforce legitimacy. Economic dynamism, bureaucratic professionalism, and digital surveillance now operate as complementary pillars of regime stability. China should therefore not be viewed as a delayed democratization case but as the construction of a distinct political model — one designed to resist liberalizing forces while preserving elite dominance. Its system fuses market efficiency with one-party command, mobilizes nationalism as a unifying ideology, and deploys advanced data-driven tools to preempt dissent rather than react to it.
is an Asia-Pacific analyst at geopolitical intelligence firm RANE where he focuses on regional security dynamics.
The Chinese Experience That Challenges the Universality of Liberalism
The result challenges the universal assumption that prosperity naturally breeds political pluralism. In China’s configuration, modernization has become an instrument of control — a source of legitimacy for continued authoritarian rule. The critical question is no longer when China will liberalize, but whether liberalism itself still defines the global benchmark of modernity in an era when autocracies can deliver growth, order, and national confidence without political freedom.
Modernization’s Great Exception
The modernization thesis, or variants thereof, has long been a foundation of political science and development studies. This thesis follows that as societies industrialize, their populations urbanize, education expands, and markets deepen; the social structure becomes more complex, the middle class expands, and demands for participation, rights, and political accountability intensify.
When China’s reforms began in the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping, many Western and Asian analysts assumed its trajectory would eventually mirror that of East Asian “tiger” economies — first South Korea and Taiwan, where authoritarian developmental states had opened politically after achieving middle-income status in the late 1980s, and later Indonesia following Suharto’s fall in 1998. At the time, these cases were widely cited in U.S. and World Bank analyses as proof that export-led growth, rising education, and global integration would inevitably foster demands for democratization. U.S. policymakers invoked this logic explicitly. President Bill Clinton, in defending China’s WTO entry, argued that “the more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people,” a sentiment echoed by European leaders promoting “constructive engagement.” In that intellectual climate, China’s market reforms and expanding private sector were expected to generate the same middle-class pressures and institutional evolution that had transformed its Asian neighbors. Even as China rose to global prominence, many liberal observers expected creeping political liberalization, whether by design or accident.
However, China’s path has undercut that expectation. Through the 1990s and 2000s, growth accelerated, markets deepened, and Chinese society became more cosmopolitan, but the political system remained locked. In that sense, China qualifies as a strong anomaly to the modernization–democratization correlation. The Chinese case thus demands a more robust explanatory account — one emphasizing how authoritarian regimes can adapt and reinvent themselves rather than perish in the face of modernization. Prosperity alone does not yield democracy; it matters who controls and channels the gains. If an authoritarian regime can learn, adapt, and co-opt, then modernization may instead reinforce — not disrupt — its grip.
Western optimism was reinforced by a deeper conviction within democracies that history itself vindicated liberalism. Having not only outlasted but defeated monarchy, fascism, and Soviet communism, the liberal order saw its own institutions, represented by free markets, human rights, and elections, as the natural culmination of modern progress. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the “end of history” rhetoric of the early 1990s fed a sense that no viable alternative could endure. From Washington to Brussels, the assumption took hold that exposure to trade, information, and consumer choice would inevitably erode one-party rule — following the logic that no society enjoying material prosperity and global connectivity would willingly remain authoritarian. In retrospect, that confidence looks less like strategy and more like ideological hubris — a belief that liberalism’s historical victories had rendered it unassailable.
But history has a way of taking unexpected turns. The CCP did not face a trajectory of collapse like the Soviet bloc. It survived the systemic shocks of the late twentieth century and dynamically reconfigured its legitimacy after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when weeks of nationwide protests calling for political reform, accountability, and freedom of expression ended in a violent military suppression that reaffirmed the Party’s monopoly on power. The episode provoked international outrage as liberal democracies imposed arms embargoes, suspended high-level exchanges, and briefly froze lending by international financial institutions.
The result challenges the universal assumption that prosperity naturally breeds political pluralism. In China’s configuration, modernization has become an instrument of control — a source of legitimacy for continued authoritarian rule. The critical question is no longer when China will liberalize, but whether liberalism itself still defines the global benchmark of modernity in an era when autocracies can deliver growth, order, and national confidence without political freedom.
Modernization’s Great Exception
The modernization thesis, or variants thereof, has long been a foundation of political science and development studies. This thesis follows that as societies industrialize, their populations urbanize, education expands, and markets deepen; the social structure becomes more complex, the middle class expands, and demands for participation, rights, and political accountability intensify.
When China’s reforms began in the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping, many Western and Asian analysts assumed its trajectory would eventually mirror that of East Asian “tiger” economies — first South Korea and Taiwan, where authoritarian developmental states had opened politically after achieving middle-income status in the late 1980s, and later Indonesia following Suharto’s fall in 1998. At the time, these cases were widely cited in U.S. and World Bank analyses as proof that export-led growth, rising education, and global integration would inevitably foster demands for democratization. U.S. policymakers invoked this logic explicitly. President Bill Clinton, in defending China’s WTO entry, argued that “the more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people,” a sentiment echoed by European leaders promoting “constructive engagement.” In that intellectual climate, China’s market reforms and expanding private sector were expected to generate the same middle-class pressures and institutional evolution that had transformed its Asian neighbors. Even as China rose to global prominence, many liberal observers expected creeping political liberalization, whether by design or accident.
However, China’s path has undercut that expectation. Through the 1990s and 2000s, growth accelerated, markets deepened, and Chinese society became more cosmopolitan, but the political system remained locked. In that sense, China qualifies as a strong anomaly to the modernization–democratization correlation. The Chinese case thus demands a more robust explanatory account — one emphasizing how authoritarian regimes can adapt and reinvent themselves rather than perish in the face of modernization. Prosperity alone does not yield democracy; it matters who controls and channels the gains. If an authoritarian regime can learn, adapt, and co-opt, then modernization may instead reinforce — not disrupt — its grip.
Western optimism was reinforced by a deeper conviction within democracies that history itself vindicated liberalism. Having not only outlasted but defeated monarchy, fascism, and Soviet communism, the liberal order saw its own institutions, represented by free markets, human rights, and elections, as the natural culmination of modern progress. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the “end of history” rhetoric of the early 1990s fed a sense that no viable alternative could endure. From Washington to Brussels, the assumption took hold that exposure to trade, information, and consumer choice would inevitably erode one-party rule — following the logic that no society enjoying material prosperity and global connectivity would willingly remain authoritarian. In retrospect, that confidence looks less like strategy and more like ideological hubris — a belief that liberalism’s historical victories had rendered it unassailable.
But history has a way of taking unexpected turns. The CCP did not face a trajectory of collapse like the Soviet bloc. It survived the systemic shocks of the late twentieth century and dynamically reconfigured its legitimacy after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when weeks of nationwide protests calling for political reform, accountability, and freedom of expression ended in a violent military suppression that reaffirmed the Party’s monopoly on power. The episode provoked international outrage as liberal democracies imposed arms embargoes, suspended high-level exchanges, and briefly froze lending by international financial institutions.
Yet the isolation proved temporary. By the early 1990s, Western governments had resumed engagement, driven by commercial interests and the belief that economic integration would still nudge China toward reform. For Beijing, from that sequence emerged a durable lesson that international condemnation could be weathered and that rapid growth and global market access would ultimately matter more for regime survival than political liberalization. In the aftermath, Chinese leadership concluded that economic performance, not ideological purity or political openness, would be the core foundation of legitimacy. As such, rather than doubling down on mass mobilization or ideological coercion, the CCP gradually evolved into a performance-based, technocratic, meritocratic regime — one that was still authoritarian but more sophisticated, flexible, and pragmatic in its operations.
The CCP’s rhetorical and narrative turn from more orthodox socialist class struggle to economic development began with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s, but the Tiananmen crisis cemented that shift. Economic development, stability, and legitimacy by performance became the Party’s core foundations. A social contract emerged in which the Party provides for consistently rising standards of living in exchange for public acquiescence to one-party rule. Over time, institutional reforms such as cadre evaluation tied to development metrics, bureaucratic specialization, and local experimentation allowed the Party to manage a growing number of governing complexities as well as dissent. The CCP has partially depoliticized governance by embedding technocratic expertise and separating policy implementation from political control, and reorganized ideological work to buttress regime legitimacy — all while ensuring that core levers of power remain under tight, unchallengeable control. In short, the CCP has arguably reinvented authoritarianism to suit a high-growth, digitally mediated era.
Surveillance as Governance
One of China’s greatest paradoxes is its success as a global capitalist giant under one-party, ostensibly socialist rule. The CCP has embraced a model in which capitalist growth is harnessed under top-down political control. The logic is that opening the economy need not imply opening politics; rather, the state retains strategic ownership and command over key sectors such as energy, telecommunications, finance, transport, and defense-linked heavy industry, while particularly later on, expanding its influence in emerging fields like semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and green technology. The Party, moreover, guides private firms via incentives and political networks. Private enterprise is not an agent of liberalization but a tool of the Party. Many private firms, especially large or strategically significant ones, remain enmeshed with Party structures. Senior executives often serve in dual roles, Party cells are embedded in companies, and compliance is rewarded. This creates both carrot and stick, as entrepreneurs must internalize political boundaries while enjoying preferential access if they align.
The regime does allow some autonomy but only within tightly bounded corridors. For example, in the tech sphere, firms like Alibaba and Tencent have room to innovate domestically and globally, but they are subject to ever-present Party oversight (e.g., ideologically guided restructuring, supervision by regulatory bodies, periodic “self-criticism” mandates, etc.). The logic is selective liberalization in that it allows markets, competition, and innovation in narrowly delimited spaces but monitors and controls where politics might intrude.
Moreover, the CCP strategically uses the rhetoric of liberal discourse (e.g., “innovation,” “rule of law,” “governance,” “consultation,” even “democracy”) to legitimize its own control. It frames its one-party state as uniquely capable of directing industrial strategy, achieving social stability, and systemically solving market failures — presenting itself as superior to liberal democracies in navigating complexity and crisis. That claim has gained credibility domestically and, to a growing extent, abroad. The Party can point to four decades of near-continuous growth, rapid poverty reduction, and decisive crisis responses as evidence that its model delivers outcomes liberal systems often struggle to replicate.
A central innovation in China’s contemporary authoritarianism is its synthesis of high-capacity surveillance, data analytics, and behavioral control. The Party has built an extensive, real-time surveillance state that collects, integrates, and analyzes data across nearly every domain of social and economic life. Where earlier authoritarian systems relied primarily on coercion and after-the-fact punishment, China’s model emphasizes prevention and anticipatory governance — detecting risks, nudging behavior, and neutralizing potential dissent before it materializes.
It does not primarily coerce through force but rather incentivizes conformity, fosters internalized self-censorship, and raises the social and economic costs of dissent.
China’s surveillance apparatus now functions as an integrated ecosystem linking state security, administrative management, and commercial data. The state draws on financial, legal, and social information from both government databases and private platforms such as telecom and payment systems. Through the evolving Social Credit System — an umbrella framework that merges these records — authorities monitor conduct, reward compliance, and restrict access to privileges such as travel, credit, or employment. At the same time, predictive policing and artificial intelligence-enabled monitoring — including facial recognition, gait and network analysis, and algorithmic profiling — allow security services to identify potential dissent or “pre-criminal” behavior before it materializes, narrowing the space for collective action.
Complementing these technologies is a grid-based governance network that embeds neighborhood monitors, social workers, and local committees to gather micro-level intelligence on disputes, grievances, and grassroots ideological sentiment — feeding data upward to higher authorities. Surveillance is also woven into daily life through public services, mobile payment systems, and “smart city” infrastructure, ensuring that administrative convenience and political supervision function as two sides of the same system. A central component of this information architecture is the so-called Great Firewall — China’s nationwide system of internet controls that filters, blocks, and monitors digital traffic across its borders. It combines technical firewalls, keyword filtering, and legal restrictions on service providers to prevent the circulation of foreign news, social media, and political content deemed subversive, while amplifying Beijing’s state messaging outward.
What’s crucial is that this architecture functions less as a punitive tool than as a system of behavioral governance — steering citizens toward compliant conduct. It does not primarily coerce through force but rather incentivizes conformity, fosters internalized self-censorship, and raises the social and economic costs of dissent. Under Xi Jinping, the surveillance apparatus has been further normalized as part of “holistic social management,” integrated into the logic of governance rather than merely policing. The boundary between security and public administration has thus substantially blurred. In a system where political pluralism is out of bounds, a regime must still build legitimacy. That task is achieved not by persuading through democracy but by constructing a compelling ideological narrative that reorients civic identity around nationalism, social harmony, and regime continuity.
The CCP has recast its authority in the language of national rejuvenation, asserting that only its rule can defend China from foreign humiliation, preserve territorial integrity, and restore global stature. Under Xi, this nationalism has taken on the character of a civic religion — reinforced through patriotic education, “red culture,” and state-curated narratives of victimhood and recovery that saturate schools, media, and public rituals. The enshrinement of Xi Jinping Thought as the Party’s guiding doctrine further personalizes this framework, transforming the regime from its previous iteration as a rule-by-consensus model (the post-Deng, pre-Xi era, roughly from 1990–2012) into a leader-centric system more reminiscent of the Mao era — where criticism of policy equates to disloyalty to the state itself.
Parallel narratives of a “harmonious society” and “collective responsibility” depict stability as a moral good and dissent as socially corrosive, while official references to “consultation,” “rule-based governance,” and “whole-process democracy” simulate participation without diluting central control. At the same time, the Party demonstrates ideological flexibility, borrowing liberal and technocratic vocabulary — terms like “governance,” “transparency,” and “data management” — and redefining them within its own discourse to signal modernization while neutralizing their emancipatory potential. In this design, belief is secondary. Most citizens do not fervently endorse communist ideology, but the Party’s narratives are pervasive enough to condition civic boundaries. Dissent becomes costly or morally marginal. Over time, this ideological architecture helps to contain political imagination.
Authoritarian Harmony
The growth of a middle class is often seen as the engine of democratization, as wealth brings autonomy, education, and political aspiration. In China, the CCP confronts precisely this tension. To prevent the politically disempowered middle class from becoming a destabilizing force, the Party engages in active containment. First, urban affluence is decoupled from political rights. The middle class in China is granted consumption, property, urban amenities, quality education, and social stability, but not political voice. The regime places limits on upward mobility into politics. The “Chinese Dream” — a slogan introduced by Xi in 2013 to encapsulate national rejuvenation and the restoration of China’s great power status — is framed more in terms of material fulfillment and national pride, in contrast to the “American Dream” it evokes, which instead emphasizes freedom, self-reliance, and social mobility through personal achievement rooted in individual rather than collective advancement.
Second, social stability is purchased through economic management. Controlling housing, employment, social welfare, and credit, the state ensures that the majority sees its livelihood trajectory as improving (or at least not collapsing). Third, the myth of the liberal entrepreneur has been curbed. During the reform era of the 1980s and 1990s, CCP leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin celebrated private enterprise as a driver of national rejuvenation — captured in Deng’s dictum that “to get rich is glorious” and Jiang’s “Three Represents” policy, which formally admitted entrepreneurs into the Party. The message was that wealth creation served socialism’s modernization goals, not liberal pluralism. Over time, however, that rhetoric has been reversed, as the Party now suppresses business figures who cross political boundaries and insists that private capital remain subordinate to its authority. Business elites must toe the Party line or face sanction. This prevents an independent economic class from developing overt political power. By subordinating business elites to the Party, the regime forestalls emergent political competitors.
Finally, the regime deliberately fragments social identity. The middle class is stratified by region, hukou status (the household registration system that ties access to jobs, housing, and social services to one’s place of birth), generational divides, and education. Strong provincial and local control mean that middle-class grievances seldom coalesce into coherent national movements, creating fractured loyalties. Civil society — e.g., NGOs, social movements, legal advocacy, and representation — represents one of the central threats to authoritarian control. China’s approach is not to ban all nonprofit or social activity but to allow only tightly regulated spaces and to manage or hammer down autonomous networks. From the mid-1990s onward, NGOs proliferated under a regime of cautious tolerance. However, in Xi’s era, the Party has moved to rein in civil society through legislative, administrative, and coercive tools.
China’s management of civil society relies on a calibrated mix of regulation, coercion, and cooptation designed to prevent autonomous organization. NGOs are required to register with the state, secure official sponsors, and operate under close supervision. The 2016 Charity Law and subsequent regulations sharply limit foreign funding, constrain work in politically sensitive areas, and obstruct the formation of independent groups. When organizations or individuals challenge these boundaries, the state responds with targeted repression. Lawyers, feminists, environmental activists, and religious leaders have faced harassment, detention, and forced disappearance, with the 2015 “709 Crackdown” on human rights lawyers serving as a defining example.
Alongside coercion, the Party cultivates its own network of mass organizations, including trade unions, women’s federations, and youth leagues that mimic civil society but function as instruments of political control. At the same time, independent actors are kept fragmented and localized through administrative hurdles, surveillance, and restrictions on interregional cooperation, preventing disparate movements from linking into a coherent national network. Thus, independent civil society is never entirely eradicated but is typically contained and hollowed out — tolerated where safe and suppressed where threatening.
Globalization was once expected to be a vector of liberal values such as open information flows, cross-border civil networks, and normative pressure to conform to democratic and human rights norms. The CCP has responded by turning globalization to its advantage — opening economics but locking in political closure. China joined the WTO, integrated into global supply chains, and became an essential hub of global manufacturing. Having insulated itself from globalization’s political effects, Beijing has since begun projecting its own norms outward.
In its foreign policy, China emphasizes a “mutual noninterference” doctrine — the framing it uses to categorize foreign advocacy as external subversion. Globalization is tolerated as long as it does not disturb the political core. Notably, China is exporting aspects of its surveillance and censorship model to other authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Egypt, and a range of African and Southeast Asian governments — including Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar — through technology transfers, police cooperation, and digital governance training. Through such channels, China assists other regimes in digital repression, presenting its model as a superior alternative to Western liberal democracy. In that way, it is creating a normative counterweight to liberalism globally.
Modern but Not Free
China’s endurance forces a reassessment of the long-held belief that modernization inevitably produces democracy. Economic expansion, technological sophistication, and state capacity can, in the Chinese case, coexist with one-party rule. Legitimacy now derives less from participation than from performance, order, and competence. Efficiency, stability, and the ability to manage crises have become the Party’s key claims to authority. This trajectory undermines the notion that liberal democracy is the natural endpoint of development. When one of the world’s largest and most dynamic economies achieves modernization without political pluralism, it suggests that multiple pathways to legitimacy exist. China’s system demonstrates that authoritarian adaptation — if institutionalized, data-driven, and nationally framed — can sustain both prosperity and control.
Yet the isolation proved temporary. By the early 1990s, Western governments had resumed engagement, driven by commercial interests and the belief that economic integration would still nudge China toward reform. For Beijing, from that sequence emerged a durable lesson that international condemnation could be weathered and that rapid growth and global market access would ultimately matter more for regime survival than political liberalization. In the aftermath, Chinese leadership concluded that economic performance, not ideological purity or political openness, would be the core foundation of legitimacy. As such, rather than doubling down on mass mobilization or ideological coercion, the CCP gradually evolved into a performance-based, technocratic, meritocratic regime — one that was still authoritarian but more sophisticated, flexible, and pragmatic in its operations.
The CCP’s rhetorical and narrative turn from more orthodox socialist class struggle to economic development began with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s, but the Tiananmen crisis cemented that shift. Economic development, stability, and legitimacy by performance became the Party’s core foundations. A social contract emerged in which the Party provides for consistently rising standards of living in exchange for public acquiescence to one-party rule. Over time, institutional reforms such as cadre evaluation tied to development metrics, bureaucratic specialization, and local experimentation allowed the Party to manage a growing number of governing complexities as well as dissent. The CCP has partially depoliticized governance by embedding technocratic expertise and separating policy implementation from political control, and reorganized ideological work to buttress regime legitimacy — all while ensuring that core levers of power remain under tight, unchallengeable control. In short, the CCP has arguably reinvented authoritarianism to suit a high-growth, digitally mediated era.
Surveillance as Governance
One of China’s greatest paradoxes is its success as a global capitalist giant under one-party, ostensibly socialist rule. The CCP has embraced a model in which capitalist growth is harnessed under top-down political control. The logic is that opening the economy need not imply opening politics; rather, the state retains strategic ownership and command over key sectors such as energy, telecommunications, finance, transport, and defense-linked heavy industry, while particularly later on, expanding its influence in emerging fields like semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and green technology. The Party, moreover, guides private firms via incentives and political networks. Private enterprise is not an agent of liberalization but a tool of the Party. Many private firms, especially large or strategically significant ones, remain enmeshed with Party structures. Senior executives often serve in dual roles, Party cells are embedded in companies, and compliance is rewarded. This creates both carrot and stick, as entrepreneurs must internalize political boundaries while enjoying preferential access if they align.
The regime does allow some autonomy but only within tightly bounded corridors. For example, in the tech sphere, firms like Alibaba and Tencent have room to innovate domestically and globally, but they are subject to ever-present Party oversight (e.g., ideologically guided restructuring, supervision by regulatory bodies, periodic “self-criticism” mandates, etc.). The logic is selective liberalization in that it allows markets, competition, and innovation in narrowly delimited spaces but monitors and controls where politics might intrude.
Moreover, the CCP strategically uses the rhetoric of liberal discourse (e.g., “innovation,” “rule of law,” “governance,” “consultation,” even “democracy”) to legitimize its own control. It frames its one-party state as uniquely capable of directing industrial strategy, achieving social stability, and systemically solving market failures — presenting itself as superior to liberal democracies in navigating complexity and crisis. That claim has gained credibility domestically and, to a growing extent, abroad. The Party can point to four decades of near-continuous growth, rapid poverty reduction, and decisive crisis responses as evidence that its model delivers outcomes liberal systems often struggle to replicate.
A central innovation in China’s contemporary authoritarianism is its synthesis of high-capacity surveillance, data analytics, and behavioral control. The Party has built an extensive, real-time surveillance state that collects, integrates, and analyzes data across nearly every domain of social and economic life. Where earlier authoritarian systems relied primarily on coercion and after-the-fact punishment, China’s model emphasizes prevention and anticipatory governance — detecting risks, nudging behavior, and neutralizing potential dissent before it materializes.
If the 21st century is to be shaped by governance models in competition, China’s endurance suggests that we may be entering not the twilight of authoritarianism, but perhaps its apogee.
Yet this model is not without strain. Structural headwinds such as slowing economic growth, rapid demographic decline, corruption, and external pushback from geopolitical rivals (not only the U.S. and Europe, but also India, Japan, and much of the Asia-Pacific region) — pose real risks to durability. Still, Beijing’s ability to navigate crises that have paralyzed many democracies — from the 2008 financial shock to pandemic containment — gives the Party confidence that its approach remains not only viable but superior in a volatile global environment.
China’s governance model now carries significance beyond its borders. It challenges liberal democracy on two fronts: normatively, by offering an alternative vision of political order; and strategically, by reshaping global institutions to accommodate that vision. Through diplomatic training, digital governance exports, infrastructure finance, and media partnerships, it provides practical tools to that end. For many governments in the so-called Global South (a loose, non-geographically determined grouping of developing and middle-income states across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East seeking rapid growth and political stability), this message is appealing. China demonstrates that modernization can proceed without democratization and that a state-centric, sovereignty-based path to development can rival the liberal models that have long defined Western influence.
The appeal is amplified by liberal democracies’ own dysfunction. Slow decision-making, domestic political polarization, and erosion of institutional credibility have undermined the prestige once associated with democratic systems. As the liberal order’s moral authority wanes, China’s narrative of efficient, state-led competence gains relative traction. At the same time, Beijing’s external behavior increasingly defines a normative competition rather than a conventional ideological struggle. Its emphasis on sovereignty, noninterference, and regime stability serves as a counterweight to Western advocacy of transparency and human rights principles — often accompanied by political and governance conditionalities that many developing states view as intrusive, coercive, or “strings attached.” By offering investment and diplomatic support without such requirements, China positions itself as a partner that respects domestic autonomy while subtly normalizing its own model of governance.
Through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (a regional security body linking China, Russia, and Central Asian partners), the Belt and Road Initiative (Beijing’s global infrastructure and investment network launched in 2013, directing large-scale financing to countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, and Egypt — thereby binding recipient economies more closely to China’s financial and strategic orbit), and BRICS (a loose coalition of emerging economies that increasingly coordinates on financial and governance reform), China is institutionalizing its vision — albeit with varying degrees of success, particularly in the case of BRICS. As such, global governance is no longer a one-way diffusion of liberal norms but a contest between competing models of modernity.
When Autocracy Wins
China’s refusal to liberalize is not simply a failure of modernization or an arrested development — it is a legitimized redefinition of modernization. Given this paradigm shift, instead of asking when China will democratize, the more urgent question is whether liberalism continues to hold universal relevance in the face of viable alternatives.
The key takeaway is that the liberal paradigm may no longer command universal gravity. China thus represents a potent, perhaps existential, challenge to liberal democracies. In a world where strategic autocracy is technologically sophisticated and economically successful, liberal democracy is increasingly finding itself on the defensive — not only from external competitors but from within, as polarization and declining public confidence erode liberal democracy’s capacity to deliver effective outcomes. Its very norms of openness and free exchange — once core strengths — expose it to foreign influence and manipulation, allowing authoritarian actors to exploit information ecosystems, social media platforms, and transnational networks to shape public discourse and weaken institutional trust — advantages compounded both by liberal principles that constrain democracies from responding in kind, and China’s technological insulation, most visibly through the Great Firewall, which shields its public sphere from reciprocal influence.
China is not brittle but resilient, not stagnant but evolving, and not peripheral but central to the emerging global order. If the 21st century is to be shaped by governance models in competition, China’s endurance suggests that we may be entering not the twilight of authoritarianism, but perhaps its apogee. The task for policymakers and analysts is to understand this alternative paradigm not as a temporary aberration, but as a serious contender in the global contest over legitimacy, power, and modernity.
China’s surveillance apparatus now functions as an integrated ecosystem linking state security, administrative management, and commercial data. The state draws on financial, legal, and social information from both government databases and private platforms such as telecom and payment systems. Through the
evolving Social Credit System — an umbrella framework that merges these records — authorities monitor conduct, reward compliance, and restrict access to privileges such as travel, credit, or employment. At the same time, predictive policing and artificial intelligence-enabled monitoring — including facial recognition, gait and network analysis, and algorithmic profiling — allow security services to identify potential dissent or “pre-criminal” behavior before it materializes, narrowing the space for collective action.
Complementing these technologies is a grid-based governance network that embeds neighborhood monitors, social workers, and local committees to gather micro-level intelligence on disputes, grievances, and grassroots ideological sentiment — feeding data upward to higher authorities. Surveillance is also woven into daily life through public services, mobile payment systems, and “smart city” infrastructure, ensuring that administrative convenience and political supervision function as two sides of the same system. A central component of this information architecture is the so-called Great Firewall — China’s nationwide system of internet controls that filters, blocks, and monitors digital traffic across its borders. It combines technical firewalls, keyword filtering, and legal restrictions on service providers to prevent the circulation of foreign news, social media, and political content deemed subversive, while amplifying Beijing’s state messaging outward.
What’s crucial is that this architecture functions less as a punitive tool than as a system of behavioral governance — steering citizens toward compliant conduct. It does not primarily coerce through force but rather incentivizes conformity, fosters internalized self-censorship, and raises the social and economic costs of dissent. Under Xi Jinping, the surveillance apparatus has been further normalized as part of “holistic social management,” integrated into the logic of governance rather than merely policing. The boundary between security and public administration has thus substantially blurred. In a system where political pluralism is out of bounds, a regime must still build legitimacy. That task is achieved not by persuading through democracy but by constructing a compelling ideological narrative that reorients civic identity around nationalism, social harmony, and regime continuity.
The CCP has recast its authority in the language of national rejuvenation, asserting that only its rule can defend China from foreign humiliation, preserve territorial integrity, and restore global stature. Under Xi, this nationalism has taken on the character of a civic religion — reinforced through patriotic education, “red culture,” and state-curated narratives of victimhood and recovery that saturate schools, media, and public rituals. The enshrinement of Xi Jinping Thought as the Party’s guiding doctrine further personalizes this framework, transforming the regime from its previous iteration as a rule-by-consensus model (the post-Deng, pre-Xi era, roughly from 1990–2012) into a leader-centric system more reminiscent of the Mao era — where criticism of policy equates to disloyalty to the state itself.
Parallel narratives of a “harmonious society” and “collective responsibility” depict stability as a moral good and dissent as socially corrosive, while official references to “consultation,” “rule-based governance,” and “whole-process democracy” simulate participation without diluting central control. At the same time, the Party demonstrates ideological flexibility, borrowing liberal and technocratic vocabulary — terms like “governance,” “transparency,” and “data management” — and redefining them within its own discourse to signal modernization while neutralizing their emancipatory potential. In this design, belief is secondary. Most citizens do not fervently endorse communist ideology, but the Party’s narratives are pervasive enough to condition civic boundaries. Dissent becomes costly or morally marginal. Over time, this ideological architecture helps to contain political imagination.
Authoritarian Harmony
The growth of a middle class is often seen as the engine of democratization, as wealth brings autonomy, education, and political aspiration. In China, the CCP confronts precisely this tension. To prevent the politically disempowered middle class from becoming a destabilizing force, the Party engages in active containment. First, urban affluence is decoupled from political rights. The middle class in China is granted consumption, property, urban amenities, quality education, and social stability, but not political voice. The regime places limits on upward mobility into politics. The “Chinese Dream” — a slogan introduced by Xi in 2013 to encapsulate national rejuvenation and the restoration of China’s great power status — is framed more in terms of material fulfillment and national pride, in contrast to the “American Dream” it evokes, which instead emphasizes freedom, self-reliance, and social mobility through personal achievement rooted in individual rather than collective advancement.
Second, social stability is purchased through economic management. Controlling housing, employment, social welfare, and credit, the state ensures that the majority sees its livelihood trajectory as improving (or at least not collapsing). Third, the myth of the liberal entrepreneur has been curbed. During the reform era of the 1980s and 1990s, CCP leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin celebrated private enterprise as a driver of national rejuvenation — captured in Deng’s dictum that “to get rich is glorious” and Jiang’s “Three Represents” policy, which formally admitted entrepreneurs into the Party. The message was that wealth creation served socialism’s modernization goals, not liberal pluralism. Over time, however, that rhetoric has been reversed, as the Party now suppresses business figures who cross political boundaries and insists that private capital remain subordinate to its authority. Business elites must toe the Party line or face sanction. This prevents an independent economic class from developing overt political power. By subordinating business elites to the Party, the regime forestalls emergent political competitors.
Finally, the regime deliberately fragments social identity. The middle class is stratified by region, hukou status (the household registration system that ties access to jobs, housing, and social services to one’s place of birth), generational divides, and education. Strong provincial and local control mean that middle-class grievances seldom coalesce into coherent national movements, creating fractured loyalties. Civil society — e.g., NGOs, social movements, legal advocacy, and representation — represents one of the central threats to authoritarian control. China’s approach is not to ban all nonprofit or social activity but to allow only tightly regulated spaces and to manage or hammer down autonomous networks. From the mid-1990s onward, NGOs proliferated under a regime of cautious tolerance. However, in Xi’s era, the Party has moved to rein in civil society through legislative, administrative, and coercive tools.
China’s management of civil society relies on a calibrated mix of regulation, coercion, and cooptation designed to prevent autonomous organization. NGOs are required to register with the state, secure official sponsors, and operate under close supervision. The 2016 Charity Law and subsequent regulations sharply limit foreign funding, constrain work in politically sensitive areas, and obstruct the formation of independent groups. When organizations or individuals challenge these boundaries, the state responds with targeted repression. Lawyers, feminists, environmental activists, and religious leaders have faced harassment, detention, and forced disappearance, with the 2015 “709 Crackdown” on human rights lawyers serving as a defining example.
Alongside coercion, the Party cultivates its own network of mass organizations, including trade unions, women’s federations, and youth leagues that mimic civil society but function as instruments of political control. At the same time, independent actors are kept fragmented and localized through administrative hurdles, surveillance, and restrictions on interregional cooperation, preventing disparate movements from linking into a coherent national network. Thus, independent civil society is never entirely eradicated but is typically contained and hollowed out — tolerated where safe and suppressed where threatening.
Globalization was once expected to be a vector of liberal values such as open information flows, cross-border civil networks, and normative pressure to conform to democratic and human rights norms. The CCP has responded by turning globalization to its advantage — opening economics but locking in political closure. China joined the WTO, integrated into global supply chains, and became an essential hub of global manufacturing. Having insulated itself from globalization’s political effects, Beijing has since begun projecting its own norms outward.
In its foreign policy, China emphasizes a “mutual noninterference” doctrine — the framing it uses to categorize foreign advocacy as external subversion. Globalization is tolerated as long as it does not disturb the political core. Notably, China is exporting aspects of its surveillance and censorship model to other authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Egypt, and a range of African and Southeast Asian governments — including Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar — through technology transfers, police cooperation, and digital governance training. Through such channels, China assists other regimes in digital repression, presenting its model as a superior alternative to Western liberal democracy. In that way, it is creating a normative counterweight to liberalism globally.
Modern but Not Free
China’s endurance forces a reassessment of the long-held belief that modernization inevitably produces democracy. Economic expansion, technological sophistication, and state capacity can, in the Chinese case, coexist with one-party rule. Legitimacy now derives less from participation than from performance, order, and competence. Efficiency, stability, and the ability to manage crises have become the Party’s key claims to authority. This trajectory undermines the notion that liberal democracy is the natural endpoint of development. When one of the world’s largest and most dynamic economies achieves modernization without political pluralism, it suggests that multiple pathways to legitimacy exist. China’s system demonstrates that authoritarian adaptation — if institutionalized, data-driven, and nationally framed — can sustain both prosperity and control.
Yet this model is not without strain. Structural headwinds such as slowing economic growth, rapid demographic decline, corruption, and external pushback from geopolitical rivals (not only the U.S. and Europe, but also India, Japan, and much of the Asia-Pacific region) — pose real risks to durability. Still, Beijing’s ability to navigate crises that have paralyzed
many democracies — from the 2008 financial shock to pandemic containment — gives the Party confidence that its approach remains not only viable but superior in a volatile global environment.
China’s governance model now carries significance beyond its borders. It challenges liberal democracy on two fronts: normatively, by offering an alternative vision of political order; and strategically, by reshaping global institutions to accommodate that vision. Through diplomatic training, digital governance exports, infrastructure finance, and media partnerships, it provides practical tools to that end. For many governments in the so-called Global South (a loose, non-geographically determined grouping of developing and middle-income states across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East seeking rapid growth and political stability), this message is appealing. China demonstrates that modernization can proceed without democratization and that a state-centric, sovereignty-based path to development can rival the liberal models that have long defined Western influence.
The appeal is amplified by liberal democracies’ own dysfunction. Slow decision-making, domestic political polarization, and erosion of institutional credibility have undermined the prestige once associated with democratic systems. As the liberal order’s moral authority wanes, China’s narrative of efficient, state-led competence gains relative traction. At the same time, Beijing’s external behavior increasingly defines a normative competition rather than a conventional ideological struggle. Its emphasis on sovereignty, noninterference, and regime stability serves as a counterweight to Western advocacy of transparency and human rights principles — often accompanied by political and governance conditionalities that many developing states view as intrusive, coercive, or “strings attached.” By offering investment and diplomatic support without such requirements, China positions itself as a partner that respects domestic autonomy while subtly normalizing its own model of governance.
Through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (a regional security body linking China, Russia, and Central Asian partners), the Belt and Road Initiative (Beijing’s global infrastructure and investment network launched in 2013, directing large-scale financing to countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, and Egypt — thereby binding recipient economies more closely to China’s financial and strategic orbit), and BRICS (a loose coalition of emerging economies that increasingly coordinates on financial and governance reform), China is institutionalizing its vision — albeit with varying degrees of success, particularly in the case of BRICS. As such, global governance is no longer a one-way diffusion of liberal norms but a contest between competing models of modernity.
When Autocracy Wins
China’s refusal to liberalize is not simply a failure of modernization or an arrested development — it is a legitimized redefinition of modernization. Given this paradigm shift, instead of asking when China will democratize, the more urgent question is whether liberalism continues to hold universal relevance in the face of viable alternatives.
The key takeaway is that the liberal paradigm may no longer command universal gravity. China thus represents a potent, perhaps existential, challenge to liberal democracies. In a world where strategic autocracy is technologically sophisticated and economically successful, liberal democracy is increasingly finding itself on the defensive — not only from external competitors but from within, as polarization and declining public confidence erode liberal democracy’s capacity to deliver effective outcomes. Its very norms of openness and free exchange — once core strengths — expose it to foreign influence and manipulation, allowing authoritarian actors to exploit information ecosystems, social media platforms, and transnational networks to shape public discourse and weaken institutional trust — advantages compounded both by liberal principles that constrain democracies from responding in kind, and China’s technological insulation, most visibly through the Great Firewall, which shields its public sphere from reciprocal influence.
China is not brittle but resilient, not stagnant but evolving, and not peripheral but central to the emerging global order. If the 21st century is to be shaped by governance models in competition, China’s endurance suggests that we may be entering not the twilight of authoritarianism, but perhaps its apogee. The task for policymakers and analysts is to understand this alternative paradigm not as a temporary aberration, but as a serious contender in the global contest over legitimacy, power, and modernity.
Recommended
No More Free Rides in a Transactional World
How Ukraine and Moldova Are Transforming Europe?
India’s Internal Challenges to Global Leadership
American foreign policy cycles between predictability and unpredictability, challenging global trust and alliances.
The Alliance’s Search for a New Identity
