Smart authoritarians adapted… They became, as Aristotle advised autocrats, ‘not vicious but half-vicious.’
— Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny
The Carter Center spoke with Jennifer Lind about her book Autocracy 2.0, which illuminates China’s once-inconceivable global leadership in innovation and an uncertain future amidst a fluctuating U.S.-China trade landscape.
Jennifer M. Lind is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, a Faculty Associate at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and a Research Associate at Chatham House in London. An expert on international security relations in East Asia and U.S. foreign policy toward the region, she is the author of Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny (Cornell University Press, 2025) and Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Cornell University Press, 2008). Her writing appears in journals including International Security and International Studies Quarterly, and spans the rise of China, American grand strategy, and American alliances in Europe and Asia.
Isobel Li: Could you briefly introduce Autocracy 2.0 and its key arguments? What inspired you to write it?
Jennifer Lind: I’m an international relations scholar, so I was interested in the question of how China’s rise would change the balance of power. I’m also a veteran of studying Japan, and I remembered conversations that people were having about the rise of Japan and speculation about Japan overtaking the United States, and of course, that did not happen. So when I saw all the speculation about China’s dominance, it really reminded me of these previous debates that people had— not just the rise of Japan, but also the Soviet Union in the 1950s, with the scare about the missile gap and Khrushchev telling Americans we will bury you. When we started hearing these things said about China was, my reaction was: don’t we know anything about this by now? Haven’t we figured out how to even have this conversation? Because it came down to people saying, well, it’s inevitable that China will overtake the US (then making a very China-focused argument for their case), then the opposition would say no and make a similarly niche argument. So that’s why I wanted to write an IR book about how countries rise to become great powers— what it takes to succeed.
Essentially, what I realized is that for the Chinese case, China already checked several of the boxes for the attributes of a great power that a country needs, like a large population, a very large economy, and lots of military power. Really, the one remaining question was about technology, because great powers must be technological leaders. History has shown us that all leading great powers have been some of the top performers at the technological cutting edge. This led me to focus the question: can China become a technological leader? I didn’t set out to write that book, but that’s where the debate led me.
I found that people were very pessimistic about this about a decade ago, saying, oh, China’s an authoritarian country. And in this day and age, when technological innovation depends so much on information and openness and participation—things typically associated with democracies— people argued that autocracies like China couldn’t possibly become technological leaders. That’s the prevailing wisdom that I set out to test. As I wrote the book, I was measuring and tracking China’s technological innovation capabilities, which were steadily rising through that time period. Now we’re at a position where China has joined the highly advanced technological leaders of the world, which poses a puzzle for that pessimistic view. My book explains the puzzle by noting that Chinese authoritarian governance has evolved in a way— much like other authoritarian regimes since the 20th century— that allows them to better compete in the global economy.
IL: Looking more into the concept of innovation, the book notes that innovation was originally an authoritarian state product, with examples of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia being technological leaders. This is no longer the case. Why?
JL: That kind of historical context is important, because most of technological innovation in human history has been undertaken in authoritarian settings— simply because most of human history has been authoritarian and the kinds of democracy we see today are a relatively recent phenomenon. It does sound strange to have people say authoritarian regimes can’t innovate because obviously they have presided over innovation for thousands of years! The key thing is that people argue there was a big difference in the technological revolutions, in what drives innovation over time. Authoritarian regimes did quite well in the first Industrial Revolution, starting in the 18th century and the second technological revolution, which was the age of electricity, chemicals, and optics.
When it came to the third around the 1960s, which was computerization and information technology, the big drama that we were watching was the U.S.-Soviet competition in the Cold War, and the U.S. economy really took off in this area. Silicon Valley basically invented this whole realm of computerization, and the Soviet Union was struggling to keep up. So when people looked at the U.S.-Soviet experience, they took the lesson that authoritarian regimes weren’t going to be able to compete very well in today’s information age. That was the root of the pessimism that people felt toward China, given the period at which it was attempting to become an innovation leader.
IL: That makes sense. China’s been very strategic in how it has opened up, but only in some ways. Could you elaborate more on smart authoritarianism and these mechanisms
JL: The argument about smart authoritarianism connects to the broader study of changes in authoritarian regimes that started around the late 20th century. I mentioned the information age, but there’s a host of other trends in the global economy and world politics that provided advantages to liberal countries and disadvantaged authoritarian countries. An example is that the liberal democracies controlled a lot of the development banks and aid-giving organizations, and they didn’t want to give out development assistance to authoritarian countries. So authoritarian countries were feeling the need to look more democratic, which led to things like non-competitive elections. There’s a whole literature in authoritarian politics that points out there has been tremendous change in the past forty or so years in terms of authoritarian governance, and a lot of that is linked to those challenges that authoritarian regimes faced. These scholars, typically interested in the question of regime durability and regime longevity, were finding that authoritarian regimes that adopted these new tools of control would perform better. So the questions examined by those scholars were chiefly about political competition: were these new types of authoritarian regimes more successful at staying in power longer?
Where my book comes in is, I’m asking a different question, one related to a country’s economic–technological success, and thus to its national competitiveness in geopolitics. I found that these new methods of authoritarian control are not just helping the regime stay in power for longer, they’re helping regimes in terms of the country’s economic and technological success. And importantly, this has enabled these regimes, what I call smart authoritarian regimes, to defy the pessimism that illiberal countries would not be able to innovate, would be less economically successful, and so on.
IL: How have China’s international efforts served as tools for improving domestic innovation and technological advancement?
JL: Part of the process of developing your economy and trying to lift up your technological base is an exercise in trying to learn more from other leaders, so back in the days when President Carter was normalizing relations with China, the Chinese looked abroad to technological leaders like the United States, the Europeans, and increasingly the Japanese and the South Koreans and Taiwanese as well. This becomes a foreign policy issue: how should Beijing manage its relations with those countries in order to develop economically and technologically? How should it handle the issue of foreign direct investment? Do you allow your businesspeople to go overseas, your students to go overseas? So this is very much connected to foreign policy and, as we know, China took full advantage of increasingly more open engagement policies to send students overseas for training, who would then go back to China and become kind of the nucleus of Chinese science in their sector. Being famous for technology transfer and policies requiring joint ventures and so on, the Chinese would adapt the technology and then create competing firms. This has led us to where we are today, where we have European and American companies dislodged by the process. Domestic-facing policies in terms of a country’s patenting and judiciary and regulatory systems are all important, but as you point out, the policies China had toward other countries are also really important.
IL: I was especially intrigued when you discussed the impact of social reforms on innovation, such as the changing position of women in society, if you could discuss these changes and their underlying logic.
JL: In my exploration of how countries rise to great power, I was fascinated to study the role of demographics in economic growth, particularly because in international relations theory, we never talk about this. But because a state’s economy is the foundation of its national power, I think it’s important that we actually talk about where economic power comes from. It turns out that a key step in economic development is a major demographic transition, meaning a big change in fertility. For example, poor countries typically have very high fertility rates. For economic growth to occur, you have to bring down fertility. Part of the reason for this is essentially half of the workforce is tied up with having or raising babies, and in these poor countries, the lifespan is much shorter, so this essentially means women’s whole lives are about children, so they can’t be in the workforce.
I really enjoyed learning about the societal institutions and norms that maintain high fertility rates, things like polygamy, suppressing girls’ education, child marriage, and so on. A country needs to deal with these things before their fertility rate will fall. And it’s fascinating how that’s tied up with the balance of power between religion and government. The changing position of women was actually something that the CCP under Mao made a big difference in. Usually, people talk about Mao as being a disaster for China before Deng Xiaoping came in and made everything great, but this misses some of these really fascinating things, like what Mao did for public health in China (which is very much linked to this demographics issue). The CCP was the first to succeed in getting rid of polygamy in China. It had been outlawed before, but the laws weren’t consistently enforced. So the CCP actually did try to give women more rights within China and this had a big impact in laying the groundwork for China’s demographic transition and later economic growth.
IL: Looking at the modern U.S.-China relationship, we see how export controls and rising tensions point to a new cold war between the countries. How has China pivoted and adapted to these controls, and has the U.S. effort to restrict technology to China worked as intended?
JL: First of all, just taking a step back— as the U.S. increasingly identified China as a military adversary, it worried about China catching up in AI, particularly in terms of military technology. For China to compete, it needs access to extremely advanced semiconductors that are chiefly designed by the United States and manufactured only in Taiwan and South Korea; or, to build its own semiconductors, China would need to import semiconductor manufacturing equipment from the Netherlands. That’s where the export controls come in— to deny China the technology it would need to compete in this realm.
The U.S. saw an opportunity because the U.S. and its partners essentially control the semiconductor supply chain. China is a huge semiconductor manufacturer when it comes to the tech that goes into cars and dishwashers and microwave ovens and similar things. That’s not the kind of semiconductor the U.S. was trying to deny them, and the U.S. also really couldn’t have done so. But for the much more niche, cutting-edge semiconductors, with the U.S. designing the software, Taiwan and South Korea manufacturing the product, and the Dutch, a NATO ally, having a monopoly on the advanced machines, the U.S. could recruit its partners to cut off China’s access. This started under President Biden and continued for a while under President Trump. Many people said this is tremendously successful— they point to the fact that it didbecome much harder for Chinese firms to get their hands on these advanced chips in the volume demanded, and because China could not import the advanced machines manufactured by the Netherlands. So some people say this was a win, because export controls significantly slowed China down.
But skeptics point to Chinese adaptation. The theme of Autocracy 2.0 is about how Westerners dismissed the potential for Chinese innovation because authoritarian regimes don’t rule in a way that encourages innovation; people neglected the potential for adaptation. That’s a key theme for the export control debate as well. Skeptics of the export controls argue that export controls caused China to adapt— that if Washington hadn’t imposed export controls then China today would still have a sleepy semiconductor sector, a sector that CCP had been trying to develop for decades, only to have a lot of corruption and not much to show for it. Chinese firms actually preferred buying foreign chips— they didn’t like the Chinese kind as much.
But the argument is that, with the shock caused by export controls, Chinese electronics and AI firms were forced to do with less. In the stunning case of DeepSeek, they did more with less. They adapted to the smaller number of chips they could get their hands on by changing the way they wrote their models. DeepSeek shocked everyone because they produced a model trained on far fewer chips at a vastly lower cost and lower energy requirements. That really triggered the debate about whether export controls were the right policy, or whether they were actually causing Chinese innovation.
IL: That makes sense. With China’s domestic conditions, President Xi has been tighter with his controls over innovation and information dissemination. I’m curious what you think their impacts may be on China’s rise or status in tech innovation.
JL: A lot of people noted that China went through a kind of loosening up in the early 21st century under Jiang Zemin and they were predicting more and more liberalization going forward. What we’ve seen first under Hu and now under Xi Jinping is somewhat a reversal of that. Particularly when Xi Jinping came in, we saw a lot of scholars arguing that this was going to be really bad for China’s economy— that they need to be more liberal. I think the framework that I provide in the book is helpful for this (at least in terms of debates about innovation). I draw from the innovation literature and I ask, what are the different conditions that innovation scholars argue need to be present to encourage innovation? Things like property rights are essential as well as a competent, relatively fair, and efficient judiciary in which you litigate those property rights. Other things you need include a macroeconomic environment that encourages investment, because capital is essential for innovation. You need lots and lots of capital for entrepreneurs and investors. You need a high-quality workforce, so you need highly educated people. You need openness so you are able to connect your workforce to the cutting-edge researchers around the world. Also getting to more of the informational side, it helps if you have a civil society such as universities and a vibrant media, because this is where information is disseminated and innovation is diffused throughout the economy.
People were skeptical of authoritarian innovation because authoritarian regimes they did not provide these conditions. But my argument is that starting with developmental autocracies in the late 20th century, like Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, which is the other case I look at in the book, you saw a very different kind of authoritarian model. They were very careful to protect property rights and provide a functioning judicial system. The key thing is that the judicial system was not for upholding freedoms, but rather to uphold property rights and pave the way for commercial transactions.
Essentially what we see is a list of conditions to promote innovation. Unlike the autocrats of the past— whose more brutal tools failed to provide those conditions— smart authoritarians provide those conditions, enabling innovation in China, Singapore, and elsewhere. So when we’re asking about the future, what I would say is we need to go back to our list of conditions that drive innovation, and we need to ask what has changed and what pressure is being put on and what areas might be more of concern to us. For example, China scholars Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell point out that China has made incredible strides in education, but there’s still a vast pool of people who need to be educated to sustain the productivity of the economy. That tells us to look closer at the education variable— to ask if the government is successfully lifting the rest of the country who have not been a part of the innovation economy so far.
We know that Xi Jinping has put tremendous pressure on civil society relative to what we saw under the somewhat growing freedoms of the previous eras. The question there is, will that interfere with information flows, information or innovation diffusion? Furthermore, managing a well-functioning innovation economy requires a competent civil service. China famously invented the imperial system for examinations. It wasn’t super meritocratic (as it was very confined to the rich males), but it was a lot more meritocratic than many systems had been, which brings us to another feature that people worry about— Xi Jinping moving more towards a Mao-style of governance where people only get jobs in the civil service due to “redness” (loyalty and political connections). That is definitely something that would reduce the quality of the civil service, dampening economic growth and innovation.
That’s how I would look at this. Start with the foundation of what drives innovation in economies and what has driven innovation in China, then consider whether Xi’s policies are changing those conditions. I think that is helpful as we’re looking at China going forward.