Tag: Authoritarianism

  • In Brief: The Myth of Chinese Authoritarianism

    In Brief: The Myth of Chinese Authoritarianism

    The negative media coverage of China has risen almost in perfect correlation with their economic development and relative power. A cynic might say the two are related.

    China conjures up the thesis from Chomsky and Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent; repeat anything often enough and it becomes assumed truth without question. Xi Jinping is an autocrat. China has no freedom and especially not freedom of speech. No right to choose leaders. Uyghurs are experiencing genocide. Constant surveillance by the state. Dissent crushed instantly. Beijing is an oppressive regime—and any country the West doesn’t like automatically has a “regime” instead of a government.

    The first thing to untangle with China is the nature of a one-party system. The ruling party of a Marxist-Leninist state does not operate like a party in a liberal state. The Communist Party of China is a mass party with 101 million members. 31% are women, roughly a third of members are farmers or workers and another third comprise of professionals and public administrators. There are about eight million cadres working to carry out national programming, implement anti-poverty measures and run community services centres. From this membership base, delegates are elected who, in turn, elect members to higher leadership posts.

    State power in China is decentralized, with municipal and provincial governments holding considerable autonomy. There are local, direct elections of representatives who then choose the governors or mayors or congresspeople for the next level up. Aside from local elections, consultative democracy is employed through online government feedback portals, continuous surveying of the population and hot topics of social media discussion.

    The data collected from the citizen body are used to define issues that need improving, set a government agenda and establish key performance indicators that politicians must reach in order to hold onto their jobs. Because the main levers of the economy are under public ownership—including banking, resource extraction and construction—the government actually has the necessary tools to fix quality of life issues for those in their jurisdiction.

    China does not have multiparty national elections factionalizing society. They have a system of steady citizen input and government redress. The major advantage of this system is the continuity of government; long-term development plans can be seen through rather than getting thrown out the window every four years.

    The adherence to long-term economic planning under continuous government is the reason why China was able to eliminate absolute poverty within their borders, guarantee housing and utilities and basic needs for 1.4 billion people, dominate global rare earths production, vertically integrate their strategic industries, and pivot to constructing the world’s first ecological civilization.

    With all of these great things the West can’t have under current management, here comes the copium: “China won’t let you speak your mind!” Well, that’s not really true either. Speaking your mind is encouraged to set the government agenda and there are tens of thousands of protests each year in China that result in activists obtaining most or all of their demands. 

    Western media routinely blames their new favourite boogeyman, the CPC, for very typical Asian norms and legal customs. Asia, and the East in general, approaches politics from radically different philosophical lineages than the West does. Eastern religions along with Confucianism, Legalism and Daoism place heavy emphasis on collective well-being over individualistic impulses. One must also consider that eastern countries including China bear deep collective scars from a past era of brutal colonial subjugation. Additionally, the security threats and military tensions in Asia are far more difficult than anything Western Europe or North America currently faces. 

    Once the existence of a different social reality is accepted, we can see that the civil liberties and political priorities of Asia are the popular byproduct of unique ancient histories and cultural sensitivities rather than government oppression.

    In Thailand, it is a 3–50 year sentence for disparaging the king. In South Korea, it is prison for praising any element of the North’s society and it is prison for questioning painful historical memories. India, likewise, has strict laws against depreciating national heroes. Publicly insulting Indian political leaders or cracking jokes about religion on stage will lead to arrest. Japan, plagued by political apathy, is a de facto one party state largely run by unelected bureaucrats. Political messaging is highly restricted and insulting language is banned from the digital and public sphere. Singapore notoriously punishes offenders with “judicial caning” for everything from bullying to theft to violent crime. They also run one of the strictest censorship regimes in the world against content deemed contrary to the public interest. Taiwan has laboured to silence pro-unification voices like CUPP and CTi and Indonesia has outright bans on a wide range of political activity deemed subversive. These are just a few examples of illiberal policies in nominally liberal Asian states but the list could go on and on.

    Whether these laws offend our western sensibilities or not is irrelevant to the sovereignty of these countries. They enforce laws to maintain social harmony and balance individual rights with collective well-being and security. In this regard, China is no different from any government in Asia.

    China even compares favourably to the freedom-loving United States on many issues for which they are criticized. For example, surveillance in China holds an 82% approval rating because it has virtually eliminated the petty thefts and scams that were once rampant in cities. By contrast, in the heavily-surveilled United States, only 38% of Americans support community surveillance while 46% oppose it. Both countries have it but only one wants it. Which is more democratic?

    Separately, China stands accused in western media of detaining up to one million ethnic Uyghurs after a spate of lethal terrorist attacks over the course of the Xinjiang conflict.1 While many western claims about Xinjiang are questionable propaganda, China’s Islamic deradicalization program has been wound down. Long-term solutions have been found with poverty reduction efforts in Xinjiang and the successful implementation of regional development strategies. Compared with western actions in Gaza, it is clear where moral authority lies. 

    Meanwhile, mass incarceration in the United States persists. There is no poverty reduction effort. Many times more Black and Hispanic people face arrest and imprisonment each year in America than Uyghurs ever have. The same is true of Romani in Europe or First Nations in Canada. Furthermore, the per capita prison population of the United States is almost five times larger than the prison population of China. Being arrested in China is a rare occurrence; a Chinese citizen is far less likely to be arrested in their lifetime than a British, American or Australian is.

    One could make a defensible argument that any state government is an inherently authoritarian institution. But to claim that China’s popular socialist system is authoritarian relative to liberal countries in Asia or the West falls apart upon scrutiny.

    It’s been said that, in Asia, “many citizens prioritize stability, economic growth and effective leadership over individual freedoms.”2 Still, let’s not forget the pernicious fact that liberal tenets in the West are frequently only promoted by capitalist oligarchs as a means to divide public opinion and smuggle corporate dictates into our governing system, much to the detriment of ordinary people and workers. 

    The East is rising while the West declines. Given the divergent trajectories between the two civilizations, the West should find out what it can learn from other systems instead of fixating on what it can criticize.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Carlos Martinez describes the economic motivations behind western propaganda narratives about Xinjiang in chapter five of his book, The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century (Praxis Press, 2023): 109–126. ↩︎

    2. Diego Fossati, “Beyond the liberal model in East and Southeast Asia,” East Asia Forum, May 26, 2025. ↩︎
  • US Aggression in Latin America: A History

    US Aggression in Latin America: A History

    When the U.S. government purchased Louisiana from France, they secured a land stretching from present-day Montana, through Oklahoma and terminating at the Gulf of Mexico. However a new dispute opened with Spain concerning the southwest boundary of the formerly French territory: Texas. The Americans felt that they had acquired the territory as part of their deal with France but Spain maintained that it was them who had control over that land. The Spanish sale of Florida to Washington was meant to settle the Texas issue and the U.S. government formally relinquished its claims as part of the transaction. But American settlers on the frontier had other ideas.

    Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821 and was quickly recognized by the United States. Initially the two countries enjoyed friendly diplomatic relations, with the Treaty of Limits affirming Mexican sovereignty over Texas and other western territories, including present-day Arizona and California. Within this cordial political atmosphere, American homesteaders were invited to settle in Texas and help to stabilize a fragile Mexican economy. What they received was an unruly population with little respect for Mexican sovereignty, much less Mexican people or customs.1 Tensions came to a boil when Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. As many American settlers had brought slaves with them, they would have faced a loss of property if the Mexican law was enforced. Instead they took up arms, kicked out Mexican authorities and demanded to be annexed by the United States.

    Early Aggressions

    Mexico warned the U.S. that their border treaty would be nullified if they annexed Texas. The Mexicans undoubtedly misunderstood the expansionist spirit of manifest destiny, having been fooled by prior friendly relations with Washington. The resulting Mexican–American War dropped the full brutality of U.S. superiority down on Mexico like the hammer of Thor: boys were shot for sport; churches were desecrated and Catholics murdered; women and little girls were stripped naked and assaulted in unspeakable ways; entire villages were razed by fire.2 The barbarity only halted when the U.S. military occupation of Mexico City forced the surrender of 55% of Mexican territory.

    The Mexican–American War was not any kind of dark chapter in the history of U.S.–Latin America relations. On the contrary—it set the mould. With the conquest of new territory stretching to the Pacific, American commercial interests began to reach down the coastline and into Central America.

    The western appetite for bananas and other tropical commodities brought US capital into contact with a new swathe of Latino peoples—and it went about as well for them as it did for the Mexicans in years prior. The ravaging of Mexico proved to America, with its powerful industrial economy, that it could act with impunity toward its less-developed neighbours to the south. Their capital and guns afforded them enormous power over a region that lacked both.

    Warfare is defined as an “open and declared armed hostile conflict between nations.” The Banana Wars of the early 20th century carry an unfortunate title because they were not wars—they were repeated molestations of vulnerable populations by an imperial power.

    When Haiti and the Dominican Republic fell into debt, the US deployed artillery, machine guns and naval ships. They stole the national gold reserves, turned government finances over to New York banks and gave American corporations free access to land for sugar plantations run by forced labour. When a nationalist insurgency threatened foreign property in Nicaragua, marines arrived to quash the rebellion. They proceeded to take over government finances and established a military base to suppress future anti-American revolts. When Washington decided to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, they backed a secessionist movement that would pull the small, pliable country of Panama from the lands of Greater Colombia. When abhorrent working conditions on American-owned sugar plantations in Cuba sparked civil unrest, thousands of marines arrived to protect the harvest and suppress anti-American agitation.3 When plantation workers in Colombia protested payment in coupons rather than cash and demanded a six day work week, the United Fruit Company massacred the strikers. In Honduras, United Fruit kept workers’ movements at bay by paying off presidential candidates and funding right wing militias. This combination of efforts made the corporation the most powerful entity in the state.

    The Dictatorships

    The advent of the Cold War brought American hegemony over Latin America to new heights. With the US military in confrontation with communist forces in Asia and Europe, covert action and special operations were relied on in the Western Hemisphere. Across Latin America, torture chambers and CIA-trained death squads blossomed alongside a growing number of brutal right wing dictators aided by Washington. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela all suffered visits from oppressive regimes that consolidated power and murdered their opposition under the cynical guise of “anticommunism.” Even modestly progressive and liberal-democratic movements were snuffed out in many of these countries, as elections were overturned and American corporate interest reigned supreme.

    This was the Latin America that confronted a young Che Guevara as he embarked on his notorious motorcycle journey across the continent. On his trip he witnessed the the cold and hungry conditions of mine workers in Chile and the faces of poverty in Peru, people who “go on living only because it’s a habit they cannot shake.”4

    Guevara correctly understood that the division of Latin America into “unstable and illusory nationalities” made the region ripe for exploitation and US domination.5 He saw this domination first-hand in 1954 when living in Guatemala, where an elected government proposed land reform for its farmers. Soon afterward, it was overthrown by American bombers in order to install a pro-United Fruit Company dictatorship headed by Castillo Armas, a CIA asset who murdered thousands of people. This experience proved the futility of representative democracy in the face of powerful corporate interests.

    Having been marked for execution by the homicidal U.S. puppet in Guatemala, Guevara fled to Mexico where he met Fidel Castro and joined the Cuban revolutionary struggle. Cuba was also ruled by a pro-US dictator at this time and he oversaw routine executions of political opponents and a Cuban economy where American corporations controlled approximately 40% of sugar production, 90% of mining concessions, 100% of cattle ranching, 80% of utilities and had a monopoly on imports. Additionally, the corruption of the Batista regime allowed the American Mafia transform Havana into a drunken cesspool of gambling and prostitution. 

    With striking lucidity President John F. Kennedy admitted: 

    I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.

    The success of the Cuban revolution saw the re-appropriation of national property and the destruction of casinos by throngs of empowered Habaneros. The revolution went on to deliver universal housing, healthcare and education, restoring dignity to a despoiled country. However, the antagonism would re-emerge in the form of a suffocating economic blockade and countless coup attempts.

    The Debt Racket

    The end of the Cold War brought more liberal governance to Latin America but they were saddled with debts carried over from the era of military juntas. From this situation came America’s next racket: the “Washington Consensus,” which was little more than a set of neoliberal dictates devised by western financiers for nations held in debt bondage.

    Mass privatization, austerity budgets and easy American access to cheap labour and resources were the hallmarks of crisis financing in the 1980s and 1990s, pulling in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico and Venezuela—resulting in La Década Perdida (the Lost Decade) of stagnant economies and soaring inequality. In other words, the Washington Consensus represented another hegemonic “push from the United States” for “trade agreements favourable to the United States…The free flow of capital that these trade agreements were designed to foster has only benefitted the rich nations and the wealthy classes.”6 Derivative of these neoliberal policy prescriptions is a migration crisis and the 21st century “pink tide” of elected progressive governments throughout Latin America.

    From the Banana Wars era to the present day, we can see that Che Guevara was proven right: liberal democracy in exploited countries is too weak to uplift the great majority and a lack of regional solidarity has made it easy for the United States to run roughshod over Latin America. In terms of real purchasing power, the region has been economically stagnant for 50 years, with examples of worsening poverty and shrinking middle incomes over that time. The pink tide movement was driven back by “soft” coups in Brazil and Bolivia, corporate pressure and repeated attacks from Washington on Latin American progressive heads of state. One pink tide country which resisted coup attempts and foreign subversion was Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. 

    In a span of 14 years Chavez was able to double school enrolment, make literacy and healthcare universal, raise access to safe drinking water from 82% to 95%, build 700,000 homes, return one million acres of land to indigenous people, reduce malnutrition from 21% to 3%, and cut unemployment and infant mortality in half. His government accomplished this through a program that forcefully eschewed liberalism in favour of participatory democracy at the neighbourhood level, worker-owned enterprises and nationalization of resources and services. For these successes, the United States delivered to Venezuela the same verdict that Cuba received decades ago: economic strangulation, with the harshest measures arriving in 2019.

    What Venezuela and Cuba represent is an expression of defiance in the face of 180 years of unbroken US hegemony in Latin America. For this reason, they are admired by a great many people who “personally suffered under US-sponsored military dictatorships that dominated much of the region” for decades.7 The kidnapping of Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, is an attempt to force compliance with the pillaging of Latino resources that American corporations feel entitled to. Cheering this move is fatally wrong, even for opponents of socialism: if Venezuela and Cuba are the backlash to United States interventionism, it follows that another intervention could make the situation much worse.  

    What the United States has done to Venezuela will perpetuate the familiar cycle of political violence and economic dependency—the breeding ground for anti-American resentment—serving nobody but the corporate lobby. The best moments in US–Latin America relations occurred when America expanded the realm of sovereignty rather than crushed it: the turnover of the Panama Canal to Panamanian authority and FDR’s short-lived Good Neighbour policy of non-interference in the region. As long as Latin American politics remains a reaction to American doctrine, the Western Hemisphere will not be free.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. The irony of this development in Texas compared to present-day complaints over immigration should not be lost on anyone. ↩︎

    2. See: Stephen Carney, The Occupation of Mexico (Government Printing Office, 2016): 20, 37, and Peter Guardino, “Gender, Soldiering, and Citizenship in the Mexican–American War of 1846-1848” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 119, No. 1: 43. ↩︎

    3. Louis A. Perez Jr., Intervention, Revolution, and Politics in Cuba (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 98. ↩︎

    4. Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (Ocean Press, 2003): 41.  ↩︎

    5. Ibid, 92. ↩︎

    6. Teresa A. Meade, A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present (John Wiley & Sons, 2022): 8. ↩︎

    7. Ibid, 10. ↩︎