Die illiberalen Giganten Asiens

SS: [historical article, 2022] Over the last decade, political pundits have become fixated on a now-familiar pattern derailing democracies around the world: mass, disaffected populists rallying around strongman autocrats—heavy-handed political outsiders with a penchant for eroding liberal institutions. The populist-strongman wave has swept over diverse regions and varied elections, from the Philippines to Hungary to Brazil, just to name a few. NGOs have dedicated wings of their organizations to address the problem; democracy watchdogs have released special reports on the issue; and thought leaders throughout academia, think tanks, and the media have written prolifically on the democratic threat posed by populist movements launching autocrats to power.

But accurate as the populist-strongman formula is for many nations, it obscures more than it illuminates in the world’s two largest countries, where two of the most dramatic—and strategically significant—resurgences of autocracy are occurring. Despite sharing a superficial likeness to the populist-strongman phenomenon, the parallel roots and structure of India’s and China’s descents into illiberalism differ markedly from the populist trends now widely understood elsewhere—and have been almost entirely overlooked.

Rather than mob-like populist masses or lone-wolf strongman individuals, India and China are increasingly under the sway of highly-disciplined, anti-democratic vanguard groups: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of India. Together, they represent a distinct, sizeable threat to liberalism: not so much manifestations of the populist-strongman wave as drivers of it—carefully orchestrating mass zeal to fuel their own autocratic ends, and grooming highly effective anti-democratic leaders. With more than a third of humanity living in societies increasingly shaped by CCP and RSS cadres, democracy’s defenders would do well to understand the very different threats to liberalism they represent.