A Tale of Two Laws

This chapter compares recent restrictions on foreign funding or the operation of foreign NGOs in Russia and China, including the 2012 law on “foreign agents” and the 2015 law on “undesirable” organizations in Russia and the 2017 law on the management of overseas NGOs in China. Using open sources and interview data, this chapter compares the development of these laws and their impact on domestic and international civil society groups in both countries. The chapter finds similarities in their timing and motivations for national security, their intentions to shape civil society, and their use of uncertainty as a strategic tool. They differ, however, in how quickly they were created, their choice of public versus private record, and their approach to implementation and punishment. Ultimately, the findings highlight how Russia and China use these laws to repress some groups while allowing others, striking a balance between liberalization and repression.

Critical Journalists in China and Russia

This chapter compares media politics in China and Russia through the prism of critical journalists. It argues that whereas Chinese journalists experience political restrictions in the form of “structured ambiguity” or via frequent preemptive signals from the state, Russian journalists face a more arbitrary state that sends occasional post-factum signals that are difficult to premeditate. As a result, journalists’ negotiation strategies also differ between the two cases. Chinese journalists embark upon a routine game of cautious improvisation with the state, whereas Russian journalists combine defiant opposition with resigned self-censorship. The China-Russia comparison suggests that structured ambiguity breeds resistance from within, whereas arbitrary coercion incites political contestation that is more isolated but also more radically disposed.

Political Opportunities for Participation and China’s Leadership Transition

How does China manage political participation? This chapter analyzes changing opportunities for participation in the leadership transition from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping. Contentious political participation—where individuals and independent organizations engage in protest and other disruptive behavior—has been further curtailed under Xi’s leadership. Yet institutional participation by ordinary citizens through quasi-democratic institutions appears unaffected and is even trending up in certain sectors. Manipulation of the political opportunity structure is likely strategic behavior on the part of authoritarian rulers, as they seek to incorporate or appease the discontented. The political opportunity structure in non-democracies is therefore multifaceted: one channel of participation can close as others expand.

Conclusion

Russia and China took fundamentally different approaches to authoritarian rule beginning in the 1980s. But there is another dimension to the divide of the 1980s that has rendered. Chinese and Russian authoritarianisms increasingly similar: their common embrace of globalization. Both regimes established statist versions of globalization that seek to contain the impact of external influences and global fluctuations even while integrating into the global economic system. Even while globalizing, both have engaged in similar efforts to regulate their civil societies, cut them off from external sources of support, inoculate citizens against foreign ideas, and utilize globalization to their advantage. In their congruent handling of the challenges posed by globalization, Chinese and Russian authoritarianism may in fact be converging toward common forms of domination that render the institutional differences between competitive and non-competitive forms of authoritarianism moot.

Going Public

This chapter investigates the political orientations and career aspirations of students who intend to join the state sector in Russia, using original survey data from three elite Russian universities. The analysis focuses on whether and how Russia’s future public servants differ from others in their views of the importance of political freedom, order, national security, and strong economic performance. It finds that Russian youth aspire to work for an autocratic state not because they favor autocratic values nor because they hope to build more democratic institutions. Rather, their preference is based on access to recruitment channels: universities with strong alumni networks in the state apparatus or a parent working in the public sector. These findings suggest that public sector workers’ attitudes are similar to those of others at the start of their careers. Over time, however, public servants’ political attitudes diverge, suggesting that Russia’s large public sector also plays a vital role in securing regime support.

Holding the Government’s Attention

Labor plays an important but underappreciated role in contemporary Chinese and Russian politics. This chapter traces how industrial contention in the two countries has converged and diverged since 1989. It then argues that workers possess powerful leverage over Beijing today. The chapter further posits that employees of state-owned enterprises present a special challenge for Chinese authorities: they are concentrated in particular industries and geographic areas, they include savvy organizers, their employment by the government makes their actions inherently politically loaded, and they have a special claim on the government’s sympathies. These dynamics are illustrated with a brief statistical analysis of state reactions to worker strikes, protests, and riots—coercive and conciliatory—as well as examples of clashes drawn from the news. The chapter concludes by discussing how officials’ fears of state sector activism might shape decision-making in China and other post-state-socialist autocracies across a variety of policy areas.

How Russian Media Control, Manipulate, and Leverage Public Discontent

The chapter analyzes how state media in authoritarian states manipulate information on protest. The authors develop a Russian-language dictionary and leverage the Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS) electronic content analysis technique to identify periods during which the media are more likely to portray protests as contributing to public disorder and those during which the media employ a frame that highlights citizens’ democratic right to freedom of assembly. Employing supervised machine learning, the authors analyze protest coverage in thousands of news stories that appeared in Russia’s state-controlled media during the 2011–2013 protest cycle and contrast it with coverage of protests in non-state-controlled media. Following the reelection of Vladimir Putin to his third presidential term in March 2012, a significant shift toward the disorder framing of anti-regime street activism was observed. This trend contrasts sharply with coverage of the October 2013 nationalist rallies in Moscow, which targeted migrants. The findings have implications for theorizing how autocrats manipulate protest.

Legitimacy, Resilience, and Political Education in Russia and China

How do authoritarian regimes attempt to build loyalty among a globally minded youth? In what ways do they educate students to be supportive of those in power, and how do strategies of legitimation change over time? This chapter examines political and patriotic education in contemporary Russia and China, including government-recommended textbooks from Russian high schools and the politics subject test of the Chinese National College Entrance Examination (NCEE). Political education materials provide a window into what these regimes view as the most politically important, what they want to transmit to young people, and insight into authoritarian strategies of legitimation. Several conclusions can be drawn from this analysis. One is that both the Russian and the Chinese regimes socialize around similar pillars of legitimacy, including ideology, institutions, and law. However, the Chinese regime seeks to foster support by highlighting economic and cultural achievements, whereas the Russian textbooks are both supportive and subversive in their discussions of democracy.

The Logic of Vladimir Putin’s Popular Appeal

This chapter traces the roots of the popularity of Vladimir Putin—arguably the most important, controversial, and perplexing aspect of his reign. Based on his image of an indispensable strongman, reversing Russia’s catastrophic post-Soviet decline, Putin’s popularity allowed him to consolidate an authoritarian regime largely through the ballot box and with minimal resort to coercion. But this strongman appeal faded as Russia began to stagnate under his reign. The chapter analyzes how Putin resuscitated his decaying brand with the interventions in Ukraine and Syria, and why he cannot back down from his dangerous crusade to “make Russia great again.”

Diffusion-Proofing

Do authoritarian leaders take preemptive actions to deter their citizens from joining cross-national waves of popular mobilizations against authoritarian rulers? Are they more likely to engage in such behavior when these uprisings appear to be more threatening—in particular, when they take place in neighboring countries and in regimes that resemble their own? This chapter provides answers to these questions by comparing the responses of the Russian and Chinese leaderships to two such waves: the color revolutions and the Arab uprisings. It concludes that despite differences in the ostensible threats posed by these two waves, they nonetheless prompted the leaders of both of these countries to introduce similar preemptive measures in order to “diffusion-proof” their rule against the color revolutions and the Arab upheavals. These findings have some important implications for an understanding of authoritarian politics and diffusion processes. One is to reinforce the emphasis in many recent studies on the strategic foundations of authoritarian resilience. That recognized, however, this chapter adds that the authoritarian tool kit needs to be expanded to include policies that preempt international threats as well as domestic ones. The other is to provide further confirmation, in this case derived from the behavior of authoritarian rulers, of how scholars have understood the drivers of cross-national diffusion. At the same time, however, students of diffusion should pay more attention to the role of resisters, as well as to adopters. In this sense, the geographical reach of diffusion is much broader than many analysts have recognized