China’s Slide Into Dictatorship

China may seem to be an odd inclusion in a discussion on democratic backsliding – the People’s Republic of China is not, and never has been, a democracy. But within the confines of China’s one-party system, the scope for certain freedoms ebbs and flows. And since Xi Jinping took power in late 2012, the trend has been all one way: toward greater control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The limited freedoms that existed at the end of the Hu Jintao era have been whittled away, such that many Chinese look back at the late ‘00s with nostalgia.

When Xi came into office, many analysts had him – incorrectly, as it turns out – pegged as a moderate, or even a reformer. Those expectations were dashed early on. In 2013, Southern Weekly, a liberal-leaning newspaper in Guangdong Province, saw its annual “New Year’s Greeting” editorial ravaged by censors, without any notice to the staff. Instead of calling for respect for constitutionally-guaranteed human rights, the piece had been turned into a paean for the CCP.

The editorial staff took to social media to protest, only to have their accounts on Sina Weibo frozen. Southern Weekly staff who spoke up were fired or demoted, along with editors and journalists at other media outlets who indicated support for the newspaper. The original censorship had been done by the provincial authorities, but the scale of the response made it clear that the national leadership agreed Southern Weekly was in the wrong.

It was a sign of things to come. Under CCP rule, China’s media sphere has never been free, but in the early 2000s there was tantalizing progress. The media sector expanded to include private, profit-driven companies. At the same time, space quietly opened for editors and journalists to push the envelope on stories the public desperately wanted to know more about: government corruption (though reporting was carefully contained to local-level officials), food safety, and other topics.

Xi’s “new era” saw that door slammed shut again. In a seminal speech in 2016, Xi declared that media outlets must not only serve the CCP, but take “party” as their “surname.” He made it clear that in China, journalism’s purpose is to serve the CCP’s ends, not inform the public. To be officially accredited as a journalist today, in fact, one must take 90 hours of “continuing education” each year on the CCP’s goals for the media and the “Marxist view of journalism.”

Media wasn’t the only realm where nascent freedoms were savagely rolled back. On July 9, 2015, Chinese authorities detained over 300 lawyers who had worked on cases involving human rights violations. Many of them were sentenced to lengthy jail terms; China’s most progressive law firms were shuttered. Even today, almost 10 years later, the victims of the 709 crackdown report being repeatedly evicted, prevented from meeting with colleagues, and denied permission to leave the country.

As with the media sphere, China’s legal system was never free. The CCP ultimately had veto power over any ruling that it deemed worthy of its attention. However, up until 2015 lawyers had been pushing at the boundaries of the system, pointing out the wide chasm between the legal rights guaranteed on paper – including in China’s Constitution – and the curtailment of those rights in practice. These lawyers rarely won their cases, but they did bravely draw attention to the hypocrisy – and Xi decided they needed to go.

Even democracy in the literal sense – voting in elections to determine government leaders – had made some small gains in China prior to Xi’s ascent. In an astonishing case in 2011, the village of Wukan, Guangdong Province, rose up in outrage after their local government orchestrated a land grab that threatened the villagers’ livelihoods. The usual crackdown ensued, but then something unexpected happened: the villagers stood strong, outrage grew, and the provincial authorities stepped in and sided with the people of Wukan. They were allowed to elect a new village committee – through a democratic vote.

In a widely circulated video online, one of the villains of the saga bitterly complained: “Our powers decline every day... Ordinary people have bigger and bigger appetites, and become smarter every day. They are harder and harder to control.”

But just five years later, the situation took another abrupt turn. Wukan’s democratically elected village head called again for protests against land seizures – and this time the crackdown was brutal and unrelenting. Wukan’s brief experiment with local democracy was over.

Importantly, these declining freedoms feed into each other. In 2011, the relatively free media environment of the time played a key role in the success of Wukan’s village protests. The eye of China, and the world, was on the crackdown, and it simply became too reputationally damaging to sustain. By 2016, however, with the media firmly in hand – and any reporters who dared to venture to Wukan detained or chased away – police had free rein to round up and assault the protesting villagers.

Reporters from Al Jazeera were among the few to make contact with Wukan during the June 2016 crackdown. They summarized villagers’ reports: “Police were more brutal than even during the uprising in 2011: they arrested more than 100 people within a few short hours and beat even old women and children.” Even several months later, Al Jazeera reported, the village remained a virtual “prison.”

These developments all took place in China’s Han-dominated heartland. In the homelands of China’s ethnic minority groups, things are even worse. The mass detentions of Uyghurs in heavily guarded camps for “re-education” are by now well-documented, including in a report from the United Nations. While officially, the camps were “vocational training centers,” eyewitnesses reported the extent of their “education”: they were forced to recant their Muslim religious beliefs, forbidden to speak in the Uyghur language, and trained to recite passages extolling the glories of the CCP.

Uyghurs weren’t the only ethnic group targeted, although their treatment was particularly harsh. Under Xi, the CCP continued to advance its longstanding oppression of Tibetans, with a wave of Tibetan-run schools shuttered and a continued campaign to force nomadic populations into tightly controlled urban areas in the name of “poverty alleviation.” Tibetan language education was replaced by mandatory classes in Mandarin – a pattern that impacted minority language education all across China, even sparking rare protests by ethnic Mongolians in the north.

And this is all without mentioning the devastation to the freedoms that Hong Kongers used to enjoy. Since the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020, Hong Kong’s limited democracy has been killed. After major electoral successes by pro-democracy legislators and district council members, such candidates are now barred from even running by the requirement that officials be proven “patriots.” Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, was forcibly shuttered over its pro-democracy stance, and labor unions were systematically dismantled.

Today, Hong Kong’s once-annual Tiananmen Square vigils are outlawed; mass gatherings like the “Occupy Central” movement of 2014 or the “Umbrella Protests” of 2019 are unthinkable. The academics and politicians who led those protests face lengthy jail sentences, and those who managed to flee abroad have bounties on their heads.

These changes, though all too noticeable in practice, are largely invisible in international rankings. This is due to the simple fact that China, even during its relatively “free” era, scored so low on indices measuring rights and freedoms that it had little room to drop. For example, China back in 2012 was already rated “not free” in Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index, with a score of 13 out of 100. In 2024, China scored 9 – which may seem like a minuscule change, but the decline was painfully obvious for those who live in or frequently visit China. On the index of “political rights” in particular, China has dropped from 7 in 2012 to -2 in 2024.

As elsewhere in the world, China’s leaders justify the steady constriction of personal liberties through the need to uphold “stability” and “national security.” Perhaps emboldened by figures like Donald Trump, who claim “fake news” when faced with any criticisms, the CCP has no qualms about simply denying reality whenever anyone does raise questions. Authorities insisted there were no “re-education camps” in Xinjiang for months, until the evidence became overwhelming; then the narrative shifted to “vocational training.” According to the CCP’s narrative, everyone in China is happy and prosperous – or they will be soon, thanks to the party’s benevolent intervention.

In fact, amid the marked downslide in already-limited freedoms, an odd contradiction cropped up: China started becoming increasingly insistent that it is, in fact, a democracy. Not only that, but China claims to be a better democracy than countries that actually hold elections.

In 2021, as the Biden administration convened its first “Summit for Democracy,” China’s State Council issued a formal white paper titled “China: Democracy That Works.” The paper opened with the claim that “Democracy is a common value of humanity and an ideal that has always been cherished by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese people.” It continued:

Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, with a deeper understanding of China’s path to democracy and the political system, the Party has developed whole-process people’s democracy as a key concept and striven to translate it and relevant democratic values into effective institutions and concrete actions…It is a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. It is a true democracy that works.

China now claims to be a “whole-process people’s democracy,” but for decades it used the less-palatable term “people’s democratic dictatorship.” The idea is that the CCP enjoys absolute rule, but is assumed to be both listening and responsive to the wishes of “the people” – all without the hassle of elections.

Yet under Xi, the CCP has been eroding the very mechanisms it once relied on to receive meaningful feedback from the general public. “After Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the CCP has been increasingly obstructing the infrastructure of consultative democracy,” Zhuoran Li, a researcher on China’s political system, wrote in a 2022 analysis for The Diplomat. “The party now views these institutions not as strengths or sources of resiliency but as weaknesses in policy implementation and threats to regime stability.”

With the CCP cracking down on space for people to express criticism of its policies, the already tenuous link between the public and the party-state is further weakened. And without the “people’s democratic” participation, even in the circumscribed form that existed 15 years ago, all that’s left is Xi’s “dictatorship.”