Two emerging international orders? China and the United States

Abstract

If it continues, deglobalization may lead not to atomization but two overlapping international orders: a liberal one (LIO) led by the United States, and an authoritarian–capitalist one (ACIO) led by China. This equilibrium could emerge because a central purpose of international orders is to preserve the domestic regimes of their Great Power sponsors. The United States and China have markedly different domestic regimes, and so as China continues to grow in power and influence, tension over the content of international order should continue to grow. I borrow from Darwinian evolution the notion of ‘niche construction’: just as organisms alter phenotype selection by manipulating their natural environments, states can alter the ‘selection’ of domestic regimes by shaping their international environments. Modes of international niche construction include foreign regime promotion, interdependence, transnational interaction and multilateral institutions. The liberal democratic niche constructed by the United States and its allies after the Second World War preserved democracy for many decades. Today, China is attempting through various means to build a niche that will eliminate the liberal bias in international institutions and safeguard its own Market-Leninist regime. The resulting ACIO would select for autocracy and hence be partially separate from the LIO, which selects for liberal democracy.

To paraphrase the editors of this special issue, deglobalization is the ongoing reversal of the complex interconnectedness of societies that had been increasing in recent decades. If globalization is the progressive opening of more and more state borders to greater flows of money, goods, services, people, ideas, and so on, then deglobalization is the progressive reclosing of those state borders. Deglobalization is endogenous to some extent: globalization has redistributed money and power within societies and removed a portion of their sovereignty and self-determination, which in turn has generated resistance within them and policy reversals in some. The editors link the modern version of globalization to the liberal international order (LIO), the set of ideas and institutions that the United States and its industrial–democratic allies set up after the Second World War to regulate economic relations, promote democracy and strengthen global governance across a number of issue areas.¹ That link suggests that deglobalization must cast the future of the LIO into doubt.²

If deglobalization is real and is putting the LIO in jeopardy, what kind of global order can we expect will follow? In principle, the world could return to the relatively closed norm of the late nineteenth century, where international interdependence is low and Great Powers worry acutely about access to raw materials, compete for territorial rights, and risk and threaten major wars with some regularity.³ Concern about the prospect of that kind of world is part of what spurs us on to think about this entire problem. Another possible equilibrium is a muddling through, in which openness and a rule-based international order persist in reduced or stagnant form. This outcome is plausible because powerful actors in wealthy states, including the United States, the EU and China, retain a strong interest in openness. A third possibility is a rejuvenation of globalization, spurred by China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and renewed growth, competitiveness and political stability in North America and Europe.

In this article, I explore a fourth possible outcome of deglobalization: the emergence of two overlapping international orders, each relatively open internally but relatively closed to the other. One, a reduced version of the LIO, would be led by the United States and Europe. The other, led by China, might be termed an authoritarian–capitalist international order (ACIO), emphasizing authoritarian government, state-led development (but also trade and investment) and state sovereignty. Goods, services, capital, people and ideas would continue to move back and forth between the LIO and ACIO, but to a lower degree than they move within each order. The different domestic models that drove this equilibrium would probably prevent global commerce and wealth from reaching their maximum possible levels, and would produce different rules in areas such as internet governance and human rights. The overall global order, comprising these two international orders, might be similar to the Cold War order after the inauguration of detente in the early 1970s, when there was trade and technological cooperation between the Soviet- and US-led blocs and the threat of war was relatively low.

The empirical bases of my argument are twofold. First, recent studies argue that the regional and global spread and contraction of regime types varies with the regime type of the hegemon.⁴ The mechanisms of expansion and contraction include learning, emulation and active regime promotion by established and rising hegemons.⁵ Second, qualitative evidence suggests that governments often believe that the international environment, broadly conceived, can be biased for or against not only their country but their country's domestic regime. Governments often take active efforts to alter their environment to favour their regime, so that they may flourish without having to undergo a regime change.⁶

We can already discern the shape of things to come from China's actions. At the UN, Beijing is trying to alter conceptions of and mechanisms for human rights and norms of internet governance. Through the BRI, it is using an estimated US$1 trillion to build interdependence with mostly countries of the global South, from south-east Asia to east Africa and the Middle East. It is exporting techniques and technologies that facilitate the perpetuation of authoritarian rule. These and other measures by China proceed from a complex set of motives by various configurations of actors, headed by Xi Jinping and the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Among these motives are the desires to sustain economic growth, to increase China's global leverage and status, and, most fundamentally, to maintain the CCP's monopoly on political power within China. I argue that the CCP's determination to have all of these things creates an unavoidable conflict of interest with the liberal democracies, and that an important effect of these policies may be the emergence of an ACIO.

China's rulers evidently want their country to remain open and for globalization to renew at full speed. They almost certainly do not intend an ACIO in the way that the United States intended to build an LIO at the end of the Second World War. Then, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations manipulated the international environment so as to safeguard liberal democracy, not only in the United States but also in Japan, Canada and the industrialized states of western Europe, against an emergent Soviet communist bloc.⁷ Today, Xi and his government claim to be working towards a more pluralistic world of globalization, one in which an array of domestic regime types from previously neglected regions can flourish in a ‘shared future for mankind’.⁸ Part of that effort involves seeking to remove what they correctly see as the liberal democratic bias in the LIO, a bias that handicaps China under its current domestic regime. Their efforts to remove that liberal bias are working in tandem with China's own national successes to enable autocracy outside China and to construct international institutions and practices that will entrench it. In so far as China succeeds in infusing an authoritarian bias into the international environment, the United States and other democracies will be compelled to segregate elements of their international order, leading to the coexistence of an LIO and an ACIO, overlapping but separate.

To make the case that China is effectively building an international order that helps safeguard ‘Market-Leninism’ but will alienate liberal democracies, I borrow logic and mechanisms from evolutionary theory in biology. The essential insight comes from the concepts of niche construction and co-evolution. For any population of organisms, the environment selects for certain traits; the organisms can also shape that environment (construct a niche) so as to favour themselves in some way; and the reshaped environment can then select for a different set of traits in the population. By analogy, states' environments can select for certain traits, including domestic regimes. A domestic regime endures as long as the balance of power within the state favours its adherents; regime change will happen when that balance changes sufficiently. Factors in a state's environment—including international rules and practices, and the successes and failures of various regime types in other states—can affect that domestic balance. An autocrat who wishes to fend off democracy, then, will endeavour to shape his or her state's external environment—alter rules and practices and weaken the performance of other democracies—so as to maintain a domestic balance of power in favour of autocracy. In so far as the autocrat succeeds, the more authoritarian international environment will then work to promote the spread and solidification of autocracy in other states.⁹

In what follows, I explicate this evolutionary logic and apply it to Great Powers' attempts to mould their international environments. I narrate the origins and operation of the LIO as a postwar project of niche construction by governments of western industrial democracies to perpetuate liberal democracy in their countries. I discuss China's worries about liberal democracy, its efforts to construct a different niche to help safeguard its domestic regime, and the (possibly unintended) resulting ACIO. (I do not discuss the ongoing crisis of the LIO itself within many industrial democracies and how that might be reversed.) I conclude with some provisional thoughts about the emergence of two international orders.

Evolutionary theory and domestic regime selection

Social scientists have made use of evolutionary arguments since Darwin published his influential works in the nineteenth century. Racists used evolution to rationalize their theories of hierarchy and survival. Other uses of the theory have been more defensible, scientifically and morally. Social evolutionary research programmes are thriving in anthropology and economics.¹⁰ Many of these set aside claims about biology and genetics and focus instead on the evolution of social phenomena. In International Relations (IR), scholars have used evolutionary logic to explain the emergence of international rules and practices,¹¹ of globalization,¹² of sovereign states,¹³ and of world politics itself.¹⁴ Like them, I use evolutionary logic without appeal to biology, that is, to physical genes. Unlike them, I use the logic to help explain continuity and change in states' domestic regimes.

IR scholars generally accept that states exist in an environment, system or structure that affects their actions and interests. What that environment consists of is contested. Structural realists take a minimalist view that the ordering principle (anarchy) and the distribution of military power are the only important components. Institutionalists and the English School add, in different ways, the presence and type of rules by which states interact. Constructivists add norms, identities or practices to states' environment. These differing conceptions of the international structure or environment yield different claims about their effects on states. Structural realists predict that states will form balances of power; institutionalists, cooperation to secure public or club goods; constructivists, common and opposing identities or practices.

With a few exceptions, IR scholars also take seriously states' agency, or their ability to act with some freedom within their environment. Wendt identified the importance of the agent–structure problem in international relations: structures condition states and their actions, but states produce and reproduce structures by those same actions.¹⁵ Sometimes agents shape structures deliberately, as when a state joins an alliance. Sometimes the shaping is unintended, as when joining an alliance sharpens the security dilemma for others, which then form a counter-alliance.¹⁶ Realism rightly insists that states with more power have more ability to maintain or alter structures; that is part of what we mean by ‘power’. A central claim of hegemonic stability theory is that a hegemon has the most sway over international rules and their interpretation and enforcement.¹⁷ Even the spare picture sketched by structural realism notes that states form international alignments to make themselves more secure.¹⁸ The result is the formation of various endogenous relationships, for example between the balance of power and states' alliance policies.

Less well understood is how the international environment affects the types of regimes or domestic institutional complexes that characterize states. In a 1784 essay, Immanuel Kant argued that the rule of law among nations would need to be established before republican government could be secured in any of them; that the perpetual threat of war enabled the perpetuation of despotic government.¹⁹ Subsequent writers developed this idea.²⁰ But Kant and those others tell only a small part of the story; many elements of international structure influence whether states are democratic or autocratic, monarchical or republican, communist or fascist. The death rate of regimes may seem low, but it is higher than that of states; revolutions, coups d'état and outside interventions are fairly common in world politics. Civil unrest and regime changes sometimes happen in neighbouring countries in rapid succession, suggesting a kind of environmental contagion.²¹

If a state's environment can affect the survival of its domestic regime, then a government can potentially affect its domestic regime's survival by shaping that same environment. For most governments, domestic regimes are of the first importance; if the regime falls, the government falls with it.²² Thus we should expect governments to try to shape the environment so as to perpetuate, rather than undermine, their respective regimes.

An environment that favours some domestic regimes over others brings to mind Darwinian evolution. In modern biology, evolution is typically defined as a ‘change in the frequency of DNA sequences … in a population, from one generation to the next’.²³ Evolution at the level of DNA, or genotype, produces change in the species' outward traits and behaviour, or phenotype. Biological evolution is driven by natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and migration. Most prominent are mutation (random changes in genetic material) and natural selection (bias in an organism's environment in favour of one trait over another). DNA for white fur came to predominate among some animal species in snowy climes because white animals were better able to hide from predators and prey, and hence had more offspring, who in turn were more likely to survive, and so on.

Niche construction

But just as state leaders try to bend their international environment to their advantage, organisms are not passive in the face of their natural environments; they intentionally modify those environments to suit themselves, building ‘niches’.²⁴ Obvious examples are bird nests and beaver dams. In recent years, biologists have begun to argue further that although organisms construct niches to make their lives easier, they can thereby effectively redirect the environment's selection pressure. In modifying the ecological inheritance of subsequent generations, organisms sometimes unwittingly build a feedback loop that biases the outcomes of evolution itself. Beavers with particularly large teeth and sociability build dams, which collect the plants that beavers like to eat; thus dams give a reproductive advantage to beavers with dam-building traits, leading over generations to the predominance of large-toothed, sociable beavers, and the disappearance of small-toothed, anti-social beavers. Put another way, some species co-evolve with their environments.²⁵

We can recast the argument set out above by saying that state leaders who believe their domestic regime to be vulnerable should attempt niche construction to safeguard it, and that leaders of more powerful states will sometimes succeed. State leaders are more intelligent than beavers—humans are capable of reflection and strategy, among other things—but leaders, like beavers, act intentionally to alter the constraints and opportunities presented by their environments.²⁶ Leaders cannot create or wholly change their states' environments, and are constrained by the environments they reshape; they have constrained agency. To simplify matters, I will focus here on the domestic balance of power among advocates of two competing regimes as the state's ‘genetic material’. Regime change—by revolution, coup or gradual ‘reform’—will happen when the balance of power among ideological groups of elites in a state shifts sufficiently.²⁷ Democratic State S will become authoritarian when enough powerful people in S become authoritarians. State S will remain a democracy to the degree that the power of democrats exceeds that of authoritarians. The international environment is far from the only factor affecting this ideological balance of power, but it can have serious effects. A vital task for S's democratic government, then, is to shape its environment so as to make sure that, within S, democracy remains stronger than authoritarianism. Some of that shaping entails simply working for national success in general, including wealth, security and power, which indirectly supports S's democratic regime; some of it entails working for the spread of democracies in the world and for international rules that favour democracies and handicap autocracies.

A state's international environment is, in other words, extremely complex. Elements of the environment that affect the survival of a state's domestic regime include:

• the international distribution of regime types, including which states have which regimes, how powerful they are, and where they are located in space;²⁸

• information about the relative performance of regime types in terms of security, stability and wealth;²⁹ and

• predominant state norms, rules and practices, including how far states respect one another's sovereignty—e.g. over human rights—how far they institutionalize cooperation, and so on.³⁰

To reiterate, a government can unintentionally shape the environment in ways that affect domestic regime survival. It can also act in error, intending to shape the environment so as to perpetuate its regime but effectively undermining it. Making the world select for a regime type is more difficult than it sounds.

Liberal internationalism as niche construction

An outstanding example of comprehensive international niche construction is the liberal internationalism of the industrial democracies in Europe, North America and Japan starting at the end of the Second World War. Liberal internationalism is at once a set of foreign policies and a set of multilateral institutions (often called the liberal international order, LIO). The literature on this general subject is vast, covering how institutions foster cooperation, the phenomenon of US hegemony, efforts to contain the Soviet Union or communism, the benefits to western capital, and the waning of formal European imperialism and rise of US informal imperialism in the developing world.³¹ Here I consider liberal internationalism as a deliberate effort by its founding governments—pre-eminently that of the United States—to safeguard constitutional democracy in the core industrial states of western Europe, North America and Japan. The grand strategy was also intended to counterbalance Soviet power, but in principle Washington could have done that without the particularly liberal features of its strategy; American balancing cannot be understood without taking the country's liberal democratic character into account. Prior to this period, predominant US thinking was that preserving the republic meant holding aloof from Europe and its system of Great Power rivalry and hierarchical societies. But the traumas of the 1930s and early 1940s taught the Americans that no democracy was an island and that in the modern world, the survival of this form of government and way of life that they cherished required deliberate changes in how democracies related to one another and to the rest of the world.³²

First, democracies had to coordinate their monetary and trading relations through a set of multilateral institutions.³³ The result was the ‘embedded liberalism’ protected by the matrix of multilateral entities that rescued the democracies from balance of payments crises and helped them negotiate and coordinate reductions in trade barriers.³⁴ With respect to trade, Cordell Hull, FDR's Secretary of State, wrote:

The withdrawal by a nation from orderly trade relations with the rest of the world inevitably leads to regimentation of all phases of national life, to the suppression of human rights, and all too frequently to preparations for war and a provocative attitude toward other nations.³⁵

‘In fact the three—peace, freedom, and world trade—are inseparable,’ said Truman.³⁶

Second, extremist ideologies of left and right had to be kept out of power in advanced industrial states. In the United States, elites in government, business, academia and journalism saw that new technologies of warfare and transportation meant that an eastern hemisphere dominated by totalitarians endangered American democracy. Thus US leaders had a new stake in the preservation and spread of democracy in faraway industrial countries, and after the Second World War Washington intervened in (western) Germany, Italy and Japan to ensure that these former enemies would become stable liberal democracies. To increase employment and industrial output, Washington extended approximately US$130 billion (in 2020 dollars) in Marshall Aid to Japan and western Europe to rebuild national economies and restore full employment (of adult males); that in turn would augment the credibility of constitutional self-government as against communism.³⁷ The United States promoted democracy in Europe and Japan not out of altruism but out of a conviction that by doing so it was helping to secure its own democracy.³⁸

Democracy was also promoted indirectly via the development and use of soft power, or the ability to get others to want what you want them to want.³⁹ Official organs such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and the US Information Agency narrated world events from a point of view friendly to US-style democracy. American soft power also emerged organically from the country's status as the world's leading economy and its vast exports of material consumer goods and cultural products that made capitalism and individualism attractive to millions. Finally, the US government and civil society, including universities, brought many thousands of foreigners to the United States to learn directly and indirectly about multiparty constitutional democracy.⁴⁰

Third, democracies needed to protect one another from attack and intimidation by authoritarian states. During these early postwar years, the Soviet Union became an enemy because it joined massive conventional military power to an anti-democratic purpose; its regime was threatened by liberal democracy and it tried to keep that regime far away. Until the Soviets developed an atomic bomb in August 1949, the United States was secure from Soviet attack. But the Red Army remained in the east European countries it had liberated from Nazi Germany, including Berlin and the surrounding German states, giving the Soviets the power to intimidate the west European democracies. Those with North Sea or Atlantic coastlines were exposed to the Soviet navy. In 1948, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin led several European governments into forming the Brussels Pact, a defensive alliance against the Soviets. The Europeans then negotiated with the United States to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949.⁴¹ In 1952, Washington signed a similar treaty with Japan, which was in a similarly exposed geographic position.

In enacting this three-legged liberal internationalism—democracy promotion, intra-democratic alliances and multilateralism—the fundamental goal of the US government was not enriching capitalists (although it did that), and certainly not bringing about a universal liberal utopia. Rather, it was to safeguard democracy in the United States itself. As President Truman put it when defending the Marshall Plan before Congress:

Our deepest concern with European recovery is that it is essential to the maintenance of the civilization in which American life is rooted … If Europe fails to recover, the people of these countries might be driven to the philosophy … which contends that their basic wants can be met only by the surrender of their basic rights to totalitarian control.⁴²

US policy-makers were convinced that preserving self-government in the industrial era required preserving it in other industrial democracies—and that, in turn, required more consultation and more institutions than it had in earlier eras so as to assure the prosperity of the middle and working classes.

The grand strategy of democratic niche construction did what it was designed to do. Within the mature, wealthy democracies of Europe, North America and Japan, the balance of power among ideological groups remained decisively in favour of liberal democrats. There were moments when that balance wobbled—as in 1968, in France and elsewhere—but it held. The industrial democracies grew richer together while reluctantly relinquishing their overseas empires.

Indeed, liberal internationalism may have played a causal role in extending the ‘third wave of democratization’ that rolled from the mid-1970s through to the 1990s.⁴³ During a good deal of that struggle, Washington actively worked against democratization in much of the developing world, to the point of backing coups in a number of countries that put anti-communist autocrats in power.⁴⁴ But as the superior fitness of democratic capitalism to communism or state socialism became evident in the 1980s—a fitness enhanced by the LIO—US administrations began to drop their autocratic clients and to strike bargains with centre-left parties, as they had done in Europe earlier in the Cold War.⁴⁵ Furthermore, lobbyists and Congress put pressure on administrations to make continuing close relations with security partners conditional on the latters' implementing human rights and other reforms.⁴⁶ Late in the Cold War, then, authoritarian states evidently felt some pressure to move into the liberal democratic international niche.

As for the Soviet Union, owing to inadequacies in its communist political economy, here too the ideological balance of power began to tilt towards democracy in the 1980s, leading first to Gorbachev's reforms and then to the state's collapse in 1991. In the 1990s, much of the world—including countries such as Brazil and democratic India, that had long been partial ‘members’, belonging to the IMF and accepting western investment—joined the LIO wholeheartedly. There appeared no alternative to its combination of market economics, democracy and multilateralism.⁴⁷

China: building a niche that selects for autocracy

Liberal internationalism has itself evolved since the 1990s, to the point where some of its features no longer select for democracy.⁴⁸ Our subject, however, is the effects on international order of the ongoing rise of China. Beginning with the accession to power of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China began moving towards the liberal international niche. It adopted market mechanisms for most of its economy, yet resisted pressures to become a constitutional democracy—pressures to which the Soviet Union succumbed and which eventually dissolved that country. Still, China's leaders continue to feel those pressures today and have set about neutralizing them.

From the disasters of Mao Zedong's rule and the comparative successes of smaller east Asian neighbours such as South Korea and Taiwan, Deng recognized that China must begin to participate in the global capitalist economy. It must liberalize its domestic economy, welcome (but regulate) foreign investment, and export material goods rather than revolution. Deng never intended for China to become a liberal democracy; he was adamant that the ruling Communist Party must retain its monopoly on political power. Entering the liberal niche, then, was risky, for it was designed to select for multiparty constitutional democracy, not just market economics. Still, in the late 1980s Deng permitted reformers led by Hu Yaobang to loosen some party controls over speech and the press. And, after the Soviet Union moved into the liberal niche in the late 1980s and liberalized its political system even more, the risk to the CCP became manifest with the Tiananmen Square protests of May 1989.

Deng, Li Peng and the CCP saw off the threat with the massacre of 4 June 1989, the purging of reformers such as Hu and Zhao Ziyang, and the reimposition of party control over civil society. In 1992, Deng's ‘southern tour’ restarted economic liberalization, but party control over politics has persisted and even tightened since then. The CCP's general strategy has been to sustain its legitimacy with high economic growth and nationalism, the combination of which is supposed to weaken any drive for democratization.⁴⁹ Coupled with high levels of surveillance and punishment, and severe limits on civil society, these measures have helped keep the regime in place. In recent years, the government has turned the internet and social media from threats to supports, harnessing them to enhance surveillance and control.⁵⁰

What kind of domestic regime does China have? Article I of the country's constitution labels it a ‘socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants’. Article III refers to ‘democratic centralism’.⁵¹ Western analysts label it authoritarian capitalist,⁵² fragmented–authoritarian,⁵³ Market-Leninist,⁵⁴ democratic–meritocratic,⁵⁵ or simply the ‘Beijing Consensus’.⁵⁶ There is at best a developing ideology to articulate and justify the regime's principles. ‘Market-Leninist’ is an especially helpful label for capturing both the fact that China's economy is roughly 60 per cent privately owned,⁵⁷ and the fact that the CCP acts to forestall the emergence of any domestic political competitor.

However we characterize China's regime, it has successfully resisted the LIO's selection pressure to become a liberal democracy. Indeed, opinion polls show that most Chinese believe that China is a democracy in its own right, and an especially well-governed one.⁵⁸ It is proving adept at using new digital technologies to entrench its power.⁵⁹ Still, the CCP remains worried about the durability of public and elite support for the party-state regime. A sharp and sustained slowing of economic growth, coupled with a significant rise in support for multiparty democracy (or some other alternative regime), would endanger authoritarian capitalism. It is the latter threat that the party believes the LIO presents. Indeed, Xi and the current leadership evidently regard liberalism as the most serious ideological threat to the regime. Document No. 9, circulated in the party in 2013, spells out various principles of liberal democracy—‘the separation of powers, the multi-party system, general elections, independent judiciaries, nationalised armies, and other characteristics’—and calls them not only alien to China, but liable to bring about division, disorder, and a ‘colour revolution’ such as those that have occurred in other autocracies.⁶⁰ Beijing's ruthless weakening of Hong Kong's autonomy in 2020–2021 is further evidence of this worry about what liberal ideas and actors would do to CCP rule and to China's national unity.

CCP officials explicitly state that the LIO is biased against China and seek to decrease that bias. Nadège Rolland notes that official discourse about international order frequently uses the phrase ‘unfair and unreasonable’ (bu gongzheng, bu heli). Chinese officials distinguish ‘international order’ from ‘world order’. International order is the legal system that recognizes the sovereign equality of all states, and China accepts it as legitimate. World order, however, is unfair because it is a Pax Americana that seeks to maintain the dominance of the West and to keep China and other less developed countries down. It is unreasonable because it aims to impose western values and institutions on countries to which they are ill suited; for instance, the revolutions of the Arab Spring brought disorder and extremism to an entire region.⁶¹

China's government, then, would like to make the international system fairer and more reasonable towards its own system.⁶² On the whole, its methods of niche construction are not as direct as those of the United States after the Second World War. China is not building military alliances with other autocratic states to defend against possible American attack and intimidation. It is not using overt or covert force to promote Market-Leninism or to roll back liberal democracy in foreign lands. Its methods are less lethal. One route is increased efforts to integrate foreign economies with China's economy, for which the primary mechanism is the BRI. The seaports, airports, railways, highways, pipelines and power grids constructed under this programme are designed to increase China's trade with dozens of countries. Clearly Xi and the party envisage the BRI as a way to ensure long-term economic growth for China. But the BRI would do more. In so far as it succeeds, it will make host countries dependent on China—through indebtedness, trans-shipment and imports—which in turn could make those host countries less beholden to the wealthy democracies, thereby reducing pressure on China to democratize its political system. Participants in the BRI include some liberal democracies, such as Italy and Portugal, which shows that the boundaries between the LIO and the potential ACIO will be blurred; Beijing's object is to weaken any opposition to its domestic institutions and practices, and making at least some of the democracies dependent on its investment can only help. The BRI also strengthens China's state-owned infrastructure-building sector, which in turn helps make its strong-state model more robust.⁶³

A second area of Chinese niche construction is international institutions and norms. Beijing is building some multilateral institutions of its own, and attempting to modify others, to help weaken potential dissent from China's regime. The 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights is clearly a liberal document, enumerating a single set of universal rights. China is labouring to make human rights relative rather than universal. Its 2017 South–South Human Rights Forum produced a Beijing Declaration stating that human rights must take into account regional, national and historical contexts.⁶⁴ The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), established by China in 2013, is officially neutral towards the political institutions of borrower states, in direct contrast to the older international financial institutions such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, which have used leverage to try to liberalize the political as well as the economic institutions of borrowers.⁶⁵ In technical areas as well, China is trying to modify international rules and norms. Of the 15 UN special agencies, four are currently headed by Chinese nationals: the International Telecommunication Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the UN Industrial Development Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization. These UN agencies historically embody a norm of service to the putative global good rather than the political interests of any one nation. According to Melanie Hart, China sometimes goes against that international norm and serves Chinese nationalism by trying to deny Taiwanese and Uighurs recognition or a voice. In the area of global internet governance, China is pressing at the UN for a norm of national sovereignty that would permit censorship rather than the borderless laissez-faire norm that the United States has championed.⁶⁶

Third, Beijing is trying to export elements of its model of government. It is bringing officials of less developed countries to China for training in how to develop an economy while maintaining a single party in power. The Baise Executive Leadership Academy in Guanxi Province, founded in 2017, has trained more than 1,000 ASEAN officials in such topics as ‘how to “guide public opinion” online when there are emergencies, and how to alleviate poverty in a “targeted” way’. Beijing has focused particular attention on Cambodia. The Chinese government also trains judges and police officers from member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).⁶⁷ Hundreds of African officials have been trained in China on extending state control over civil society through, for example, censorship of social media. China has exported its advanced surveillance technology to a number of states in Africa and Latin America, which plan to use the cameras and storage to monitor citizens.⁶⁸

Finally, China, like the United States before it, works to build and use soft power. Here, the party's path has not been as straightforward, for the consumer goods that China exports—particularly digital hardware—enable individual consumerism as much as anything the United States ever exported. China's cultural exports, particularly in music, film and sport, do not come close to rivalling those of the United States, although China is using its market leverage to alter movies and censor athletes and team owners to favour a Chinese point of view.⁶⁹ With cooperation from university campuses, Beijing has established hundreds of Confucius Institutes in a dozens of countries to educate people in Chinese languages, culture and history.⁷⁰ These institutes have, however, been perceived on some campuses as propaganda engines uninterested in the free exchange of ideas, and some have been shut down.⁷¹ Recent surveys of Chinese scholars and officials suggest a lack of confidence in the country's ability to outdo the United States in terms of soft power.⁷² Still, China is building a narrative of benevolence around the BRI, depicting it not as the bid for empire perceived by suspicious foreigners, but as an immense goodwill plan to develop economies and bring peoples together for the benefit of all.⁷³ Beijing has also leveraged its relative success in taming the COVID-19 pandemic into a narrative about the superiority of its domestic system.⁷⁴

A global system of two international orders?

Xi and China's ruling party may not seek an ACIO. It is probably not in China's overall economic interest to have such an order; the opportunity costs would be significant, as states that lead trading blocs are typically richer in capital than China, and the ‘southern’ trading partners would not be as lucrative a set of collaborators as China is accustomed to having.⁷⁵ Beijing's goal seems, rather, to be remain in the LIO but to deliberalize it. Success in that endeavour, though, would require building a different bias into its international environment. The new bias would favour states whose governments face no meaningful domestic competition, control flows of information and monitor their populations closely, are immune from external pressure regarding civil liberties and political dissent, and whose economies stress state-led infrastructure development over private enterprise. But US governments—with the possible exception of some officials in the Trump administration—do not want the country to have to become authoritarian in order to remain a predominant global power. Neither do the governments of most liberal democracies want to move in an authoritarian direction.

Beijing and Washington both sense that an international order cannot select for both liberal democracy and authoritarian capitalism. This has led to recent moves by each to set the agenda for world order, with Washington countering China's BRI with its ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy.⁷⁶ As a second-best outcome, each might be resigned to an equilibrium of separate but overlapping international orders—an LIO and an ACIO—existing within a larger global order. The Obama administration tried to keep China away from the centre of the LIO, for example by proposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which excluded China; pressing allies not to join the China-centred AIIB; and joining Japan, India and Australia in the so-called Quad group of democracies. President Trump withdrew the United States from the TPP, but President Biden may try to put it back into the rump group, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for a TPP (CPTPP).⁷⁷ Meanwhile, China has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which is more tolerant of large state-owned sectors.

It is not difficult to think of barriers to the two-orders global system. First, should China continue to avoid military alliances, an ACIO could be fragile or not form at all. US security commitments have been integral to the core states of the LIO, inasmuch as they have wanted protection from intimidation by authoritarian powers. It may be that Chinese client states would want similar guarantees against US intimidation. Beijing could refuse, reasoning that to provide such support would make a cold war with America more likely. Or it could reason that America's global alliance network exposes Beijing's international interests to such a degree that it must end its tradition of avoiding alliances, just as the United States did in the 1940s. The BRI, with its political relationships and physical infrastructure such as ports, would lower the start-up costs of military alliances.

Second, the membership of a number of countries in both the RCEP and the CPTPP alerts us to the certainty that many countries, particularly in south-east Asia, will try mightily to avoid committing to either the LIO or ACIO.⁷⁸ No doubt the two orders will interpenetrate. It would seem safe to bet that in the areas of human rights, internet governance and technology exports, the two will be relatively separate. In trade, investment and environmental governance, on the other hand, the two orders may connect. History provides precedents for two distinct yet overlapping international orders. During the Cold War, many developing countries (for example, communist Romania) both accepted Soviet aid and belonged to the IMF; from the early 1970s, the Soviet- and US-led blocs engaged in trade. Neither Beijing nor Washington would want the ACIO and LIO to be completely aloof from one another.

I have not discussed the LIO's present and future. As the premise of this special issue holds, the prognosis of that order has not been good, as support for the LIO within the wealthy democracies—particularly the United States—has weakened in the past 20 years. The coexistence of two international orders would obviously require that the LIO itself regain strength and purpose. Whether the United States and other mature liberal democracies can bring that about remains to be seen. Should they do so, they would achieve greater integration among the world's liberal democracies but not necessarily greater harmony over global order.

A 1950s-style Sino-American cold war would benefit no one, and need not emerge. But if deglobalization continues, it may produce two international orders that help their core countries maintain their respectively preferred systems of government and ways of life. The opportunity costs of such a world would be real. But trade-offs are endemic in politics as in economics, and it may be that sacrificing some wealth to preserve highly valued domestic regimes is better than Sino-American competition for hegemony over a single global system.

Footnotes

Author notes