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

by Anne Applebaum

But these concerns never prevented the Chinese from selling surveillance technology, crowd-control equipment, and riot gear to the Maduro government, along with water cannons, tear-gas guns, and enormous movable walls that could block people from joining crowds—all tools that helped prevent the opposition from winning power.

Cuban spies still help the Venezuelan regime suppress the dissent that periodically bubbles up in the military (soldiers’ families are affected by the food shortages and general discontent too), and Cubans have also taught the Venezuelan regime how to use shortages to their advantage, distributing food rations to their supporters and punishing opponents by taking food rations away.

The Islamic Republic is a theocracy; the Bolivarian Republic ostensibly promotes left-wing internationalism. What binds them is oil, anti-Americanism, opposition to their own democracy movements, and a shared need to learn the dark art of sanctions evasion.

Iranians helped Venezuela build a drone factory (apparently with mixed success) and have sent equipment and personnel to help repair Venezuelan oil refineries.

In October 2022, five Russian and two Spanish oil traders were indicted in the United States for participating in an elaborate conspiracy to simultaneously sidestep U.S. sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry and evade the ban on exports of electronics and other technology to Russia.

A U.S. Justice Department indictment alleges that the proceeds were used to buy high-tech components from U.S. companies for Russian military contractors, who used them to build weapons designed to kill Ukrainians.

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.

An influx of kleptocratic cash can also empower regimes to become more autocratic and repressive themselves.

In a country where some people can become fabulously rich just by being in the right place at the right time while others remain poor, it is no wonder Uebert Angel’s financial advice and “miracle money” attract so much faith and hope: a form of invisible foreign “magic” has made a few people extremely wealthy.

In exchange, Zimbabwe got broadband deals and Chinese surveillance technology, including Huawei equipment and surveillance cameras that China has long used to track internal dissent. Other Chinese technology firms, including some that produce facial-recognition software, signed deals to provide equipment for what was vaguely described as “law enforcement purposes.” Zimbabwe turned over its telecommunications infrastructure to China.

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.

It’s worth remembering again that room full of foreign policy experts who laughed, back in 2000, when President Clinton said that any Chinese attempt to control the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.” Books with titles like Here Comes Everybody and Virtuous Reality once argued that the internet would lead to a boom in self-organization, even a cultural renaissance. As recently as 2012, it was still possible for a reviewer in The New York Times to belittle the idea, expressed in a book of mine, that the internet could become a tool of control. “Vladimir Putin may yet make her a prophet,” wrote Max Frankel about me, “but so far this century, technology has become a welcome defense against tyranny.”

“Firewall” sounds like a physical object, and China’s system of internet management—in fact, conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases.

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.

Foreign companies helped, initially rushing into this new security market the same way they had rushed into post-Soviet financial markets. Microsoft at one point altered its blogging software to accommodate the Great Firewall’s protocols. Yahoo agreed to sign a “public pledge on self-discipline,” ensuring that forbidden terms wouldn’t turn up in its searches. Cisco Systems, another U.S. company, sold hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment to China, including technology that blocked traffic to banned websites. When I wrote about these sales in 2005, a spokesman told me this was the “same equipment technology that your local library uses to block pornography,” adding, “We’re not doing anything illegal.”

But as in so many other spheres, China absorbed the technology it needed and then eased the foreign companies out. Google struggled to adhere to the Great Firewall’s rules before giving up in 2010, following a cyberattack orchestrated by the People’s Liberation Army. The company later worked secretly on a version of its search engine that would be compatible with Chinese censorship, but abandoned that as well, following staff protest and public criticism in 2018. China banned Facebook in 2009 and Instagram in 2014. TikTok, although invented by a Chinese company, has never been permitted to function in China at all. The Chinese regime also cast the net wider, beyond cyberspace, learning to combine online tracking systems with other tools of repression, including security cameras, police inspections, and arrests.

Uighurs have been required to install “nanny apps” on their phones, which constantly search for “ideological viruses,” including Koranic verses and religious references as well as suspicious statements in all forms of correspondence. The apps can monitor purchases of digital books and track an individual’s location, sending the information back to police. They can also pick up unusual behavior: anyone who downloads a virtual private network, anyone who stays off-line altogether, and anyone whose home uses too much electricity (which could be evidence of a secret houseguest) can arouse suspicion. Voice-recognition technology and even DNA swabs are used to monitor where Uighurs walk, drive, and shop. Eventually, this system could spread across all of China, where hundreds of millions of security cameras already monitor public spaces.

A so-called social credit system already connects a wealth of databases, blacklisting individuals who break the rules. Sometimes this system is described by the benign term “safe city technology,” as if its only purpose were to improve traffic flows, and indeed it does that too.

The tech journalist Ross Andersen has written in The Atlantic that soon “Chinese algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.” With every new breakthrough, with every AI advance, China gets closer to its version of the holy grail: a system that can eliminate not just the words “democracy” and “Tiananmen” from the internet but the thinking that leads people to become democracy activists or attend public protests in real life.

“Safe city technology,” surveillance, and AI systems have been sold by the Chinese tech behemoth Huawei to Pakistan, Brazil, Mexi...

Some elements of “safe city technology” really can help combat crime, and plenty of democracies experiment with it.

Pegasus mobile phone spyware, created by the Israeli company NSO, has been used to track journalists, activists, and political opponents in Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, India, Bahrain, and Greece, among others.

There are important differences between the way these stories play out in democracies and dictatorships.

If no parallel scandal has ever unfolded in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, that’s because there are no legislative committees or free media that could play the same role.

China exports these technologies for commercial reasons, possibly for espionage, but also because their spread justifies their use at home: if there are fewer objections to mass surveillance outside China, then there is less danger that criticism will be heard inside China.

The lesson for Autocracy, Inc., was ominous: even in a state where surveillance seems total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can always radicalize people.

The strength of these demonstrations and the broader anger they reflected were enough to spook the Chinese authorities into lifting the quarantines and allowing the virus to spread.

If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those ideas have to be poisoned.

Posters, art, movies, and newspapers portrayed a shiny and idealized future, filled with clean factories, abundant produce, enthusiastic workers, and healthy tractor drivers.

In theory, citizens were meant to feel enthusiasm, inspiration, and hope. In practice, this kind of propaganda backfired, since people could compare what they saw in posters and movies with a far more impoverished reality.

They don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build.

Instead of portraying China as the perfect society, modern Chinese domestic propaganda seeks to inculcate nationalist pride, based on China’s real experience of economic development and national redemption. The Chinese regime also draws a contrast between their own “order” and the chaos or violence of democracy.

Instead, they are told constantly about the decline of places they don’t know and have mostly never visited: America, France, Britain, Sweden, Poland, countries apparently filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and Russophobia.

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.

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

This tactic, the so-called “fire hose of falsehoods” produces not outrage but nihilism.

Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world.

It rather involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence media and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some amplified by both paid and unpaid members of the American and European far right; and, increasingly, the efforts of other autocracies piggybacking on these networks, using the same tactics and the same language to promote their own illiberal regimes, often for the purpose of achieving similar narrative control.

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.

The Xinhua wire service, China Global Television Network (CGTN), China Radio International, and the China Daily web portal all receive significant state financing, have social media accounts in multiple languages and regions, and sell, share, or otherwise promote their content.

At the moment, not many people watch these Chinese-owned channels, whose output is predictable and often boring.

Legal pressure on foreign news organizations, the blocking of foreign websites, online trolling operations aimed at foreign journalists, cyberattacks—all these can be deployed as part of a single operation designed to undermine a particular organization or to promote a particular narrative.

They call this “borrowing boats to reach the sea.”

RT, like PressTV, Telesur, and even China’s CGTN, is rather a showcase, a production facility, and a source of video clips that can be spread by the social media network, and indeed human network, that Russians and others have constructed for that purpose.

Russian-owned Facebook and Twitter accounts, pretending to be Americans, pushed out anti-immigration slogans designed to benefit Donald Trump, as well as fake “Black Lives Matter” accounts attacking Hillary Clinton from the left. They manufactured anti-Muslim hysteria in places with few Muslims, even creating a Facebook group called Secured Borders that successfully fueled an anti-refugee movement in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Nevertheless, an American Twitter account with links to the QAnon conspiracy network—@WarClandestine—began tweeting about it, racking up thousands of retweets and views. The hashtag #biolab started trending on Twitter and reached over nine million views. Even after the suspension of the account—later revealed to belong to a real person, a veteran of the Army National Guard—people continued to post screenshots.

Anyone inside this echo chamber would have heard the biolab conspiracy theory many times, always from different sources, each one repeating and building on the others to create the impression of veracity.

Although the company is registered to an address in London—a mail drop shared by sixty-five thousand other companies—its “news team” is based in a suburb of Damascus, Syria.

Created in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RRN, part of a bigger information-laundering operation known to investigators as Doppelganger, is primarily a “typosquatter”: a company that registers domain names that look similar to real media domain names—Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, for example—as well as websites with names that sound authentic (such as Notre Pays, or “Our Country”) but are created to deceive.

During its short existence, it has created more than three hundred sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. Links to these sites are then used to make Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and other social media posts appear credible.