Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

At the extremes, such contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic has called the “Maduro model” of governance, after the current leader of Venezuela. Autocrats who adopt it are “willing to see their country enter the category of failed states,” he says—accepting economic collapse, endemic violence, mass poverty, and international isolation if that’s what it takes to stay in power. Like Maduro, Presidents Bashir al-Assad in Syria and Lukashenko in Belarus seem entirely comfortable ruling over collapsed economies and societies.

Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors. But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy. That enemy is us. To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, “the West,” NATO, the European Union, their own, internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them. These include the notion that the law is a neutral force, not subject to the whims of politics; that courts and judges should be independent; that political opposition is legitimate; that the rights to speech and assembly can be guaranteed; and that there can be independent journalists and writers and thinkers who are capable of being critical of the ruling party or leader while at the same time remaining loyal to the state.

In 2013, as Xi Jinping was beginning his rise to power, an internal Chinese memo known, enigmatically, as Document Number Nine or, more formally, as the “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” listed the “seven perils” faced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Western constitutional democracy led the list, followed by “universal values,” media independence and civic participation, as well as “nihilist” criticism of the Communist Party.

This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.

Between 1980 and 2002, new kinds of states emerged, not just tax havens, but “bridging jurisdictions,” as a National Endowment for Democracy study calls them. These are hybrid states that are a legitimate part of the international financial system, that trade normally with the democratic world, that are sometimes part of democratic military alliances, but that are also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has in recent years made it much easier for foreigners, even those under sanctions, to become residents or even citizens and to buy property.

In the aftermath of these events, the Chinese concluded that even this response was insufficient. To prevent the democratic wave then sweeping across Western Europe from spreading to the East, China’s leaders set out to eliminate not just the people but the ideas that had motivated the protests: the rule of law, the separation of powers, the right to freedom of speech and assembly, and all the principles that they described as “spiritual pollution” coming from the democratic world.

In 2000, something called the Measures for Managing Internet Comment Provision prohibited an extraordinarily wide range of content, including anything that “endangers national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, undermines national unification,” and “is detrimental to the honor and interests of the state”—anything, in other words, that the authorities don’t like.

The Chinese regime also draws a contrast between their own “order” and the chaos or violence of democracy.

Americans who rarely think about Russia would be stunned to learn how much time Russian state television devotes to America’s culture wars, especially arguments over gender.

Putin’s portrayal of Russia as the leader of an alliance of strong, traditional states against weak democracies has nevertheless won some adherents in America.

This manipulation of the strong emotions about gay rights and feminism has been widely copied throughout the autocratic world.

Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.

The analyst Christopher Walker has coined the term “sharp power”—neither “hard” military power nor “soft” cultural power—to describe the Chinese influence campaigns that are now felt in many different areas of culture, media, academia, and even sports. Many are coordinated by the United Front, the Chinese Communist Party’s most important influence project, which creates educational and exchange programs, seeks to control Chinese exile communities, builds Chinese chambers of commerce, and, most notoriously, helps run the Confucius Institutes, situated within academic institutions all over the world. Originally perceived as benign cultural bodies, not unlike the Goethe Institute run by the German government or the Alliance Française, the Confucius Institutes were welcomed by many universities because they provided cheap or even free Chinese-language classes and professors. Over time, the institutes aroused suspicion by policing Chinese students at American universities, seeking to block public discussions of Tibet or Taiwan, and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history and politics to suit Chinese narratives. Although mostly disbanded in the United States, Confucius Institutes flourish in many other places. There are several dozen in Africa alone.

China’s enormous investment, estimated at $7–10 billion, in international media.

Chinese propagandists prefer their points of view to appear in the local press, with local bylines. They call this “borrowing boats to reach the sea.”

The goal is to spread the same narratives that autocrats use at home, to connect democracy with degeneracy and chaos, to undermine democratic institutions, to smear not just activists who promote democracy but the system itself.

autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics. They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself.

Instead of human rights, which are monitored by outside organizations and independent agencies and can be measured against international standards, China wants to prioritize the right to development, which is something that can be defined and measured only by governments. China also relies heavily on the word sovereignty, which has many connotations, some of them positive. But in the context of international institutions, “sovereignty” is the word that dictators use when they want to push back against criticism of their policies, whether it comes from UN bodies, independent human rights monitors, or their own citizens.

To protect its sovereignty, China seeks to change other kinds of language too. Instead of “political rights” or “human rights,” the Chinese want the UN and other international organizations to talk about win-win cooperation—by which they mean that everyone will benefit if each country maintains its own political system. They also want everyone to popularize mutual respect—by which they mean that no one should criticize anyone else. This vocabulary is deliberately dull and unthreatening: Who could be against “win-win cooperation” or “mutual respect”?

A team from Britain’s Royal United Services Institute has described the current Russian offer to sitting dictators and would-be dictators as a “regime survival package.” This bundle of aid can include personal protection for the dictator; violent assaults on his political enemies; help in fighting an insurgency; broadcast or social media campaigns that echo the themes of multipolarity and anticolonialism; kleptocratic contacts that help the elite hide money (and possibly benefit the Russians as well). By accepting this package, the local dictator will also be cut off from democratic allies, either because the violence and repression needed to maintain power make him too unpalatable or because his new Russian allies insist he cut ties with old American and European friends.

“In recent years various dictatorships—of both internal and external origin—have collapsed or stumbled when confronted by defiant, mobilized people.” Those are the opening words of From Dictatorship to Democracy, an iconic pamphlet composed by Gene Sharp, an American academic.

They did everything right. But they were defeated because the Chinese authorities had also been studying the kinds of tactics proposed by Sharp and Havel. They had thought hard about how to mock and undermine symbolic acts; how to smear and discredit charismatic leaders; how to use social media to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories; how to isolate and alienate people; how to break links between different social groups and social classes; how to eliminate influential exiles; and above all, how to turn the language of human rights, freedom, and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal. The rest of Autocracy, Inc., learned these lessons too.

The allegation that “George Soros” is organizing demonstrations—the name Soros being a stand-in for “international Jewish conspiracy”—has been used over and over again to smear activists,

As Shore explains, “Kremlin propaganda, the conviction that American intelligence or some other world-controlling force must be pulling the strings, betrayed not only malicious intent, but also an inability to believe that there could be such a thing as individuals thinking and acting for themselves.”

Modern dictators have learned that the mass violence of the twentieth century is no longer necessary: targeted violence is often enough to keep ordinary people away from politics altogether, convincing them that it’s a contest they can never win.

This is why modern autocrats usually prefer to avoid murder. A martyr can inspire a political movement, while a successful smear campaign can destroy one.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a U.S. senator who has argued for greater financial transparency for many years, once told me that he does so partly because “the same techniques of concealment used to facilitate offshore thugs and criminal activities also facilitate the political activities of domestic special interests.”

During the three decades that have passed since the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies imagined that they had no need to compete in this sphere, because good information would somehow win the battle in the “marketplace of ideas.” But there isn’t a marketplace of ideas, or in any case not a free market of ideas. Instead, some ideas have been turbocharged by disinformation campaigns, by heavy spending by the social media companies whose algorithms promote emotional and divisive content, and perhaps, in some cases, by algorithms designed to promote Russian or Chinese narratives in a similar manner. Since we first encountered Russian disinformation inside our own societies, we’ve imagined that our existing forms of communication could beat it without any special effort. But no one who studies autocratic propaganda believes that fact-checking or even swift reactions are sufficient. By the time the correction is made, the falsehood has already traveled around the world. Our old models never acknowledged the truth that many people desire disinformation. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.

The risks of overdependence on trade with Russia, China, or other autocracies aren’t just economic. They are existential. Following the invasion of Ukraine, Europeans learned the hard way how high a price they had paid for their decision to rely upon Russian gas. The shift to more expensive energy sources caused inflation. Inflation in turn caused dissatisfaction. Compounded by a Russian disinformation campaign, this dissatisfaction contributed to a surge in support for the German far right, a political movement that would alter the nature of postwar Germany beyond recognition, if it ever took power.