Hong Kong, China, and Staying Hopeful in an Era of Authoritarian Resurgence — with Larry Diamond
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I think the two most important questions that will affect the future of freedom in the world are, of course, what's going to happen in the United States. It's only recently in the last eight years that I thought we would have to ask that question, but now we do. And second, what's going to happen in China?

Hi listeners, welcome to a new episode of Peking Hotel. I'm your host Leo. Hope you guys are staying well. It's only been a month of Trump presidency and already feels like the pre-Trump era was long in the past. And in this age of authoritarian resurgence, it's perhaps fitting that we hear from the world's leading advocate and scholar of democracy, Professor Larry Diamond of Stanford, and

Professor Diamond is a professor of political science and sociology at Stanford and senior fellow at Hoover Institution. He co-founded the influential Journal of Democracy and wrote and co-edited a dozen books on democracy in America, Asia, Africa and Latin America. He led the creation of Hoover Institution's China Global Shock Power Project to safeguard democratic institutions from China's influences.

Today, he'll talk about his connection with the pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong and China, his observations about American politics and how to stay hopeful in an age of democratic backsliding. I hope you enjoy this one. Hong Kong is one of those places that used to bear the hope for China's democratization and open society, but it's now descended the other way. And so I wonder,

if you had any significant experience in Hong Kong dealing with the Hong Kong dissidents. I mean, I know, you know, you personally know Jimmy Lyon and Joshua Wong and people like that. So maybe you could just talk to us about your connection to Hong Kong. As the movement for democracy in Hong Kong was ramping up, I was being invited to go there and give lectures

on democracy and democratization. At Hong Kong University, they lectured at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, even Chinese University of Hong Kong. There was a lot of interest in democracy and people wanted to hear about it.

I had long since met a number of leading Hong Kong democracy activists like Martin Lee because they were part of an international network of Democrats supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. And when I started visiting Hong Kong,

I wanted to see these people. I wanted to engage them and be of assistance. The media were also interested in what I had to say. And they were particularly the South China Morning Post, but other

publications as well. I think there's something called Ming Pao wanting to interview me and have me comment on developments in Hong Kong. The media interest in me was accentuated by the fact that I had supervised a master's thesis of Regina Ip

had been the secretary or in effect minister for internal security during the period when the PRC was trying to get stuffed through the Hong Kong legislature, the kind of national security law that it ultimately forced the passage of

make it easier to arrest dissidents. And when she resigned in that controversy, after mass protests forced the government to withdraw the national security law, she then decided to come to Stanford, get a master's degree in East Asian Studies, and I think originally had

I've been planning to write something more historical, more focused on culture, maybe ancient Chinese culture. But I had taught Regina in a seminar on democracy and democratization when she was a business, a student in the executive MBA program. It's a one-year executive program for people who are already kind of in their careers and

and come and get a one-year degree. And, you know, so we'd known each other, and she looked me up, and she proceeded to write this actually very interesting and thoughtful analysis about how Hong Kong might move toward democracy with constitutional amendments that wouldn't perhaps be

result in a fully directly elected parliament or a chief executive, but that would come much closer and that I thought were interesting and potentially viable compromise formulas. And the fact that someone who had been, in essence, the head of the police and security and

you know pushing the beijing inspired national security law in hong kong would come to stanford kind of rethink her position advocate for constitutional reform and then go back and chart her own course not join an explicitly pro-china party and not seek to get elected

through one of the constituency, indirect election of functional constituencies, but rather run for a directly elected territorial constituency for the LegCo. This all kind of generated a lot of interest and it heightened the media interest

in me and my relationship with Regina and so on and so forth. I thought some of it was, you know, a bit excessive and personality focused, but that was okay. I was wanting to be supportive in whatever way I could. At the same time, we had a

scholar of Hong Kong and historian who I think taught in Hong Kong for many years and then kind of settled in the Stanford area and had a relationship with Hoover. His name was Ming Chan and he organized several meetings at Stanford about the Constitutional

future of Hong Kong and the struggle for democratic change there, and also edited a book, which was one of two that I contributed to. And there was a period of time when I was really, I was trying to, you know, contribute to the interesting and kind of open-ended dialogue about how constitutional

reform could happen in Hong Kong in a way that might lead to democracy. I think beginning around 2016, I'm trying to go through my email here, I began to get to know some of the younger activists for democratic change in Hong Kong.

particularly Joshua Wong and Nathan Law. That was a powerful experience as well. And that was kind of an interesting situation in that era, because on the one hand, I was trying to learn as much as I could.

and really try and understand the umbrella movement of 2014, which was this very historic movement of protest and activism that was really trying to press for democratic constitutional change in Hong Kong.

and that was protesting Beijing's resistance to the kinds of proposals many people were putting forward with the focus on the 2017 election of Hong Kong's chief executive. They were really trying to press for direct election of the chief executive, more completely democratic election of the legislative council.

and the umbrella became the symbol of the movement and thrust forward a whole new collection of democratic activists. I think it was around that time that I also met another member of the Legislative Council, Lee Chok-Yan, who was a member of the

Labor Party, relatively small party, and had been a long time General Secretary of the Trade Union Confederation there, the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions. And I was in this interesting kind of mix of roles.

On the one hand, I was, when asked, speaking and lecturing about democracy and democratic change in terms of general principles. Secondly, I was offering ideas about how Hong Kong

might move to democracy, how future democratic constitutional system could be structured, why it was vital for Hong Kong and morally imperative for Hong Kong to become a democracy, why Hong Kong could become a democracy without attempting to split off from China. This led to, as the movement progressed and

developed a prominent and increasingly outspoken separatist wing, I was quietly trying to warn people that I thought it was very dangerous to give any implication that the democracy movement in Hong Kong might also seek to separate from mainland China, assert more than

the autonomy that was anticipated with the formulation of one country, two systems, which was of course something that the PRC was trying to nullify and renege upon. So I had a role of lecturing in general, a role of contributing to the more specific debate

a role of trying to understand what was happening in interviewing people, and a role of kind of personal friendship and solidarity as I got to know these actors.

and felt a strong political, social, and human bond with them. I remain, frankly, very fond of these people, both the older generation, the Martin Lee generation, the Emily Lau generation, and then the younger ones.

What do you think about the Hong Kong movement now? Once, I mean, it's now dispersed all over the world and with different kinds of communities and even internal splits and strategies. The crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong is one of the great tragedies of our time. As I wrote repeatedly in my essay,

for Ming Chan's book and in a couple other things I was writing at the time, around 2014, 2015, 2016, when these issues were alive and earlier, Hong Kong met all the conditions for liberal democracy. It was highly educated, a prosperous society. It had a history of

elections, you know, with some degree of meaningfulness. It had pretty impressive rule of law tradition with, at the time, at least in many realms, a substantially independent judiciary. And if the People's Republic of China, if the Beijing authorities

had just said, we said one country, two systems, at least for 50 years now. We're not crazy about what's happening, but as long as they honor their side of the bargain and recognize and commit to the one system element of one country, two systems, we'll just kind of draw a fence around it and

make clear that Hong Kong is not a model for the rest of China, but it can have limited self-determination within the formula we had agreed to. If the PRC had done that, I think Hong Kong could have become a remarkable experiment in some considerable degree of self-determination and self-governance.

But I think it is possible to look back on the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong after the handover in 1997. And particularly with the transition from the first chief executive under the new arrangement to the second, it's possible to look back on all of that and think,

regard it with a considerable degree of skepticism or see it all as futile. It recalls to mind the famous phrase of Abraham Lincoln in advance of the Civil War, I think perhaps well in advance, possibly a decade and a half in advance of the Civil War in a

a prominent debate when he said, "This country cannot survive half slave and half free. It'll become all one or all the other." And I'm massacring Lincoln's eloquence and his famous words, but anyway, that was the kind of both philosophical and analytical prediction

that Lincoln correctly made. And at the time, it seemed possible, particularly in the Jiang Zemin era, you know, there's a kind of lighter touch, Hu Jintao in the early years. But toward the later years of Hu Jintao, and especially once Xi Jinping took over in 2012, that just was, it was clear, there was no way

that Xi Jinping was going to allow anything close to a real and potentially successful democratic experiment within any part of the People's Republic of China.

And the whole idea of one country, two systems, therefore, was an improbable and maybe always unserious compromise. Because the Chinese Communist Party, the ruling authority, the monolithic ruling authority in China, you know, they're not stupid. They were smart enough to realize that you have a successful government

example of a self-governed and democratically elected autonomous region within China, in the bosom of the motherland. And people are going to get ideas. You know, the virus is going to spread across the border to southern China, and people are going to talk about it, and they're going to say, you know, why not us?

And it's a very, very dangerous thing. I regard it as really one of the great personal and global geopolitical tragedies that all of this talent, all of this work, all of this mobilization was just crushed. And now some people are still there, but they've been

Terrorized into relative silence. Many people have left, including another former member of the Legislative Council representing digital technology constituency, Charles Mock.

who's now with us at Stanford. Many people are in jail, like Joshua Wong. So it's heartbreaking. Hong Kong did meet all the conditions for a successful democracy, except that it was part of an empire. Yes. And the Empress was not going to let it happen. Correct. It met all of the conditions except one,

You know, Juan Lins stressed on Alfred Stapon in their work on democratic transitions that to have a democracy, you first have to have a state. And the people of Hong Kong, they didn't really have a state. They had some scope for self-governance constantly at the sufferance.

of the Beijing authorities and it could be taken away at any time and it could evolve only with the approval of one of the most authoritarian governments in the world. I think that if Xi Jinping had been different, if the succession to Hu Jintao

had gone differently, rotated to a more flexible and reformist individual. And if the Hong Kong Democrats had kind of moderated their demands, maybe something interesting could still have happened. But none of those things did happen. And as the Beijing authorities became

more contemptuous, more stubborn, more arrogant, and more resistant to any serious further steps toward popular sovereignty in Hong Kong. The movement in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement and what followed, just became radicalized and more

more demanding. I think their demands were morally justified, but probably not always politically astute. I think for a time, right around

2000, there was all this talk about China transitioning to a rule of law state, that you build a strong independent judiciary. And gradually through an independent judiciary, you bring institutionalization of the bureaucracy, checks and balances, and gradually you introduce election. And part of the

basis for that model would be something like Hong Kong, where it had a genuine rule of law and just waiting for election to finally be introduced. How do you make sense of that whole idea of democratic transition through a rule of law state or through some sort of semi-open society, semi-democracy, which, I mean, obviously it's not so feasible now.

But was it ever feasible? Was it ever possible to do something like that when you don't have a popular elected government, but you try to introduce independent sources of power within a state?

It's only, I think it's a pathway, it's potentially imaginable. One of the options for democratic evolution is you gradually expand the aperture of democratic competition. So it goes from competition within a single party, which is the Chinese reality,

to genuine electoral competition that is not purely the monopoly of a single party which is what village elections could have matured into and then gradually evolves becomes more serious scales up and so on the critical factor well the two critical factors i think are one

to build up what Dahl called a system of mutual security, to build up trust and confidence among the authoritarian elites that they won't be wiped out, eliminated or targeted with retribution if they lose, that they have enough standing in society, enough wealth, enough power

so that they can afford to take some risks because their fundamental interests are still protected. Gradual democratization gradually opens up the system, can lead a ruling party to grow. This is the model of Taiwan, right? Gradually, competition becomes more serious and the ruling party

comes to realize that if it loses, it could still come back to power. If it loses, it hasn't lost everything. It may still have a substantial or commanding position in the legislature. It still has a lot of power in the business community, but you have to have some considerable self-confidence and some overarching commitment to democratic principles

or some other set of incentives or drivers that lead you to feel that the risks of democratization are less than the risks of trying to hang on to authoritarian power indefinitely. And that leads to that famous formula in Dahl's book, Polyarchy,

where he argues that democratization happens when the risks and costs of repression come to be greater than the risks and costs of toleration, of opposition, and basically acceptance of democratic competition. So you have to ask what could have prompted the Chinese Communist Party

to see that the risks were increasing and the costs were decreasing. A long period of partial competition might have gotten them comfortable with that, but they closed that off when they essentially hollowed out village elections and stopped what some had imagined might be the process of gradually scaling up

competitive elections, more open and democratic elections from the village. And you look for other examples. The most compelling one is Singapore, and we haven't seen the end of that story. It's one of the most successful developmental states in human history. It grew from absolute poverty to poverty.

breathtaking prosperity, more or less in the space of two generations, now maybe three. And quite honestly, it would do just fine as an electoral democracy, in my opinion. But the ruling PAP right now has no incentive to open up the system to democracy. Why should they? And I'm sure it still perceives some risks.

to the country as well as to itself from such a move. But in any case, one could imagine it happening. And I think that it could have happened with a different type of leader, more of a Singaporean type of leader in China succeeding Hu Jintao. I frequently floated the idea in my writings

that the best we could hope for in the near term, and something that maybe wasn't likely but was imaginable, is that China would become Singapore, an authoritarian state, but that gradually depoliticized the judiciary, reduced party control over the commanding heights of the economy and organizational life in society.

and created a more pluralistic and dynamic economy and society. That was imaginable, but probably not very imaginable without an end to Communist Party rule or a transition from a full-blown Leninist Communist Party to some sort of Hungarian bulash communism or Gorbachev-style communism.

But, you know, one of the most trite and oft-repeated generalizations that have been made about this era and the history of communist China is they live in fear of becoming like Gorbachev. And the fall of the Soviet Union, I think, and of Gorbachev's experiment,

put the nail in the coffin of that pathway of incremental gradual let's do rule of law first and see how it happens political reform how credible do you think is the factor of brutality of repression in explaining china's

failure to democratize. If you have a party that's so willing to use brute force to repress, then it seems they really don't have incentive to compromise with the society. I'm afraid that's true. And I think that the most obvious thing you could say about authoritarian regimes is that ultimately they survive by their

monopoly on the use of force and their willingness to freely and brutally deploy it to intimidate, discourage, punish, and silence opposition. It's the most obvious thing you could say about all authoritarian regimes.

But the fact that it's obvious doesn't mean it's not true. And of course, in the case of communist systems, more than other authoritarian systems, there are other realities and dynamics that are important to their survival over many decades, including ideology and the command of party organization.

and the penetration in society and so on and so forth. But repression is key. And, you know, ultimately it was repression, legal police repression, jailing large numbers of people, hounding others into exile that defeated the virus

of democratic mobilization in Hong Kong. And how can people fight the repression, in your opinion? You don't give up. I think that there's a lot to be learned from Vaclav Havel and his principle of living in truth and quiet resistance. And I think that promoting independent flows of communication and ideas

are extremely important. And even with the Great Firewall, we have ways of waging the ideological battle for democracy, for freedom, and trying to promote or facilitate in China greater adoption of various kinds of technological instruments to circumnavigate the Great Firewall.

and overcome a hurdle, scale the wall and hear what's on the other side. So there's a limit to what outside actors can do in China because change will be authored from within. But I think the battle of ideas, the battle of knowledge, including the knowledge of China's own history,

That's something that we can facilitate and support Chinese to do for their own society and their own culture. I think China can and will democratize someday, but I think it is very difficult to anticipate when or how that will happen. I think we're already seeing the

to use one of Marxist's favorite words, contradictions in the Chinese system, that the lack of accountability allows for Mao, errors of judgment and policy, not to mention moral calculus, on the titanic level of what Mao had. And even if you don't characterize Xi Jinping's

calamities now by comparison to the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward, they're pretty cataclysmic. And yeah, China's pursuit of artificial intelligence continues. China's technological innovation continues. China's military modernization continues. But because it's a not transparent system, we don't see very well, we get glimpses

now and then of the dark sides of what corruption and personalistic rule and miscalculation may be doing. But I think there are a lot of vulnerabilities there. I don't rule out the possibility of some kind of more sudden unraveling. No one saw the end of the Soviet Union coming. I won't say no one, but very few people.

There's a couple probably of Soviet intellectuals who did, but very few people from the outside did. I think that it's very hard to know when and where, but the biggest mistake, there's two enormous mistakes we could make, and we should avoid both types of errors. The first type of error is to think,

that because Chinese Communist Party rule is so morally grotesque, or because it has, it's taking on or fomenting a growing range of really profound contradictions and dysfunctions in the nature of rule and the way a lot of key constituencies are reacting to it, that therefore it's inevitable that it will fall

And we don't have to worry about the geopolitical risk that it poses because it won't be around for very long. That is an enormous and extremely dangerous type of error of thinking or strategy. The second type of error is to think it's infallible and will go on forever and nothing can be done to bring it down.

And personally, I think that people should be thinking about what might be scenarios for change and what might be factors that would accelerate change. And although you're not a China scholar,

your China work has kind of mushroomed in the past years. I mean, you are directing the China Global Shop Power program at Hoover and you're heading the Taiwan program at Hoover. And there are lots of China events, conferences, talks, books going on, which have involved you over the years. Can you talk about

that decision to broaden your work on China? I mean, you're a terribly busy guy with lots of commitment. Why did you make the decision to make China such a big deal? Because I think the two most important questions that will affect the future of freedom in the world are, of course, what's going to happen in the United States. It's only recently in the last eight years that I thought we would have to ask that question, but now we do.

And second, what's going to happen in China? Shed 75 years of communism and move toward a pluralistic democracy and a rule of law state, even if it only runs through. I'm sorry, I apologize. This will be the last time I do this. Peaceful evolution. That would be one of the most important world historical developments ever.

of all time, really. And I'm not a China scholar. I took leadership, direction, strategizing, and development of the China program at the Hoover Institution really only temporarily, particularly after I recruited Liz Economy to come to Hoover. And then she got the opportunity to take a very important position

in the Commerce Department in this administration. So I continued to do it because I was the only one available at the senior fellow level to it. But I recruited, I brought Glenn Tifford in as a significant resident scholar and then my partner in this. It was always my intention

to have Liz Economy, once she returned from Washington, D.C., take the leadership with Glenn Tiffert of the China program at Hoover. But in the interim, someone had to push it, develop a plan and execute projects out of it, you know, build the program.

And I have never regretted it or begrudged the amount of time of mine that it took because right now and back then, five years ago, I can't imagine anything more important

to the future of freedom in the world then this question will china democratize for me and it's just a fascinating intellectual puzzle i think it should be obvious to even a casual observer of world affairs that china is the principal enemy of democracy in the world

the principal obstacle to democracy in the world, the principal ideological and organizational adversary of democratic movements and aspirations in the world, and the principal agent of trying to transform both global norms and global organizations and network into

new era of global structures, rules, coalitions that will be hostile to democracy and to the human rights principles of the post-World War II era. It's not the only one. Of course, Russia is playing a very active and resourceful

and occasionally effective role in this regard as well. And then you have Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and non-communist or non-totalitarian authoritarian regimes like Hungary and Turkey that are nevertheless trying to elevate, glorify, and propagate their model. If you want to be effective,

In global battles, I don't want to use the word war, but there is certainly a global struggle. CCP likes to quote Sun Tzu, we can do it too. You better know your enemy, right? Know your adversary. You have to know yourself, what your resources and assets and weaknesses are, but also what you stand for.

but you have to know your adversary. And I don't want to think of the People's Republic of China as an enemy. I certainly, God help us if China and the United States fight a war. But China is an adversary now of the U.S., Europe, Australia, Canada, every country that borders the South China Sea and doesn't want China

unfairly sucking up its resources. And most of all, I think we can use the enemy in the ideological sense. The People's Republic of China is an enemy of freedom in the world. It is an enemy of human rights, rule of law, and popular sovereignty, principles and aspirations. And that is...

likely to be the case, certainly as long as Xi Jinping is the president of China or the paramount leader of China, and possibly well after he leaves the political scene or is no longer present on the planet Earth. We don't know how long Chinese communist rule will last. But I

trying to cooperate with China where possible, because we have a lot of problems to manage in the world, trying to defuse tensions wherever we can, both in terms of countries where there's instability and where we might be competing, and on global problems like public health, migration, and most of all, climate change, but also weapons proliferation.

So I'm not one of those people who thinks we have to have nothing but containment and conflict with China. I think that's a very short-sighted view. But in the end, this is a communist regime which runs on Marxist-Leninist principles with a heavy emphasis on the Leninists and then the kind of zesty twist with Chinese characteristics.

If we are not alert to their ambitions and very vigilant about and skeptical of what they're trying to do, the odds of their substantial success in trying to remake the world and undermine freedom will dramatically increase. So this is an enormous challenge.

deeply sobering historical obligation

to know thy adversary and rise to the challenge of meeting them and thwarting them from achieving their hegemonic aims. In terms of your understanding of China, I mean, that's set in the broader context of the third wave of democracy, modernization theory. But in terms of how you understand China, could you talk about who your significant...

mentors, influences, friends, colleagues are, have been over the years that informed your China knowledge? Well, probably the two most important ones have been Andy Nathan and Minxin Pei. You know, I have respect for

for people with a less skeptical or critical view of the Chinese Communist Party and you want to argue more for its institutional capacity and its achievements.

But I am not an admirer of communist regimes. I will give them grudging respect for lifting people out of poverty, but not... Or poverty that they themselves caused through Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and all kinds of political campaigns. There was plenty of poverty before 1949.

China was a very poor country when they came to power. But of course, they made it worse in many ways and destroyed the capitalist basis that might have more quickly produced economic development. But it is all to say that I've always found more compelling and more helpful the critical analyses

uh people like minchin pay them i don't name them but others who have been we can name them much more respectful or even intellectually indulgent of um

of the Chinese Communist Party and ignoring of its brutality and its violations of human rights and its murder, whether directly or indirectly, of people like Liu Xiaobo. Perry Link, I have a lot of respect for his writing. And, you know, then the new generation of scholars that we were bringing together in...

in the Journal of Democracy. I really like the book that Bruce Gilley did on China in his early years before he started writing about other things. He wrote about religion in China. That was a great article he did

religion on the growth of religion in China Karl Minzner the underground christian church in China was it Karl Minzner yeah in you know in the post in the post 1999 era um

I've been very influenced by Xiao Chang's writings on China's technological repression, its appropriation of that. And Richard Madsen, The Upsurge of Religion in China. That's a very good piece.

philosophically by Lu Juning became a friend until he kind of turned in a Trump a weird reaction I've been very disappointed in a lot of the kind of 1989 generation and their you know in their effort to bury the Chinese Communist Party to endorse an autocrat um

like Trump, that's been a very painful experience. Can you talk about that a bit more? Your relationship with the Chinese dissidents, especially the 1989 generation, I mean all the other generation as well, but particularly them. Did you get to know them well? Did you guys work together? Well, I keep kind of circling back. Wang Juntai

I got to know through conferences and things. And then I think he did his dissertation with Andy Nathan at Columbia. But I lost touch with him. Wang Dong, you know, I came into contact with and published some and then, you know, engaged periodically in Taiwan and here. Wang Dong was more...

persistent in his kind of intellectual and political work of monitoring and resisting Chinese authoritarianism and the way it has evolved. I like him personally a lot, but a lot of people in Taiwan made this mistake as well. You know, they got so wrapped up in their own purpose, in their own mission, in their own

need to confront the Chinese Communist dictatorship, that they weren't able to develop a more rounded and sophisticated view of what was necessary in the long run to undermine and defeat the Chinese Communist Party state. And to appreciate that if you lose democracy in the United States,

It's not going to be good for the struggle for democracy anywhere in the world. And so I find it very sad, deeply frustrating as well, but also very sad when Democrats in other parts of the world endorse someone like Trump or glom on

to an autocrat like Trump just for purely instrumental reasons because they think it's going to help their cause when it's not even an intelligent decision in the most purely instrumental sense. You can see it now in the ways Trump's trying to signal that he's ready to sell out Taiwan or sell out Democrats in China or anywhere if he thinks it'll bring him some advantage.

And I wonder from your experience of working with the student diaspora, and you work with basically, I think, all of the well-known activists in the space of democracy for the past decades, what can the diaspora aim to achieve? What can the diaspora aspire to be able to create an impact within their home society over time? You know, it doesn't have to be sort of tomorrow or whatever.

Well, again, I think that the most important thing that diaspora can do is itself wage the battle of information and ideas and try and redirect these information flows, these ideological discussions, these truthful currents of reporting back into China.

It can't really be, in the end, the U.S. government broadcasting this alone because people may be suspicious of the source. It's got more authenticity culturally, socially, politically.

when the people writing, the people speaking, the people acting in videos, whatever it might be, are actually Chinese people that other Chinese people can relate to. And so I think it's going to be a very long and difficult campaign in which people in exile or in the diaspora in China

are going to have extremely important roles to play as leaders of thought, opinion, analysis, advocacy, and imagining about China's political future. And I also think that business people can play very important roles, including when they can get their resources out of the country, funding,

the intellectual and cultural work to advocate for fundamental political change in China. And what role should the US play in the mission of global democracy today, actually, especially given your past experience in constitutional building in Iraq, which I think, well, I mean, the whole Iraq experience dampened US

global reputation in many different ways. What should the US do, given the historical experience? I mean, we know what we should not do, right? I was not in favor of the US invasion of Iraq. I was not in favor of treating it as a missionary enterprise to spread

freedom around the world and bring down tyranny by military force. I don't think we should be using military force for the principal purpose of trying to promote democracy. And indeed, there were other motives for invading Iraq that when those proved not to

have been founded gave way to the mission of democracy promotion. If you take away the use of force and you take away a kind of neo-colonial enterprise, then you see that the role of the U.S. and of its peer nations, its peer liberal democracies in Europe

And then, you know, Canada, Australia, Japan, potentially Korea, Taiwan, a few others in the Americas. Our mission is to help other people achieve free and democratic societies and political systems. And we can do this by the power of our example. We can do this through financial assistance to support

civil society, technical and organizational assistance, solidarity, advocacy within international circles for democratic change, and for the protection and defense of human rights. And we have to be true to our values. We have to show some consistency in that, some willingness to fight for them in a nonviolent sense, to struggle for them.

and to wage a normative battle, an informational battle. You could wind up saying an ideological battle for freedom, popular sovereignty, political competition, rule of law.

human rights, political accountability, you know, the open society. And if we don't mount a defense of these values and diverse institutional manifestations in different countries around the world with very considerable possibilities for improvement and innovation,

If we don't mount defense of that and campaign for that, no one else will do so. And the field will be clear, ideologically, normatively, to democracy's worst enemies. So I cannot emphasize enough, you don't have to be a communist to take ideas and political arguments seriously.

And Democrats need to become better and bolder at making those arguments and waging, in a certain sense, the ideological struggle for freedom, for democracy, against one-party rule, against the doctrine of centralized leadership and anti-pluralism.

I really liked reading Anne Applebaum's new book, Autocracy Inc., because I think she touches on an important topic of how autocrats work together, mobilize resources. And they suddenly have a way because, I mean, they're autocrats. They are in control of their state resources and they can distribute as they like. But for democratic states, a lot of the resource mobilization and international global cooperation would actually require democracy.

popular mobilization. You need the society, you need the voters to be with you, to be interested in global alliances, in democracy in the world, rather than retreating, isolating from the rest of the world, which I sense it's certainly a political undercurrent in the West right now. Isolationism, cutting off from global supply chains and trying to bring manufacturing back, bring jobs back, not

paying for security of other states and just focus on America's own problem or Europe's own problem. So I wonder what's your take on that and how

Western governments can mobilize, well, not just Western governments, but democracy movement builders can mobilize Western society to essentially defend the movement from isolationism. First of all, I think it was almost inevitable that the world's leading autocracies would kind of find one another

repair some of their historic divisions and craft alliances of cynical mutual interest. They are very nervous. They know that they are skating on thin ice in terms of legitimacy, and they have limited means, particularly now that China's economy is slowing down so dramatically and Russia's

got really no engine of economic growth outside of oil and weapons production. So they're nervous and they need the solidarity and cooperation of trying to unify their ranks in the face of the much more powerful and durable and forthright and positive alliances of NATO and

of the emerging cooperative security architecture in East Asia. All of that was to be expected, and the more desperate they grow, the more they may cling to and cooperate with one another. We face not the same legitimacy challenges, but I'd say parallel ones.

because a lot of people have lost ground in an era of globalization and deindustrialization in Europe and the United States. And there's a lot of angst. There's cultural churning and anxiety. And then immigration has been a huge destabilizing factor.

and polarizing factor in Europe and the United States, somewhat less so in Australia and Canada, but they're not irrelevant concerns there. They're not irrelevant concerns there. And we have to find answers in the advanced liberal democracies to our own challenges of governance. And I think we need to do them separately for each country with each

country's unique political system and set of parties and coalitions, but we need to do it together as well. And we will not be fully effective in competing against Russia and China until we do a better job of transcending our polarization and finding new policy formulas

for combating the stagnation of economic opportunity, rising economic inequality, what appears to be out of control immigration, and so on and so forth. And then finally you have to know the historically distinct challenge of penetration of the information environment and manipulation of our polarization

as a result of social media in the way that Russia in particular, but increasingly China and maybe a little bit Iran are manipulating it. And so democracies face that challenge too. And one last question to wrap up our conversation is about, well, this hairy topic of hope. I think for the older generation like yourself, you've had...

a lot more positive experience than I have in terms of seeing waves of democracy, seeing the end of Cold War, experiencing those historical moments that were unexpected but were positive in many ways. And so for people like myself and others who

don't have that sort of experience, who come into a world of democracy being dominant and seeing it corroding and falling away, falling apart, it's difficult to maintain hope in that general environment where things are just failing, becoming worse than yesterday. How can people keep the hopes up?

It's not just hope, but closely related to it is morale. How do you sustain a positive morale, a positive spirit?

and not yield to cynicism and despair. I'd say the first thing is it does pay to study history. It's really imperative that people study history. And there you see, there were previous moments in world history. Look at the 1930s that offered much more

profound and overwhelming reasons for despair about the political direction of the world than what we face today. And one hopes that it's not going to take another massive global war

to turn the corner on this period of authoritarian momentum, but you do find that authoritarian regimes have their profound vulnerabilities and that patience, persistence, and adherence to principle combined with intelligent analysis and smart tactical and strategic decision-making

can turn the corner. They did in the past and they can again. So studying history to learn that tides of authoritarianism or of reversal of progress have been turned around, have been reversed, can be again, will be again, that history does kind of move in these waves. So

When you're in the middle of a bleak wave, it's very important to understand that and to see that

that you may be nearer to coming out of it than you realize. The second thing is that we do need some wins for democracy. We need some high-profile wins, some victories, some signs that it's not all bleak, that we can and will turn things around.

When you get a victory, as happened in Poland with the defeat of right-wing, illiberal law and justice ruling party in Poland, and some of the other elements of progress, and then this amazing student revolution in Bangladesh that brought down

one of the more corrupt and repressive illiberal populist authoritarian leaders of the last decade and a half, Sheikh Hasina, and then the massive string of municipal victories against the Erdogan regime in municipal elections in Turkey earlier this year. And I mean, there have been some positive developments.

And we need to spread the news about those and the implications of those and the lessons of those with more vigor and creativity. And then, you know, there are ongoing struggles now that could be enormously consequential in Venezuela, where the opposition won the July 28th presidential election, but

the dictator Maduro is trying to hang on, in Bangladesh where the students overthrew a dictator, and in the United States where a former authoritarian-minded president is trying to regain the office. So we need to have a better strategy for education, a better strategy for information and dissemination. We need to

seize opportunities when they arise. And the last thing is about morale. A positive, joyful, optimistic spirit to mobilization has always been a factor in democratic success.

And you look at the color revolutions and there were a lot of very positive and even joyful elements to them starting in the Philippines in 1986. And even before that, with the nonviolent mobilization that brought down the... It started with a military coup, but then the people rallied behind it in Portugal in April 1974.

And it takes a certain playfulness, joy, you decide what, to walk up to a soldier in a checkpoint or to a line of soldiers and

conveying a message, you're not going to cross this line, and to put flowers in the rifle barrels, which is what the people of Portugal did in the revolution of the carnations in 1974, which is why it got that name. And, you know, there have been other parallels in other countries. Thinking about how to make it socially meaningful and

creative and joyful and celebratory and resolute and, you know, elevating of the human spirit. This is part of the challenge. You can't sustain a struggle for democracy if it's all just grimness and fear. All right. Well, on that hopeful, moralful note, thank you, Larry, for your time at this Unseen the Hour.

Thanks for listening to our episode today. If you like our stuff, well, you may follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We also have a Substack account called Peking Hotel with links in description. I hope you're staying well and looking forward to chatting next time.