A decade ago, China\u2019s government unveiled Made in China 2025 \u2013 a bold vision for transforming the country from the world\u2019s assembly line into a global innovation leader. The plan was met with considerable skepticism, particularly in the West, where a robust scholarly consensus held that authoritarianism was fundamentally incompatible with innovation. Furthermore, with a shaky technological base, middling universities, and a shortage of high-skilled talent, China was light-years behind the global frontier. Barring drastic political change, many observers concluded, China would remain a \u201ccopycat nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
We know how that prediction turned out. But the misguided belief that innovation depends on political freedom appeared to have a sound analytical and historical basis. As the late political scientist Samuel Huntington\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0in 1996, the tools that keep authoritarian regimes in power \u2013 such as censorship, repression, and corruption \u2013 naturally stifle innovation and economic dynamism. And the conditions that enable innovation, such as greater human mobility and information flows, risk empowering forces that could threaten an authoritarian regime.\u00a0Mikhail Gorbachev<\/a>\u00a0could have attested to that.<\/p>\n But as I show in my book\u00a0Autocracy 2.0<\/a>, China\u2019s leaders found a way around this \u201cking\u2019s dilemma.\u201d Crafting a model I call \u201csmart authoritarianism,\u201d China has blended a novel approach to political control with selective economic openness, building on lessons from high-tech, authoritarian Singapore.<\/p>\n Eschewing heavy-handed repression, the Communist Party of China (CPC) pioneered diverse and subtle techniques of information control, which scholar Tony Zirui Yang\u00a0argues<\/a>\u00a0\u201cnormalized\u201d censorship and \u201cdesensitized\u201d the Chinese people to it. Instead of truncheons and guns, China\u2019s leaders use digital tools like AI, facial recognition, and other biometric-data collection to detect, monitor, and preempt dissent. While violent coercion still occurs, the scholar Lynette Ong\u00a0explains<\/a>, the CPC maintains deniability by outsourcing it to \u201cthugs for hire\u201d \u2013\u00a0enforcers who intimidate petitioners, disperse protests, and carry out forced evictions.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, China\u2019s government has pursued a selective opening of certain areas of the economy, including universities and the private sector, and invested heavily in expanding the country\u2019s innovative capacity, such as by funding research and development and promoting human-capital formation. Over the last decade, China has drastically improved the quality of its higher education and built a massive high-tech workforce.<\/p>\n China resembles other rising economies, including the 19th-century United States. China\u2019s bright young people used to study overseas but increasingly could stay home to get a superb education. China produces the most\u00a0science and engineering doctoral graduates<\/a>\u00a0worldwide. The majority of engineers at DeepSeek, which stunned the world in 2023 with its open-source AI model, were trained in China.<\/p>\n Chinese firms now lead \u2013 and even dominate \u2013 several high-tech sectors. China possesses more than 80% of the world\u2019s\u00a0solar manufacturing<\/a>\u00a0capability. Chinese firms lead the electric-vehicle and EV-battery industries, and in 2023, China surpassed Japan to become the\u00a0world\u2019s largest automobile exporter<\/a>. A single Chinese company, DJI, is the undisputed leader in the commercial drone industry, claiming more than\u00a070% of the global market<\/a>.<\/p>\n China remains a one-party state that disappears dissidents and censors ideas, yet it has vaulted past Japan, Germany, and France \u2013 countries long celebrated as global innovation leaders \u2013 to become the world\u2019s tenth most-innovative economy in the latest\u00a0Global Innovation Index<\/a>. China ranks among (or above) the world\u2019s top innovators, including South Korea, on metrics like number of patents, production of widely cited science and technology research, and high-value manufacturing. Made in China 2025 may not have hit all its targets, but China has certainly reached the technological frontier.<\/p>\n Some observers still have their doubts. They believe that intensifying repression under President Xi Jinping will erode China\u2019s innovative capacity, pointing to his crackdown on the tech sector, which began in 2020 and destroyed a huge amount of national wealth. But smart authoritarianism is not about maximizing growth; it is about balancing economic objectives with the imperative of regime survival. For example, China\u2019s government has eased up considerably on the tech sector since 2023. The smart authoritarian model accounts for periods of political tightening and loosening.<\/p>\n Skeptics note that China also faces other powerful growth headwinds, such as adverse demographics, uneven and slowing productivity, massive debts, and a troubled real-estate sector. These challenges are real and have already contributed to a significant growth slowdown. But by transforming itself into a technology superpower and shifting the global balance of power, China has already achieved something few people believed would be possible.<\/p>\n To be clear, acknowledging that smart authoritarians\u00a0can\u00a0innovate does not mean that they are better equipped to do so than their democratic counterparts. Democratic countries still boast universities that attract the world\u2019s brightest minds, firms that work at \u2013 and push forward \u2013 the technological frontier, and transnational networks that foster and facilitate innovation. In 2020, democracies were the first to develop the vaccines that offered the world a way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are more than capable of competing with China.<\/p>\n But Western democracies can no longer dismiss China\u2019s innovative potential \u2013 or the dangers it implies. As a superpower, China poses an increasingly potent military threat to Taiwan, and to America\u2019s future strategic influence in East Asia. Not only does a successful China provide an appealing model for other smart authoritarians, such as in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; its government also directly supports dictators by sharing new\u00a0technologies and strategies of repression<\/a>.<\/p>\n Xi recently\u00a0declared<\/a>, \u201cNo force can stop China\u2019s scientific and technological development!\u201d Whether this is true remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: Western democracies cannot simply assume that they will come out on top.<\/p>\n Jennifer Lind is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, and the author of\u00a0Autocracy 2.0: How China\u2019s Rise Reinvented Tyranny<\/a>\u00a0(Cornell University Press, 2025).\u00a0Copyright: Project Syndicate<\/a>, 2025, published here with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A decade ago, China\u2019s government unveiled Made in China 2025 \u2013 a bold vision for transforming the country…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-154222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}