For decades, the prevailing wisdom in international relations has gotten China wrong. The idea that China could become a true rival and world power on par with the United States was, according to the establishment, far-fetched.
Those days, professor Jennifer Lind says, aren’t just numbered—they’re over. The question is no longer “Can China rise to become a great power?” but, rather, “How did China do it?”
As Lind, an associate professor in the Department of Government, explains in her new book, Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny, China has defied expectations for what an authoritarian nation can achieve. Its leaders have performed a high-wire act to chart a course from copycat economy to becoming of the world’s leading technological innovators, a necessary prerequisite to challenging the global economic and political power structure.
In this Q&A, Lind delves into the evolution of authoritarianism, how China has defied expectations on its path to becoming a global superpower, the threat China’s unique brand of technological prowess poses to the spread of democracy, and how Aristotle offered the roadmap to all of this more than 2,000 years ago.
Where did you first encounter the concept of “smart authoritarianism?”
In political science, we often think of authoritarian governments as pursuing policies primarily aimed at maintaining control—and those policies often lead to economic and military ineptness.
There was, however, a large literature on what were called “developmental authoritarians,” which examined how certain leaders, responding to an era of globalization, found ways to maintain control without harming the economy. This literature generally held that such regimes could lift their economies to a middle-income level. But the consensus was that to keep growing, you had to foster innovation—and authoritarians faced a fundamental choice. Door No. 1: loosen restrictions, allow greater information flows and freedoms, and generate more innovation, but risk losing power. Door No. 2: keep tight control, but dampen innovation.
That was the expectation for China. The prediction was that it would eventually hit that ceiling. What I found, though, is that China took the developmental authoritarian model and pushed it beyond what scholars thought was its expiration date. China’s government has managed to encourage innovation while still maintaining significant political control. I needed a term to capture this distinction (between early-stage growth and innovation-based growth). I called it “smart authoritarianism”—the ability not only to move from poverty to middle income, but, as China has, to go further and cultivate the innovation needed to sustain economic growth.
At one point early in the book, you note how one publication wrote in 2014 about “why China can’t innovate.” But just seven years later the same publication ran a piece about “China’s innovation advantage.” What does this say about what China’s accomplished?
The first thing it shows is that something changed very quickly. Less than a decade passed between those articles, and that pace of change is striking. Many people still haven’t fully absorbed what happened—we had very strong priors that this kind of shift wasn’t possible.
In my own work, I’ve also studied Japan, and there was similar skepticism about whether Japan could sustain economic growth after World War II. We also called them copycats—the same language often applied to China. But rising economies almost always start by copying. That’s how the U.S. economy rose in the 19th century: we imitated the global technological frontier before eventually becoming it. The same pattern is playing out in China today—they’ve been climbing the technology ladder.
What do those drastically different views on China say about broader perceptions of China today? Are the days of underestimating China numbered—or gone?
I think we’re still underestimating China. What strikes me now, as I talk to people about the book, is how often I hear, “Oh, but China’s economy is in really bad shape.” It does indeed face many challenges – that’s absolutely true. But from the book’s perspective, that’s neither here nor there. Regardless of what happens in the future, the point is that China has accomplished something we didn’t think was possible—and that part is in the rearview mirror.
The conventional wisdom in the U.S. academic and policy community has gotten China wrong at almost every turn. We argued that a policy of “engagement” made sense because if we helped China get rich, its people would demand liberalization and China would democratize. That didn’t happen. We argued that bringing China into global governance would make it into a stakeholder willing to accept the prevailing international order. But China rejects the liberal goals for international order and has its own agenda. We kept getting China wrong – in all of the major debates, we kept underestimating China and overestimating our ability to influence its choices.
How has China’s cultivation of technological innovation and how they’ve put it to use differed from previous great powers? What is the relationship between innovation and how China has carved out spheres of geopolitical influence with developing nations around the globe?
Every great power uses economic tools of statecraft—aid, development assistance, market access. If you have a large, influential, high-tech economy, these become instruments for extending your influence regionally and globally. The United States certainly does this, and we’re now seeing China do the same. The Belt and Road Initiative is one example of China leveraging its economic and technological strength to gain influence in different parts of the world.
What’s more—and this is deeply concerning for global human rights and the future of democracy—China has become the world’s leading provider of technologies of repression. Facial recognition systems, other biometrics, and other surveillance technologies are areas where China leads precisely because its government has used them to maintain control over 1.4 billion people.
You quote Aristotle as telling leaders to “be not vicious but half-vicious.” The idea of today’s authoritarian leaders taking a cue from Aristotle, 2,000 years their senior, is striking. How did you discover that connection?
I should probably pretend I spend my days reading Aristotle, but the truth is I was looking something up in Politics for some other reason. Because I was so immersed in the authoritarian politics literature at the time, the sections offering advice to rulers jumped out at me. I came across this line and was floored—it captured, in just a few words, the core argument of my book.
One point I make is that authoritarianism has constantly adapted over time. China’s smart authoritarian model (drawn from Singapore and South Korea’s models) was an adaptation to new conditions in the world. Namely, isolated or autarkic states found it harder to succeed in a modern, globalized economy. In earlier eras, it may have been more feasible to remain isolated and poor – for leaders to be “vicious.” But globalization raised the stakes. That’s why this phenomenon is so contemporary. And, remarkably, Aristotle saw the logic of it centuries ago.
Just how delicate is managing the tension of the smart authoritarian model? And how does China’s scale complicate that?
In terms of scale, this is why many people thought Singapore couldn’t serve as a model for China. Authoritarian countries generally have very low levels of science and technology—yet Singapore, a tiny city-state, is an exception. China, by contrast, has more than a billion people, so it wasn’t obvious how Singapore’s experience could be instructive.
The core tension within smart authoritarianism is between the freedoms necessary to foster innovation and the need to contain the forces that those freedoms unleash—information flows, the growth of civil society, independent media, universities. These institutions typically create alternative sources of influence and ideas, which can be threatening from an authoritarian perspective. Managing that balance is extremely delicate.
It’s also important to remember that this model is not designed to maximize growth. Its goal is to generate as much innovation as possible while the regime maintains power. In other words, there are two objectives, not one: encourage innovation and economic growth, while also ensuring the regime stays in control. And that means sacrificing some growth to protect political survival.
When you began working on this book, how much thought did you give to these themes and issues being applicable to the United States and its own economic/political future? Do you see the U.S. at a crossroads of sorts in regards to what’s happening at the federal level, changing or eliminating funding for the programs and partnerships that have historically been so fruitful to creating innovation?
The initial motivation for the book was to understand China’s future as a great power. When I began writing, I didn’t have any authoritarian-versus-liberal framework in mind—that came later.
It is interesting that in the book I mostly focus on regimes that arrived at smart authoritarianism from a certain direction: namely they were “harder” autocracies that loosened controls in order to promote innovation. Your question, though, makes us think about the possibility that a country could arrive at smart authoritarianism from the other direction - namely as a democracy that experienced backsliding. And indeed we can see this in the world. Hungary, for example, was once a democratic, industrialized country but has shifted in a less liberal direction.
I don’t think that’s where the United States is. But to your question, the China case raises all sorts of questions about how the government interacts with the innovation ecosystem. Should the state take a more active role in industrial policy, or should it remain hands-off? The US government, after all, has played a much larger role in promoting innovation than most Americans realize. And with a number of emerging sectors, it’s important that the government interact with the innovation ecosystem in a healthy, supportive way.
How does this project fit into what you teach at Dartmouth?
I created two classes while researching this project. First I developed a course called The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, because the book started off as a study of how countries become great powers. I love teaching classes around book projects; the initial process of creating a syllabus—framing the questions and organizing the material—is incredibly valuable for clarifying one’s thinking about what the book is about–and NOT about, and what background understanding one needs to construct an argument.
As my book research continued, I realized the authoritarian-politics dimension was going to be central, which I hadn’t anticipated at the start. I was reading so much about authoritarian and democratic regimes and found the literature really terrific (and obviously quite timely given global trends). So I eventually created a course on dictatorship. That’s now an upper-level government department seminar.
In addition to creating the syllabus, teaching is also really valuable. As a professor, you have to present material clearly and engagingly, and explain complex ideas in a way students can absorb. Doing all of that requires a deep command of the subject, which then feeds into the book. And discussing the subject with students sometimes takes one in unexpected directions. So for me, creating classes connected to book and article projects has always been tremendously useful. The students enjoy it too: they are excited to know that they’re part of something that will someday be a book.
Where do you think this topic and your book leaves us as we end 2025 and turn to a new year?
I think it raises all sorts of questions about how we’re going to compete with China technologically. We didn’t anticipate having a competitor this serious—we underestimated China. We didn’t expect to face an authoritarian rival of this scale. Most of the other highly advanced economies in the global top 10 are our friends, not countries we worry about projecting power around the world in harmful ways. So now, having been jolted out of our complacency, the question becomes: what do we do about it?