Tag Archive for: authoritarianism

The battle for the internet

Democracies and authoritarian states are battling over the future of the internet in a little-known UN process.

The United Nations is conducting a 20-year review of its World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a landmark series of meetings that, among other achievements, formally established today’s multistakeholder model of internet governance. This model ensures the internet remains open, global and not controlled by any single entity.

This model is now at the centre of a fierce geopolitical struggle. Authoritarian countries are pushing for a multilateral governance approach—one that shifts control of the internet firmly into the hands of governments. This shift would legitimise crackdowns on dissent, expand online surveillance, enable internet shutdowns, weaken human rights, and accelerate the global spread of digital authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, the WSIS+20 review comes as this approach to internet and digital governance is increasingly popular. In recent years China and Russia have made significant inroads in the UN in advancing their interests for greater state control over the internet and digital governance. In 2024, the UN Cybercrime Treaty granted governments new powers over online activity, sparking concerns it could facilitate digital surveillance and legitimise restrictions on human rights and freedoms, while the UN Global Digital Compact also shifted toward a larger state role in digital governance issues.

These developments set a troubling precedent as WSIS+20 unfolds, raising the question of whether the internet remains free and open, or whether the UN will legitimise digital authoritarianism on a global scale.

What is WSIS?

WSIS, held in two phases in 2003 and 2005, was a landmark UN summit that brought the international community together to ‘build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society.’ It established 11 action lines to use information communication technologies for global development and tasked various UN agencies with overseeing their implementation.

In 2005, WSIS’s Tunis Agenda formally established the multistakeholder model of internet governance that had emerged since the internet was created, emphasising the inclusion of governments, civil society, technical experts, academia and the private sector. This recognised that the internet is a network of networks, with multiple stakeholders facilitating its operation. This model—by design—also prevented any single entity, particularly states, exerting undue control or influence over the internet’s architecture. Among WSIS’s achievements was the creation of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a platform where governments, civil society, the private sector, technical experts and academia could engage and collaborate on internet governance issues.

Two decades later, the 2025 WSIS+20 review will revisit established principles and assess progress against the WSIS action lines. The review will consider the extension of WSIS’s mandate, the future of the IGF (whose mandate also expires in 2025) and, potentially, the expansion of WSIS’s mandate to cover emerging technologies such as AI.

The review process has multiple components. UN agencies are conducting reviews of their respective WSIS action lines. The UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development is coordinating input from stakeholders and preparing a report to be released in April. This report will inform negotiations at the UN General Assembly, culminating in a resolution to be presented for adoption by the UN in December. Throughout the year, events such as June’s IGF in Norway (the last before the forum’s mandate expires) and July’s WSIS+20 High-Level Event in Geneva will also provide important opportunities for the multistakeholder community to provide input into the review process before intergovernmental negotiations ramp up.

WSIS and geopolitical competition

With digital technologies playing an ever-growing role in the modern world, the WSIS+20 review is an opportunity to shape the future of the internet and ensure it remains open, inclusive and development-oriented. The aims and ideals of WSIS have never been so important. However, WSIS has become a complicated geopolitical battleground because of its central role in the multistakeholder model of internet governance.

For years, countries such as China and Russia have pushed for a multilateral approach, arguing that internet and broader digital governance should be controlled by states rather than through the multistakeholder model.

Some criticism of the multistakeholder system is warranted. While the model has fostered an open and innovative internet for decades, it has been dominated by Western governments and major corporations, leaving many countries—particularly in the Global South—feeling sidelined in discussions. Its fragmented and complex processes can be difficult and expensive to navigate, limiting meaningful participation. As digital challenges such as AI governance grow more urgent, many countries also see a need for stronger state engagement to protect national sovereignty and counter the unchecked power of Big Tech. Even democracies, historically the strongest proponents of the multistakeholder model, are increasingly drawn to multilateral approaches to rein in tech giants and address digital challenges more effectively.

China and Russia have skilfully and strategically used these criticisms to advance their own agendas, framing multilateralism as a more inclusive and equitable alternative to the multistakeholder model.

However, their push for multilateral governance ultimately serves to entrench authoritarian control over the internet. Both nations promote ‘cyber sovereignty’ or ‘internet sovereignty’ concepts, arguing that states should have absolute control over their domestic internet governance and effectively justifying their digital authoritarian practices.

While their push for increased multilateral cooperation may appear constructive on the surface—multilateral cooperation is normally a good thing—it aims to concentrate power in forums where only nation-states have voting authority, effectively sidelining civil society and other stakeholders. This has serious implications for global human rights and freedoms.

Over the past year, authoritarian states have made significant strides in advancing this multilateral vision within the UN system through processes such as the Global Digital Compact and the Cybercrime Treaty. WSIS+20 is an opportunity for them to consolidate these gains and fundamentally reshape global digital governance in their interests.

What authoritarians want

Authoritarians’ approach to WSIS will likely focus on four broad strategic areas.

First, they will likely push for new initiatives or for inclusion of language that strengthens multilateral cooperation and action, aiming to concentrate power in forums where only nation-states have voting authority, effectively sidelining other stakeholders. This could include attempts to position WSIS as implementing the Global Digital Compact (GDC)—a nation-state negotiated framework—or trying to subordinate WSIS under this framework, despite WSIS’s independent mandate. This could also include attempts to strengthen the newly established UN Office of Emerging and Digital Technologies, an outcome of the GDC. The office has faced controversy over a lack of transparency about its mandate and its potential to not only further centralise internet governance within the UN in New York, but to centre it within the UN secretariat.

Second, they will likely target the IGF. While preventing its extension seems unlikely, authoritarian governments may work to shift its functions to other UN bodies where only states have voting power—a move China has long advocated for. Alternatively, they may seek to weaken the IGF’s effectiveness by maintaining voluntary funding or creating competing multilateral mechanisms that duplicate its functions.

Third, they will likely push to extend WSIS’s mandate to include emerging technologies, particularly through initiatives that emphasise multilateral involvement. This would create opportunities to shape the governance of AI, data, biotechnology and other emerging fields across multiple disparate forums, making it difficult to track developments and coordinate responses.

Fourth, authoritarian states, particularly China, will likely capitalise on WSIS+20’s development-focused agenda. China has promoted the right to development to justify its prioritisation of state-led economic growth over other universal human rights and freedoms, serving as a strategic tool to strengthen China’s domestic authoritarian model in the name of economic progress. WSIS+20’s emphasis on development, and the urgent need to close the global digital divide, creates a risk that this concept could spread to global digital governance. This would provide a framework for other governments to adopt digital authoritarian practices under the guise of national development priorities.

The central role of the Global South in the review process makes this more concerning. China wields considerable influence through this group, including via the G77+China group, which represents 134 of the 193 UN member states—a majority of UN votes if they negotiate or vote as a bloc, as they did in last year’s GDC negotiations.

The structural elements of the WSIS+20 review further tilt the process in favour of authoritarian interests. The outcome document will be presented for adoption by the UN General Assembly’s Second Committee. Beijing has historically wielded significant influence in this forum, increasing the risk that WSIS+20 shifts toward a state-centric model at the expense of the multistakeholder model.

WSIS isn’t happening in a vacuum

While the WSIS+20 review may seem like an abstract UN process, it’s unfolding in a rapidly changing internet and digital landscape.

The internet is becoming less open and less global as national governments—including democracies—assert greater control over digital spaces. Global internet freedom is in decline, with China and Russia advancing their state-centric visions for digital governance—not only within the UN but also through influential groups like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Meanwhile, China is exporting its digital authoritarian model worldwide via the Digital Silk Road, embedding rules and technologies that entrench state control.

This shift isn’t just happening at a normative or policy level. Technical standards—long an area of geopolitical competition—are beginning to split. The technical foundations of the global internet are also beginning to fracture. For instance, China’s proposed IPv6+ initiative introduces protocols that enable greater state control over internet traffic, raising concerns about its potential global adoption through the spread of Chinese technology.

The internet’s physical infrastructure is also splintering. Subsea cables, telecommunications networks and satellite systems are increasingly fragmented along geopolitical divides. Efforts to decouple technology supply chains—including critical minerals, semiconductors, and advanced chips—are further deepening these divisions.

Conclusion

WSIS+20 is not just another review.  It is a crossroads for the future of the internet.

For democracies, WSIS represents the last major opportunity to defend the multistakeholder model of internet governance. Democracies must lead efforts to improve the multistakeholder model, making it more inclusive and responsive to the needs and interests of the Global South with clear ideas about how to harness digital technologies for development. WSIS is an opportunity to genuinely collaborate with these nations to evolve the system and address developmental challenges, all while countering the narratives promoted by authoritarian regimes.

Multistakeholder bodies, such as ICANN, as well as the technical community and civil society, mobilised ahead of the GDC negotiations last year to push back on attempts to erode the open and global internet and shape discussions on how the multistakeholder model could evolve. They are likewise approaching WSIS with the gravity it deserves. Democracies must do the same.

If democracies fail to approach WSIS with the magnitude it deserves, 2025 may well mark the end of the open global internet. The battle for the internet is not just about digital governance- it’s the frontline of the broader struggle over the global order.

Authoritarian states recognise this. It’s time democracies did too.

A complex balancing act: Australia’s response to wrongful detention

The often tireless efforts of officials in Australia and around the world to secure the release of their citizens detained arbitrarily have yielded mixed results. This malign practice by autocratic regimes continues.

The patchy outcomes show the need for Australia to review and improve its approach. The current Senate inquiry into the wrongful detention of Australian citizens abroad, due to report around the end of November, provides a crucial opportunity to better understand and tackle this pressing issue that brings together human rights, diplomacy and national security.

The first weakness is that there is not enough public messaging that arbitrary detention and hostage diplomacy are used by authoritarian regimes to achieve their strategic objectives.

Of course, some Australians overseas do the wrong thing and face local justice accordingly. Arbitrary detention and hostage diplomacy, by contrast, are used to gain political or economic concessions from the detained citizen’s government, in violation of their human rights and without legal justification. This latter practice must be identified and called out for what it is. The resulting attention should galvanise rule-abiding nations to hold hostage-taking countries collectively to account and to deter the practice.

The exquisite dilemma that governments face is that they must at once prioritise the welfare of their citizen while maintaining a resolute conviction not to give concessions that might provide temporary relief but incentivise further use of the malign practice over the longer term.

Recognising the wicked nature of this challenge forms the basis of the submission we recently made to the Senate inquiry, arguing that Australia needs a well-defined policy framework that covers diplomatic engagement, legal action, international partnerships and public communication.

First, a consistent and transparent application of the term ‘arbitrary detention’ is needed. Cases have often been marked by significant inconsistencies, adding to our own public’s confusion and potentially letting authoritarian regimes off the hook.

Australian citizen Yang Hengjun has been detained in China since January 2019. After two years of unsuccessful diplomatic engagement and worsening treatment, the Australian government labelled his detention as arbitrary, marking the first use of the term in relation to a citizen held by China. This label has rarely been used in relation to others held by China, including Cheng Lei. And more recently, particularly around the June 2023 visit to Australia of Chinese Premier Li Qiang, the Australian government seemingly dropped the word ‘arbitrary’ in relation to Yang.

Any argument that silence or mutedness is a necessary diplomatic compromise does not cut it. The unjustified, punitive and coercive detention of an Australian citizen cannot simply be accepted and absorbed into a relationship in pursuit of stability. It must be regarded rather as an ongoing source of destabilisation.

Second, a principle should be maintained that the welfare of the individual is paramount and that Australia’s upholding of international rules and deterrence of future cases are higher priorities than economic and diplomatic relationships. Preventing future exploitation of detainees means the policy should prohibit making policy concessions or payments to regimes involved in hostage diplomacy.

Third, we need clarity on when to use quiet diplomacy versus public advocacy. This will depend on the circumstances of each case. In the immediate period after a citizen is detained, quiet diplomacy can offer the best chance of an early release, while premature public attention might make it harder for the detaining regime to relent.

The mistake that governments have sometimes made is in failing to recognise when that stage has ended and when greater public pressure is required.

Fourth, it is essential that like-minded nations and international organisations strengthen their co-operation. By working closely with the United States, Canada, European nations and others, Australia can exert collective diplomatic, reputational and economic pressure on regimes that engage in hostage diplomacy.

In February 2021, the Canadian government led a landmark international declaration against arbitrary detention, signed by about 60 countries. But more than three years later, democracies like Australia must go beyond declarations and ensure there are adequate enforcement mechanisms such as targeted sanctions—the fifth measure Australia should utilise. Once a case becomes formally recognised as state-backed arbitrary detention, mechanisms such as sanctions should be used to hold regimes to account and deter them from further breaches.

This could be done through the potent tool of Magnitsky-style legislation passed in 2021, which enables Australia to impose financial and travel restrictions on individuals and entities in regimes that practice arbitrary detention. Successive Australian governments have shrunk from using them in response to Yang’s arbitrary detention (and in relation to human rights abuses in Xinjiang) but, with no end in sight for Yang after almost six years, using Magnitsky to target those responsible is now long overdue.

Sixth, public engagement is essential for the purpose of transparency and enabling Australians to make more informed decisions while travelling or living abroad. Keeping the public and affected families aware of Australia’s actions will help build trust and ensure accountability. Proactive public campaigns can educate Australians about travel risks.

Finally, we need support mechanisms such as the establishment of a deterrence fund. This fund would support diplomatic efforts, legal actions and public awareness campaigns, ensuring Australia has the resources to respond swiftly and effectively.

Addressing the issue of wrongful detention demands a dynamic and comprehensive response. Proactive reforms and strategic partnerships will enable Australia to safeguard its citizens effectively and ensure responses are principled, transparent and impactful.

Australia Day: We just need to get our values straight

As Australia Day approaches, there will be passionate debates about the suitability of the day and the historical context for First Australians in particular.

But within those debates we should all agree to unite around the importance of preserving, defending and nurturing our country’s democratic values.

We enjoy the rights to speak freely, protest against beliefs with which we disagree, practise any or no religion, hold a range of ideological positions, and enjoy a reasonable degree of privacy.

We also have a collective security that safeguards these freedoms, either through laws or social norms by which society protects us—provided we are not hurting others—while carefully avoiding the centralisation of power in a way that could lead to its arbitrary abuse. Ideally, we leave each other alone while also looking out for each other.

The question worth pondering on Australia Day—and the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—is whether we are preserving the proper appreciation of these freedoms and rights, which were hard won during and after World War II, but are still enjoyed by only a minority—and democracy-watchers suggest a shrinking minority—of people around the world.

Two worrying trends should galvanise us to invest as a society in our core democratic values. First, authoritarianism and illiberalism are on the march globally. From Beijing to Moscow to Tehran, powerful autocrats are flexing, demonstrating their aggression in places such as Ukraine, the South China Sea and Yemen, to carve out geopolitical spheres of influence in flagrant violation of international rules.

This is a security threat but not itself fatal to democracies. As history has shown, authoritarianism can be confronted and countered. If we destroy ourselves as a democracy, it will be from within, perhaps catalysed by external pressure but necessarily self-inflicted.

This is the second worrying trend: the declining self-confidence about the rightness of democratic values. The two trends are connected; self-doubt about our values is exactly what authoritarians want and the propaganda for which their useful idiots—from elements of the US MAGA right to far-left Western activists—become a conduit.

Think about the sorts of messages these strange bedfellows promote. That international rules are naive and ineffectual, while collective strength to bolster freedom is a suspect notion. Democracies are so imperfect as to be indistinguishable from other political systems, with values a kind of sanctimony; short-term interests, achieved through transactionalism, are what we should go for.

In practice, it means the MAGA right and the far left can coalesce on foreign policy falsehoods such as NATO being to blame for Russia’s illegal war on democratic Ukraine. And elements of both extremes just want to put economic gain ahead of long-term security, and could abandon Taiwan to a unilateral takeover by the Chinese Communist Party because its precious worth as a democracy means less than the quick hit of trade and investment.

It is our values that provide a foundation for consistent policymaking and a bulwark against short-term caprice. Supporting Ukraine against Russia’s appalling aggression is no less right in 2024 than it was in 2022. Indeed, adherence to principles sends the message that dictators can’t just wait us out, as Vladimir Putin is trying to do, believing we lack the fortitude for the long game.

Values help us resist the transactionalism at which dictators tend to excel. Beijing would love nothing more than to split up the region and deal with each country individually so it can use its size to its advantage. Australia, following its values, must support democracies against the kind of bullying The Philippines is experiencing in the South China Sea and Taiwan constantly suffers from military aggression and political interference.

Consistency in defending international rules and friends abroad is inseparable from, and directly reflects, the strength of our domestic values and national resilience, including the promotion of free speech, the ability to disagree respectfully and never shying away from being a proud democracy.

There are elements in the federal bureaucracy that counsel downplaying our democratic values, out of fear it comes across as hectoring to non-democracies, especially in our Indo-Pacific region. This is a woeful misjudgement. If we lose self-respect, other countries will only respect us less.

The mistake is conflating the imposition of our values with having pride in them. We can champion them and, through our actions at home and abroad, demonstrate that they make us a more prosperous country and a better international partner. It’s not propaganda to say the world is safer for everyone when there is more democracy.

Why else do we expect higher standards from democracies—such as Israel—than authoritarian regimes such as Iran, or terrorist groups such as Hamas? Because they have democratic values.

We need to make sure that as our society evolves through changes in demographics, economics and technology, we are bringing these enduring values with us.

We have faced these worrying trends and challenges to democracy before. It is a bipartisan view in Australia—from Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy—that we are in a period comparable to the 1930s.

In September 1936, Winston Churchill made an impassioned plea for democracy. Leading democratic nations, he said, were ‘very much aware of the shortcomings of our civilisation, and the need of continual social betterment’.

However, he continued: ‘We believe fervently that our institutions are such as to enable us to improve conditions and correct abuses steadily, and to march every year and every decade forward upon a broader front into a better age.’

He concluded by imploring democratic societies to ask: ‘Are we taking every measure within our power to defend that cause?’

With war in Europe and the Middle East, and increased tension in our region, it is again time to ask this question and ensure that our protection and promotion of democracy, and the freedoms that come with it, are backed by the capability to deter and to make a meaningful contribution where the rule of law is challenged by authoritarians and terrorists.

This Australia Day, we should be proud to say it is our democratic values we live by and want to preserve for future generations.

The world’s stake in American democracy

For more than three-quarters of a century, the United States has played an outsized, constructive role in the world. To be sure, there have been major errors, including the Vietnam War and the 2003 Iraq War, but the has US gotten it right far more often than not.

The results speak for themselves. US entry into World War II proved decisive. In part because of American urging, the colonial era came to a rapid if not always peaceful end. The creation of a post-war order of alliances helped to ensure the Cold War stayed cold and ended on terms consistent with Western interests and values. A range of institutions and policies provided the foundation for unprecedented global economic growth and extension of lifespans.

But the ability of the US to continue to play a large and influential global role is increasingly uncertain. Some reasons have nothing to do with the US but affect its position all the same.

There are new external challenges. The US economy, responsible for half the world’s output after WWII, now produces only a quarter. Military force is now widely distributed among other countries and groups. Energy and mineral resources, along with manufacturing hubs on which the US and others depend, are widely distributed. This distribution of power and wealth gives others the ability to resist or counter US influence and might. America’s position in this world is one of overall primacy, but not domination.

America’s ability to have its way is further limited by globalisation. Be it climate change or viruses, the US cannot wall itself off from the costly consequences of developments beyond its borders or generate solutions on its own. Neither isolationism nor unilateralism is a viable option.

What might be the most serious threat to global security and stability, though, stems from developments within the US, from the deep political and social divisions that threaten the country’s competitiveness, its ability to design and implement consistent policy, and even its stability.

No doubt some readers will feel more than a little schadenfreude at all this and take satisfaction from US difficulties following decades of having to follow America’s lead. But any such satisfaction will be short-lived, because in a world that is sometimes violent and always global, America’s difficulties can and will quickly become theirs. Further erosion of American democracy will be used by anti-democratic governments elsewhere to justify and extend their repression of their own populations. And, absent a strong US economy, other countries’ economies will grow more slowly as their exports lag.

A weaker and less predictable US would fray the fabric of alliances, which to be effective require mutual assistance to be near-certain. Similarly, foes would grow emboldened in the belief they could act with impunity. The result would be a world of more frequent conflict, one in which advanced weapons proliferate more widely and aggressive countries wield more influence.

A US that is distracted and divided at home would lack the capacity and the consensus to exercise leadership on global challenges such as climate change. Without American resources and leadership, the already-large gap between these global challenges and global responses would almost certainly grow. There is no other country or group of countries both willing and able to take America’s place on the world stage.

The question, then, is whether the US will soon regain its footing and come to resemble the country of the past 75 years. There are some reassuring signs. American economic and military support for Ukraine has been robust. The November 2022 midterm election results were reassuring in that many of the most extreme candidates posing the greatest threat to American democracy were defeated.

But there are also less reassuring developments. We have just marked the second anniversary of the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol, which came close to destroying American democracy. No one can assume that such violent protests will not happen again. And now that divided government is once more a reality, it remains to be seen whether a Democratic president and Senate can find any common ground with a Republican-led House of Representatives. Early signs are not good, as the newly empowered Republicans seem more focused on investigating and obstructing than on legislating and leading.

Winston Churchill famously said, ‘You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.’ That dictum is about to be tested. The problem for the rest of the world is that it will be affected in significant ways by what happens in the US but has little or no ability to influence developments there. It is an uncomfortable but unavoidable reality.

Time for ‘Democracy Inc’ to stand against authoritarian aggression

Dictators stay in power with one another’s help. As a Venezuelan pro-democracy activist told Lithuania’s recent Future of Democracy forum when asked how dictator Nicolás Maduro holds on to power, the answer is always the same: because he’s propped up by all the world’s other autocrats.

It’s an argument that The Atlantic writer and historian Anne Applebaum has often made: global authoritarianism is a network, a kind of ‘Autocracy Inc’.

When our sanctions bite, autocrats pick up the slack for each other, as China is doing for Russia now. When we try to hold them to account through censures in international forums, they block, veto, distract and pump out the whataboutery. They amplify one another’s disinformation, share propaganda narratives and look away from the others’ human rights abuses and international aggression.

One of the themes to emerge at the Future of Democracy forum, hosted by Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis and steered by Vice Minister Mantas Adomėnas, was that we need to draw more counter-strength from a network of democracies—a ‘Democracy Inc’. It was an idea this author advocated during a panel discussion with Applebaum and others at the forum.

Liberal democracies have values around which to coalesce—openness, fairness, equality and accountability on agreed rules—and which translate well from national political cultures to external behaviour towards other nations. While countries pursuing their interests don’t always practise perfectly what they preach, democracies are pretty good at valuing all countries equally, irrespective of size and economic clout, underpinning a respect for sovereignty.

These values have proven themselves able to sustain peace, stability and prosperity better than an environment in which countries simply exercise their raw power. However, given authoritarians such as those in China and Russia are choosing power over rules and are resisting the influence of the rest of the world, we need to accept that we are in a period of long-term, full-spectrum competition. Our goal must be to constrain and deter these regimes for the foreseeable future.

The finish line will be the establishment of a new, evolved set of rules and norms. We will have succeeded if those rules and norms reflect our values and have widespread buy-in, as opposed to a more arbitrary environment permanently shaped by the coercive and exploitative objectives of autocrats.

There are immediate priorities for a confederation of democracies. We can work together to counter economic coercion. This might involve a NATO Article-5-style arrangement whereby coercion against one member provokes a response from all, but there are other, less contentious proposals. We might agree to discourage our own businesses from taking advantage of trade opportunities created by coercion against others, or simply agree to build capacity in vulnerable states to improve their resilience to coercion attempts.

We can accelerate and deepen efforts to build supply and value chains for critical materials and technology, whether through coordinated export controls on authoritarian strategic rivals, by bolstering ‘friendshoring’, or, as it has been nicely described, ‘reglobalising among friends’.

We can share innovation clout—which we are already doing with AUKUS and to some extent the Quad—but this can be taken much further. Hints of Japan’s involvement in the non-submarine aspects of AUKUS are encouraging, as is Defence Minister Richard Marles’s effusiveness for cooperation among like-minded nations in industries that used to be reigned by implacable competition.

As NATO has a notional defence spending target of 2% of GDP for each member, a confederation of democracies could have a similar target for research and development spending in areas of technology that are critical for national and economic security.

We also need better strategic communications to persuade countries—especially in the Indo-Pacific—that are nervous about the prospect of major-power competition that the democratic agenda is positive and seeks to improve the circumstances of all nations, not just an elite club of the wealthy and self-governed. Strengthening smaller countries’ abilities to combat the bombardment of disinformation is crucial.

Above all, we’ve got to actively support each other. That includes backing pro-democracy movements in places like Hong Kong, Iran, Russia and Myanmar.

Lithuania is a role model. With fewer than 3 million people and an economy ranked in the 80s globally, the small Baltic nation has nevertheless become a big champion of democracy. It has stood its ground against bullying from both Russia and China, which took coercive trade measures after Lithuania allowed the opening of a Taiwan representative office in its capital Vilnius. Lithuania has actively promoted democratic causes, including through events like Future of Democracy.

These events give governments, diplomatic services, think tanks, democracy advocates and exiled freedom fighters the chance to build connections with one another.

Ukrainian flags are draped all over Vilnius. Landsbergis is among the most voluble international voices calling for support to Ukraine, and Lithuania’s distinction is reflected in NATO’s decision to hold its 2023 summit in Vilnius.

None of this suggests the world is going to bifurcate neatly into competing democratic and non-democratic spheres. Indeed, the advantage democracies like Australia have is that we can partner with countries acting in good faith even when they have different political systems. The reality will be messy and complex, and the finish line is unlikely to be as obvious as, say, the fall of the Berlin Wall was in marking the end of the Cold War.

It will be a lengthy and difficult period, but it is possible for democratic values to prevail over time. Rivals such as China have plenty of challenges: slowing growth, demographic decline, rising internal repression and overt public dismay over Covid-19 restrictions.

The encouraging response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine demonstrates an appetite across countries to work together to compete and deter, driven as it was more by an instinctive revulsion to brazen aggression than by any formal international architecture. The willingness of so many countries to sanction and ostracise Moscow puts to shame the superannuated UN system within which Autocracy Inc has never been more adept at orchestrating failure.

In turn, this shows the opportunity now before us to strengthen and expand our cooperation towards a renewed global system that has democratic values at its heart and serves the needs of all.

How should the US confront state fragility and democratic decline?

The return of strategic competition between states is an established geopolitical trend. But states themselves are getting more fragile, according to the 2021 Fund for Peace Fragile States Index.

The index shows an increase in nations hovering on the brink of state failure, including Mali, Nigeria, Venezuela and Syria. Covid-19 and climate change are listed as contributing factors. And it’s not only states in the global south that are moving down the stability scale—the United States showed the largest year-on-year worsening, and the United Kingdom also experienced a marked downturn in stability.

The index indicates that the pandemic has blurred assumptions about what makes a state fragile. The most reliable features preventing states from becoming fragile were not just economic or health resources, but also social capital and a sense of a shared national good.

Democracy indexes have measured steep declines too. For example, the 2021 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index found that one-third of the global population lives under authoritarian rule, while less than one-tenth lives in a full democracy, the lowest level since the launch of the index in 2006.

There’s a close feedback loop between these two metrics. Authoritarian populism thrives in fragile states and usually drives a state further into a cycle of conflict. Worsening climate change, rising inequality, corrupt financial flows and new technology are further complicating the state stability picture.

If the global system of states is getting shakier, there are many question marks about the role of US power and international institutions in guaranteeing the system’s stability after past failures. At the multilateral level, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently called for renewed commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to prevent a vulnerable post-Covid world from sliding further into chaos.

Over the past few years, commentary on US domestic politics has wrestled with how the US recalibrates its presence in the world. And there’s a continuum through the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden not to repeat the military interventionism of the George W. Bush administration, even as great differences remain between Republicans and Democrats over the importance of alliances and diplomacy.

This continuum was reflected in bipartisan support for the Global Fragility Act, passed at the end of 2019, which prioritises US engagement to stabilise fragile states. It calls on the US government to fund develop and test new ways to reduce and prevent violent conflict by addressing root causes—political, social and economic grievances.

It also calls for the US government to do this in a coordinated way across the departments of Defense and State and USAID. That’s something the US doesn’t do well, according to Frances Z. Brown, former director for democracy and fragile states on the National Security Council staff and senior fellow and co-director of Carnegie’s democracy, conflict and governance program.

‘The Global Fragility Act is trying to lay out no more US business as usual when it comes to fragile states,’ says Brown.

So far, the act has been slow to get off the ground. The Trump team tried to get traction with it and failed because the draft strategy didn’t meet legal requirements. And the Biden administration is still staffing up a Department of State that was severely depleted during the Trump era.

The implementation strategy is still stalled at the first hurdle—selecting the countries where it will be implemented. ‘It’s been an interminable process, and we’re looking forward to it being finalised. This is where the rubber really hits the road,’ says Brown.

But the critical thing here is the ‘how’ of addressing political and economic grievances in another country. Brown says that the experience of failure to improve state stability in Afghanistan offers a lot of lessons, for the Global Fragility Act in particular.

The most important lesson about reversing state fragility, she says, is that more resources don’t necessarily lead to better outcomes. Rather, it is all about the politics. The billions of dollars directed to Afghanistan in training, security and economic assistance didn’t result in better governance and only exacerbated underlying political problems of corruption and incompetence.

Of course, the Afghanistan mission was complicated by the fact that it was both a military anti-terrorism mission and a stabilisation mission, which often worked at cross-purposes, says Brown.

‘We’ve been talking for years in the international policy community about the need to work politically in fragile states. But we still really have yet to figure out how we operationalise that insight.’

The costs of political failure have been high. According to Brown, ‘The Taliban victory was much more a psychological and political victory than a military conquest. They were able to take territory without firing a shot.’

This was because local leaders, government officials and soldiers had often not been paid and viewed the government in Kabul as corrupt and exclusionary. ‘So, the US did not have the politics and the relationship with the host government right.’

Because of its hegemonic baggage, Brown argues that the US might not always be the best partner for a fragile state.

A key aspect of the Global Fragility Act is that it calls for the establishment of a multi-donor fund, which would ideally allow the US to partner with other nations like Australia on fragile states. ‘That has yet to be moved forward, but that will be an interesting space to watch,’ says Brown.

Also interesting is how another central aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy—strengthening democracy at home and abroad—might align with the fragile states agenda.

Brown argues that this focus is right, but, bureaucratically, fragile states are addressed in different silos to those focused on pushing back rising illiberalism. ‘We have people working on democracy in one camp, and people that work on conflict and deploying to warzones in another. We have this assumption that a country is in the conflict basket and then it suddenly transitions to being in the democracy basket, and that’s not really how the world works.’

A signature US democracy initiative that started as a Biden campaign pledge is the Democracy Summit, set to happen virtually on 9–10 December this year and to be followed with a second leaders summit at the end of 2022.

The three broad themes are anti-corruption, human rights and countering authoritarianism. Both established and emerging democracies like Iraq will likely be invited as well as troubled democratic states like Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.

The invitation list will also include Taiwan, whose president, Tsai Ing-wen, wrote in Foreign Policy this month that her country has ‘an important part to play in strengthening global democracy’.

Civil society and the private sector will also have a presence.

There’s not a lot of detail about the agenda on the State Department website as yet, but Brown says there’s a lot of excitement about the summit in Washington. ‘It is a really important signal to send to the world that the US is back on the side of advocating very loudly for democracy and is bringing together democracies to take on challenges.’

The Biden administration has made it clear that any country that attends needs to make firm commitments to both improving democracy in their own countries and championing it around the world. And some experts suggest that the summit should result in a formal enshrining of US democracy strategy in major US national security directives.

As one of the few stable democracies left in the world and a close US ally, it will be interesting to see what big ideas Australia brings to this table in December.

Editors’ picks for 2020: ‘The power of narratives and the risk of surveillance creep in the response to Covid-19’

Originally published 30 March 2020.

Remember December 2019? That innocent age before our kids knew how to spell ‘Covid’, when all we were worried about was the terrible bushfires and the ongoing climate crisis? In only three months, the novel coronavirus has spread everywhere and all of us are engaged in a continual, rolling recalculation of its mind-boggling implications.

The virus may have emerged in China, an authoritarian state, but it doesn’t distinguish between political systems: democracy and dictatorship alike have staggered under Covid-19’s frightening spread.

Yet even as the crisis rages across the world, and the number of infections continues to increase, there’s a ferocious battle of narratives over which political system has mobilised the best response. As China declares no new local infections and goes on the offensive in the disinformation battle, US President Donald Trump pushes the ‘Chinese virus’ line in place of an effective, coordinated response.

Dozens of nations are in lockdown, infections keep climbing and a global recession looms. China was first into the pandemic, so it may be one of the earliest out.

A geostrategic risk out of all of this is that the perceived ‘lesson’ of the pandemic will be that authoritarianism works and democracy is chaos.

Anywhere you look, government is back, in a big way. Most national governments, both democratic and autocratic, have concluded they need to fight the virus by throttling the freedoms underpinning market economies.

But a preliminary picture is emerging: while extraordinary measures curtailing civic freedoms are evidently necessary for curtailing the outbreak in the absence of a vaccine, autocracy has no monopoly on an effective response. The lack of transparency and accountability, the restrictions on freedom of speech and the lack of a free media in authoritarian countries may in fact make things worse on the ground, as it seems to have done in China in the early days of the outbreak, with consequences we are all now living with.

More important in predicting the efficiency of a nation’s response might be whether it has a population and a public health system with a fresh memory of an epidemic, as in Taiwan and Singapore, which were hit by SARS in 2002 and 2003, and South Korea, which was hit by MERS in 2015.

In the past month, South Korea has managed to flatten the curve without resorting to China’s heavy-handed tactics. The death rate and rate of transmission have been dramatically reduced and the country’s approach has been hailed as an example to the world.

Analysis suggests South Korea’s mass testing (almost 360,000 of 51 million citizens tested) has been crucial in restraining the outbreak. Laws enabling aggressive contact-tracing enacted after MERS mean epidemiologists can act ‘like police detectives’ and quickly track down and quarantine infected people. Mass text messaging, effective public mobilisation and a nationalised healthcare system have also been important factors.

After the SARS outbreak, Taiwan empowered a central command centre for epidemics, implementing lessons from that crisis. Taiwan moved fast on Covid-19, establishing health checks for passengers from Wuhan in early January. It is employing a mobile phone location tracking system to keep people who’ve been exposed to the virus quarantined in their homes. As of 29 March, Taiwan—which has a population the size of Australia’s and much closer ties to China—had reported just 298 confirmed cases and two deaths.

Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told his people in a national address on 8 February that the experience of SARS had prepared them for the next epidemic. Singapore has a National Centre for Infectious Diseases, a stockpile of masks and other medical equipment, a cadre of trained medical personnel and strong research capabilities.

As of 29 March, the global transport hub had reported 844 cases and three deaths. It has cast aside privacy considerations, launching a public health app which creates a record of virus spread risks by analysing the Bluetooth connections of users’ phones. It’s been reported that those not using the app could be prosecuted.

China’s response earned praise from the World Health Organization (although the WHO itself seems to have been less effective as an advance warning system than we would all like), but elements of the Chinese response were troubling. After initially suppressing health workers’ reports of a terrible new lung disease, China locked down whole megacities. Early images showed people who had apparently refused quarantine being violently dragged from their apartments and Chinese drones rebuking unmasked pedestrians. Government censors, meanwhile, came down hard on any discussion of the virus or criticism of the authorities’ response.

An app linked to the popular payment system Alipay assigned tens of millions of Chinese users a green, yellow or red code based on opaque data the users were not aware of, the New York Times reported. Those without green codes, whether sick or not, found themselves arbitrarily forbidden from travelling anywhere, even, in some cases, from entering their own apartment buildings. The Times found the app shared user information and location data with the police each time it was used.

China claimed its first day with no new local infections on 18 March. This milestone presaged an all-out propaganda assault aimed at flipping the story of cover-up and rampant censorship and came amid rumblings of data-fiddling in time for President Xi Jinping’s first visit to Wuhan on 10 March. There are considerable question marks around China’s figures, and China doesn’t include asymptomatic confirmed cases in its final tally.

It’s still early days. The risk of a second wave of infections in Asia, including China, is real. The energy and focus should be on stopping transmission. But the narrative battle matters, because the pandemic risks shaping a more illiberal world.

The deaths and suffering from the virus itself, combined with extraordinary public health measures like isolating people in their homes, are likely to tip most of the world into an economic downturn, bankrupt innumerable small businesses, decimate industries and deepen inequality. All of these factors risk exacerbating existing impulses towards a dismal, nativist politics as fear heightens and nations turn inwards. Distrust in internationalism is likely to increase just as it’s most needed.

Leadership can make a difference to this bleak prognosis, as can tangible international cooperation at this time of crisis. But that kind of leadership has been in short supply so far.

The pandemic is also likely to hardwire our dependence on technology, making our reliance on digital connectivity so absolute that we become more willing to tolerate the downsides of life in a post-privacy age. Democratic governments may be tempted—or driven—to emulate the techniques of autocratic ones. Surveillance creep seems inevitable. The risk is that notions of ‘deviance’ will shift with political priorities: this year the government may want your data for a public health emergency; next time it might be because they don’t like your opinions.

The story of which system wins the battle against Covid-19 will have vernacular power around the world, and it seems likely that—even with strong, fact-based counter-messaging and clarity and transparency around democratic responses—great-power competition will accelerate and a more fractured, more dangerous world will result.

Getting out of the hall of mirrors: China’s security apparatus is without parallel

Beijing’s party-controlled legal system and two-million-person Ministry of Public Security are key tools for clamping down on internal dissent and ensuring that the information available to China’s citizens perpetuates the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. This system of information control and repression bears no resemblance to any system of law or free speech in a liberal democracy.

Yet Beijing’s narrative-spinning machine seeks to establish exactly this equivalence.

Equating the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s search of the homes and devices of Chinese state media employees in Australia with what the Chinese security apparatus does in the name of state security, including the threats it made against Australian journalists Bill Birtles and Mike Smith, is a new theme in this storytelling.

But the Beijing narrative should be seen for what it is: a deliberate and audacious attempt to establish false parallels to obscure the CCP’s own abuses and focus critics on their own internal dynamics and debates.

Taking it seriously doesn’t just demean Australia’s system of government and law. It gives the ‘out and proud’ authoritarian rulers in Beijing a disturbingly free pass right at a time when their intimidation and silencing of domestic and foreign critics is accelerating—and when reversing that should be the focus of increasing international attention and effort.

Unlike Birtles and Smith, the four Chinese individuals involved—the bureau chief of the China News Service, Tao Shelan; China Radio International’s Sydney bureau chief, Li Dayong; and two other Chinese journalists—faced no prospect of first being taken away to a black prison and interrogated by tens of people at a time every day for months without having been charged with a crime, and then being charged and inevitably found guilty in a CCP-run court for what in China is a uniquely opaque and flexible offence: endangering ‘state security’.

Birtles and Smith knew that the threat of detention and interrogation without charge was real because two Canadians and two Australians have already been living through this. They’ve joined thousands of Chinese, including domestic journalists and now citizens of Hong Kong, along with more than a million Chinese citizens in arbitrary mass detention in Xinjiang.

The 18-year jail sentence given to Chinese billionaire Ren Zhiqiang after he referred to Xi as ‘a clown stripped naked who insisted on continuing being emperor’ for his mishandling of the pandemic is just the latest example of the internal clampdown to protect Xi from dissent, newsworthy because of Ren’s wealth and party membership.

And if we didn’t understand the environment of fear and coercion that Beijing’s security apparatus works hard to create by now, this week gave us the account of another Australian, ABC chief correspondent Matthew Carney, telling us of the ugly and direct threats made back in 2018 towards him and his family, including to interrogate his 14-year-old daughter and imprison her in an adult Chinese jail.

All for him doing his job as a reporter. There was no insinuation of covert or espionage-like activity even in the strident lines from the angry security officials berating him and his family and eventually extorting ‘confessions’ about visa forms. His offence was apparently that he was an Australian, and the Australian parliament had just passed a law that would make it harder for Beijing to covertly interfere with the Australian political system.

Ironically, that law was the basis for ASIO’s searching the four Chinese state media employees’ homes and devices. Those searches, made under warrant, are part of a deep, careful investigation into Chinese state interference in the workings of the New South Wales parliament. It raises the prospect that the investigators may be able to convince routinely sceptical prosecutors that the evidence gathered meets the threshold of criminal liability and a case or cases should be taken to court.

If that happens, some or all of the four individuals may face charges under Australian law and need to defend themselves in court. No off-books black prisons, arbitrary detention, lengthy interrogations or certain guilt here. Plenty of competent legal representation and advice and protection of their liberties and rights throughout, though. And all with plenty of media reporting and public debate as part of civil society holding government to account.

But let’s step back and look at what these events are actually about. They’re not some ‘tit for tat’ exchange between countries with political differences, where each is scoring own-goals on freedom of expression and journalism and the only issue is tallying up how many each system scores.

What we’re witnessing is a fundamental clash between two very different ways of organising and operating a society. And one—democracy—is the form of organising and governing that I happen to like more than state autocracies controlled by singularly powerful and unaccountable rulers who abuse their power to enrich themselves and to control others.

So, the regime in Beijing is using all levers, including the CCP’s total ownership of the Chinese legal system, to silence domestic and foreign critics and to intimidate other governments over anxieties they hold for the personal safety of their citizens in China. It’s also using its unique government institution—its united front machine—this way and to interfere in the operation of other societies and governments.

Meanwhile, the Australian government is working within all the constraints on law enforcement that apply in a system governed by the rule of law, with independent judges and juries, to assemble a credible body of evidence to take cases to court.

The Australian agencies’ motivation isn’t to protect a single-party authoritarian regime’s hold on power, but to protect our democracy and our freedoms from corrosive, covert and corrupting interference by Chinese state actors. It will result in freer speech and less intimidation and coercion of voices in our public debate by making it harder for arms of the Chinese government to organise covert, corrupting and intimidating action within Australian society. It has no equivalence with the silencing of voices in mainland China. And we, like every other democracy, have no institution of government remotely similar to Beijing’s United Front Work Department.

Let’s not have our tails twisted by Beijing-created narratives characterising how we operate as in any way a mirror of, or an excuse for, the actions of the CCP’s own nasty security apparatus.

And, better yet, let’s avoid creating false parallels with Beijing ourselves, when we need to be spending more of our time reinforcing what we value in our system, and working with like-minded states and civil-society institutions to do what we can to prevent the brutal excesses of the Chinese regime.

Perhaps we could also take a moment to even be encouraged by the careful way our law enforcement and judicial arms go about their business and to look forward to well-grounded, professionally defended, prosecutions under the foreign interference laws. That way justice will be done and be seen to be done.

What a contrast to what many thousands of humans are experiencing right now within mainland China’s system.

The dictator’s two dilemmas

Authoritarian regimes often enjoy more public support than democratic governments do. To discover why, my colleagues and I administered the Asian Barometer Survey in four waves across 14 Asian countries between 2001 and 2016. What we found is that authoritarian regimes actually suffer from acute near- and long-term vulnerabilities.

When asked how much confidence they have in six different government institutions, respondents in China and Vietnam expressed ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of trust in 4.4–5.3 institutions, on average, whereas Japanese and Taiwanese respondents trusted only 2–2.6 institutions.

We then asked four questions about whether respondents thought their form of government could solve the country’s problems and thus deserved the people’s support. Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean citizens gave more ‘no’ than ‘yes’ answers, while citizens in Vietnam, China, Myanmar, Cambodia and other authoritarian countries answered yes much more often than no.

The conventional wisdom is that such results reflect the effects of nationalism and access to media. That is correct. In both democratic and authoritarian systems, citizens who express pride in their country also are more likely to express support for the regime.

Likewise, greater trust in media has a positive effect on regime support. In democracies, where media options are diverse and often critical of the government, citizens who have more trust in media are more likely to feel that they understand why the government does what it does. In authoritarian systems, where the media are government-run or government-influenced, citizens who believe official sources are more likely to support the regime.

Two other sets of variables are more surprising, and point to authoritarian regimes’ vulnerabilities. First, we found that the economic welfare of the respondent’s family had little effect on his or her support for the regime. People seemed to credit or blame themselves for how well or poorly their families did, even though they attributed the overall state of the economy to the regime.

By contrast, in both democracies and autocracies, citizens gave more weight to the government’s role in ensuring ‘fairness’, defined as providing equal treatment to rich and poor, safeguarding freedom of speech and association, and guaranteeing access to basic necessities such as food, clothing and shelter. And they gave even more weight to the government’s ‘effectiveness’, meaning its ability to fight corruption, administer the rule of law and solve what respondents identified as the most important problem facing the country.

These findings point to a near-term threat to authoritarian legitimacy. Authoritarian regimes are more susceptible than democracies to corruption, abuses of power and catastrophic policy mistakes due to secrecy and overcentralisation. In democracies, dissatisfied citizens can organise and vote. Under authoritarian rule, dissatisfaction tends to build up until mass demonstrations erupt, potentially jeopardising the regime’s survival.

A final reason for the differences in support between authoritarian and democratic regimes is culture. Here, the survey included a nine-item questionnaire to measure traditional social values like conflict avoidance, deference to authority and group loyalty over individualism. It also included a seven-item battery designed to assess support for core liberal democratic principles, such as the freedom of speech and association, judicial independence and the separation of powers.

In all but two of the countries surveyed, those who affirm traditional values tend to accord greater legitimacy to the regime under which they live, regardless of whether it’s democratic or authoritarian. Likewise, there is also a statistically significant relationship between affirming liberal democratic values and being critical of one’s government.

The combined role of performance and culture in generating regime legitimacy points to a long-term dilemma for authoritarian regimes. To achieve high marks for performance, both democratic and authoritarian regimes will pursue policies that promote modernisation. Yet, by definition, such policies run counter to traditional values, which helps to explain why those authoritarian countries that have modernised the fastest also have the fastest spread of liberal democratic values, especially among younger, more educated, urban citizens.

Moreover, while liberal democratic values—and criticism of government—are baked into the politics of democracies, they pose a unique threat to authoritarian systems, because they are strongly associated with a desire for an alternative regime.

In the survey, we presented three alternative forms of authoritarian rule and asked if respondents would approve of any of them. Perhaps not surprisingly, liberal citizens in both authoritarian and democratic regimes found all three options unattractive, implying that they see no authoritarian alternative that is superior to what they already have.

But when we posed four questions about the attributes respondents prefer in government, we found a preference for liberal democratic regime characteristics among citizens who believed in liberal democratic values. Respondents were asked, for example, whether they believe that ‘Government is our employee, the people should tell government what needs to be done’ or whether they believe that ‘The government is like a parent, it should decide what is good for us.’

The fact that adherents to liberal values display a preference for regime characteristics associated with liberal democracy is not surprising. But the implications are different for different types of regimes. If these liberal citizens live in a democracy, they may be dissatisfied with what they have, but they would not prefer an alternative. In authoritarian regimes, as liberal values spread, so does a preference for democratic regime characteristics. So, while democratic regimes need not worry about their liberal citizens favouring an alternative system, autocratic regimes do.

To be sure, authoritarian regimes can try to slow the erosion of democratic values, as China has done with its campaigns to revive Confucianism and promote a cult of President Xi Jinping. These efforts encourage younger and more educated citizens to feel proud of their country’s traditions and accomplishments. Yet the same cohorts are increasingly determined to assert their individuality, protect their personal and property rights, and learn more about the outside world. They want an accountable government that abides by the rule of law.

The better an authoritarian regime performs in its mission to modernise society, the more rapidly liberal democratic values will replace traditional values, and the larger the proportion of the population dissatisfied with authoritarian rule will become. The most effective authoritarian regimes, then, are gradually digging their own graves.

Press freedom under attack across Asia

By almost every measure, press freedom in East Asia has suffered a depressing erosion lately.

Professional journalists and citizen bloggers have been jailed or slapped with costly defamation suits. Media outlets have had their operating licences threatened or revoked. Cybersecurity and ‘fake news’ laws have given autocrats a new cudgel to crack down on reporting they dislike. Journalists and bloggers trying to provide information about the coronavirus pandemic have been threatened and jailed. And countries are increasingly weaponising the visa process to keep out or kick out prying foreign correspondents.

But as dramatic as this rollback of press freedom has been, in East Asia—particularly Southeast Asia—this is really just a reversion to the mean.

For decades, this region has been inhospitable terrain for the press. Independent journalists have long been viewed with suspicion or outright hostility.

Local journalists for many decades have been straitjacketed with a range of restrictions and governmental ‘red lines’—topics off-limits to coverage—with many reporters choosing to exercise self-censorship to avoid transgressions. Much of the Asian media was state-owned, meaning they could only report the official government line.

For the relatively compact corps of foreign correspondents traversing the region, covering East Asia meant navigating a patchwork of visa requirements and work permits, internal travel restrictions, rejections, revocations and, occasionally, expulsions. I know; for two years, from 1987 until 1989, I was banned from Indonesia for a single line in an article that went against the Suharto regime’s historical narrative of how it took power. I was blacklisted from Myanmar for years after interviewing Aung San Suu Kyi in 1989.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Myanmar and Laos remained among the least covered countries in the world by the foreign press because of their stinginess in granting visas to journalists. Other countries like Vietnam and Cambodia only allowed in a large number of foreign reporters for grandiose staged events. Reporters on individual trips were assigned ‘guides’ to monitor their movements. Some forward-looking guides were actually helpful, and would turn a blind eye if you slipped away from your assigned hotel to interview a dissident who was officially off limits to see. But they were the exceptions.

The media environment slowly started to change as more and more countries became inspired by the 1986 ‘People Power’ revolution in the Philippines that toppled the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, and by democratic openings in South Korea and Taiwan. But the larger impetus was the 1997 Asian economic crisis that collapsed living standards across Asia and forced a new democratic reckoning—‘reformasi’ in Indonesia, and a new ‘people’s constitution’ in Thailand that promised to limit the role of the military and the old corrupt provincial elite.

Some argued that the democratising trend in East Asia at the turn of the century was ‘an inevitability’. It was the result of a more educated and affluent middle class, globalisation, the growth of information technology, and the pressure of foreign aid donors.

‘More and more Asians [are] now choosing their own leaders, throwing out old ones, forming labor unions and advocacy groups outside of government control and publicly clamoring for more democratic rights’, said an article in the Washington Post in December 1997. ‘Just as democracy swept through Latin America and the former Communist-run states of Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, East Asia, too, is in the midst of what many here are calling a slow but steady move toward more pluralism and openness.’

I recognise those words because I wrote them.

It seemed then an accurate reflection of the times. The democratic optimism was swiftly followed by the explosion of the internet in East Asia. Social media, new online media outlets and ‘citizen journalists’ began challenging the state-run media monopoly on information, giving a voice to the voiceless.

The trend even spread to China. In 2009, when I landed in Beijing as a correspondent for the Washington Post, China was in the midst of a still-new, largely unregulated online revolution. Citizen journalists, microbloggers and online activists were exposing official corruption, highlighting problems like food safety, child kidnapping and illegal land grabs. They were holding the communist authorities accountable. And, for the first time, ordinary people had a way to talk back to—and criticise—their leaders.

‘China’s bloggers are taking risks and pushing for change, one click at a time’, was the headline of a piece I wrote in 2012 analysing the impact of this new online activism. In addition, Chinese traditional media outlets like Caixin magazine and Southern Weekly in Guangzhou were pushing the boundaries with hard-hitting investigative reporting.

But when Xi Jinping ascended to power in late 2012, he set about reining in the online space. New regulations and restrictions were imposed. Journalists were told that their job was to conform to the party line and follow the ‘correct political direction’. The anonymity that allowed free speech to flourish online was crushed with new ‘real name’ registration rules. Internet celebrities with large followings, the so-called ‘Big V’s’, were harassed and some arrested. Bloggers and citizen journalists were jailed. The once freewheeling internet conversation on Weibo, or Chinese Twitter, soon halted.

A new national security law imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong on 1 July this year now threatens to stifle the local media in the former British colony, or at the very least create a climate of fear that will likely lead to more self-censorship. The new law calls for more ‘supervision’ of the media, gives the police unlimited surveillance powers, and could force journalists to turn over their notes and data during national security investigations.

China’s crackdown on the internet was actually a harbinger of the ossifying of nascent democratic trends elsewhere in the region. Whereas in the late 1990s and early 2000s, democracy seemed on an irreversible march across East Asia, the past few years have seen a return to old-style authoritarianism. And a key casualty has been the region’s newfound press freedoms.

Indonesia, after the fall of the Suharto ‘New Order’ regime in 1998, saw a flourishing of the local press, and a relaxation of the visa restrictions and ‘blacklists’ that saw me banned for two years. But now under President Joko Widodo, the visa is again being weaponised. American journalist Philip Jacobson, who exposed environmental damage and corruption, was arrested and deported, supposedly for violating the terms of his visa. Journalists have been barred from reporting on Papua. Islamic groups threaten to have reporters jailed under the country’s strict laws against blasphemy.

An independent media did flourish in the Philippines for a time after the fall of Marcos. But a gun-heavy place long known for violence against journalists, it holds the record for the biggest mass killing of media workers in history—32 of them—at Maguindanao, a southern province, in 2009.

Beyond the bloodshed, the law has proved an effective weapon against the press under the authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte. Maria Ressa, the founder of the scrappy online investigative news site Rappler, was convicted of ‘cyberlibel’ and faces seven years in prison, and she still is grappling with multiple tax charges, in what is widely seen as official retribution for the site’s critical reporting on Duterte.

One of the Philippines’ largest and most respected television networks, ABS-CBN, had its broadcasting licence revoked, in a case also considered punishment for its reporting on the thin-skinned president.

Vietnam and Laos, the two unabashedly communist holdouts, continue to arrest bloggers and journalists.

Myanmar appeared a bright spot, following the country’s transition from years of military dictatorship that culminated in free parliamentary elections in 2015. New media outlets flourished during the transition. But Myanmar reverted back to its darker past as journalists were jailed under draconian ‘state secrets’ laws, including two Reuters reporters imprisoned for more than 500 days for covering the military’s persecution of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State.

Thailand also saw a reversion to coups and a military-dominated regime, after a brief dalliance with democracy. Journalists have been jailed under the country’s sweeping ‘cybersecurity’ law, and the media mutes any criticism of the Thai king because of lèse-majesté laws that can lead to a 15-year prison sentence. Strict criminal defamation laws also are used to harass reporters.

Cambodia has always been inhospitable to journalists, although there was a brief flourishing of the press after the end of the civil war and the establishment of a quasi-democracy in the 1990s. Newly established outlets like the Phnom Penh Post and the Cambodia Daily provided critical, in-depth coverage. But Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has used his own Facebook page to deride what he considers ‘fake news’, has forced the shutdown of dozens of radio stations, the closure of the Cambodia Daily and the sale of the Phnom Penh Post to a friendly Malaysian businessman.

Malaysia was deemed to have turned a corner after the May 2018 election that ended the decades-long rule of the nativist United Malays National Organisation and restored nonagenarian Mahathir Mohamed to power. But Malaysia also has backslid, with Steven Gan, the editor-in-chief of the feisty new digital site Malaysiakini, facing contempt-of-court charges because of reader comments on the site that criticised the judiciary. Separately, Malaysian police investigated journalists from the South China Morning Post and Al Jazeera for reporting on the plight of migrant workers during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Reporters Without Borders ranks 180 countries on its 2020 Press Freedom Index, and in the Asia–Pacific region, only New Zealand ranks in the top 10. Australia comes in at 26, and the next Asian countries are South Korea and Taiwan, at 42 and 43. The 10 countries of Southeast Asia only begin to appear at number 136, with the Philippines, and end with Vietnam at 175 and China at 177, above only Eritrea, Turkmenistan and North Korea.

An independent and unshackled press, able to work unimpeded and without fear, is a pillar of democratic society, and what is clear is that as democracy has receded in Asia, so too has press freedom. For a while, there was the belief that Asia was entering a new more democratic era, and that the internet would become a catalyst for more openness and freedom.

It seems Asia’s supposed move towards democracy was largely ephemeral. Old authoritarian states are reverting to type. As is often the case in the region, the more things change, the more they stay the same.