In just one month of the second Trump presidency, the world has travelled far into a new territory. Whether you lament or chastise the past, any mentions of the pre-Trump era feel somewhat like an archaeological excavation of ancient sites. But excavations are often done precisely because humanity displays repeated patterns of behaviour, with each wave not completely new. As such, this interview with Larry Diamond — which took place back not that long ago, in September 2024, before Trump’s re-election — contains many insights that hold remarkably well in this “new era.”
Larry is no stranger to Peking Hotel, where he previously shared his teaching experience at the Central Party School. Prof. Larry Diamond is a Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution. As a staunch advocate and scholar of democracy, 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 Sharp Power Project to safeguard democratic institutions from China’s influence. His 2019 best-selling book Ill Winds characterises China as among the chief threats to global democracy.
In today’s interview excerpt, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, Larry shares his connections with and thoughts on Hong Kong’s democracy movement, the role of diaspora in fighting for the democratic cause, and lessons from history on resisting global autocrats — who, sadly, have moved into the White House. Though there are threats, as Larry argues, the lessons we can draw from Hong Kong and China are not of despair, but hope, patience, tactics, determination, and reason. This is not the first time we’ve seen authoritarian resurgence, and it likely won’t be the last. There is a playbook for this, thanks to history. In times of turmoil, it is all the more imperative that we remember those historical lessons, and avoid the mistakes of the past.
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The demise of Hong Kong’s democracy movement
Hong Kong used to bear the hope for China’s development, democratisation, and becoming an open society, but hope is now gone. What have been your experiences interacting with issues in Hong Kong?
As the movement for democracy in Hong Kong was ramping up, I was invited to go and give lectures. There was a lot of interest in democracy. I had long since met a number of leading Hong Kong democracy activists like Martin Lee. And when I started visiting Hong Kong, I wanted to see these people, engage them, and be of assistance.
The crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong is one of the great tragedies of our time.
The media were also interested in what I had to say. This was accentuated by the fact that I had supervised a master’s thesis of Regina Ip, who had been the Secretary for Security during the period when the PRC was trying to stuff through the Hong Kong legislature the kind of national security law that it ultimately forced the passage of. When she resigned, and controversy after mass protests forced the government to withdraw the national security law, she came to Stanford for a master’s degree in East Asian studies.
At Stanford, she proceeded to write this interesting and thoughtful analysis about how Hong Kong could move toward democracy, with constitutional amendments short of a fully directly elected parliament or a chief executive, but would come close, and I thought those were interesting and potentially viable compromise formulas for Hong Kong. She had been the head of the police and security and pushed the Beijing-inspired national security law in Hong Kong. So for someone with her profile to come to Stanford, 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 indirect elections of functional constituencies, but rather run for a directly elected territorial constituency for the LegCo, this all generated a lot of interest.
There was a period of time when I was trying to contribute to interesting and open-ended dialogues about constitutional reform in Hong Kong. Beginning around 2016, I began to know younger activists for democratic change in Hong Kong, particularly Joshua Wong and Nathan Law. That was a powerful experience.
I was trying to learn as much as I could about the Umbrella Movement of 2014, which was this historic movement of protest and activism for democratic constitutional change in Hong Kong. They pressed 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.
Hong Kong met all the conditions for liberal democracy. It was a highly educated, prosperous society. It had a history of elections, with some degree of meaningfulness. It had an impressive rule of law tradition with a substantially independent judiciary… Hong Kong could have become a remarkable experiment with considerable degree of self-determination and self-governance.
As the movement progressed and developed a prominent and increasingly outspoken separatist wing, I was quietly trying to warn people that it was dangerous to give any implication that the democracy movement in Hong Kong might also seek to separate from mainland China or assert more than the autonomy anticipated under “one country, two systems,” which was of course something that the PRC was trying to nullify and renege upon.
So I had multiple roles: lecturing, contributing to the more specific debate, trying to understand what was happening and interviewing people, and personal friendship and solidarity as I got to know these actors and felt a strong political, social, and human bond with them.
What do you think about the Hong Kong movement now? It’s now dispersed all over the world, and with different kinds of communities and even internal splits and strategies among them.
The crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong is one of the great tragedies of our time. Hong Kong met all the conditions for liberal democracy. It was a highly educated, prosperous society. It had a history of elections, with some degree of meaningfulness. It had an impressive rule of law tradition with a substantially independent judiciary.
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 recognise and commit to the ‘one [country]’ element of ‘one country, two systems,’ we’ll draw a fence around it and make clear that Hong Kong is not a model for the rest of China. Still, 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 with considerable degree of self-determination and self-governance.
It is possible to look back on the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong after the handover in 1997 and see it all as futile. It calls to mind the famous phrase of Abraham Lincoln in advance of the Civil War, when he said, “This country cannot survive half slave and half free. It’ll become all one or all the other.” I’m massacring Lincoln’s eloquence and famous words. But that was the philosophical and analytical prediction that Lincoln correctly made.
The whole idea of “one country, two systems” therefore was an improbable and maybe always unserious compromise.
At the time, change seemed possible. In the Jiang Zemin era, there was a lighter touch. But toward the later years of Hu Jintao, and especially once Xi Jinping took over in 2012, 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 the People’s Republic of China.
The whole idea of “one country, two systems” therefore was an improbable and maybe always unserious compromise. Because the Chinese Communist Party is not stupid. They were smart enough to realise that you have a successful example of a self-governed and democratically elected autonomous region within China, in the bosom of the motherland, people are going to get ideas. The virus is going to spread across the border to Southern China. People are going to talk about it, and ask, “Why not us?” It’s a 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 mobilisation was just crushed. Now, some people are still there, but they’ve been terrorised into relative silence. Many have left, including another former member of the Legislative Council representing the digital technology constituency, Charles Mok, who’s now with us at Stanford. Many people are in jail, like Joshua Wong. It’s heartbreaking.
Hong Kong did meet all the conditions for a successful democracy, except that it was part of an empire. And the emperor was not going to let it happen.
Right. It met all of the conditions except one. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan stressed in their work on democratic transitions that to have a democracy, you first have to have a state. And the people of Hong Kong didn’t have a state. They had some scope for self-governance, constantly at the sufferance of the Beijing authorities. 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 flexible and reformist individual, and if the Hong Kong democrats had 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, stubborn, arrogant, and resistant to further steps toward popular sovereignty in Hong Kong, the movement in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement and what followed, just became radicalised and more demanding. Their demands were morally justified, but probably not always politically astute.
“China can and will democratise someday”
Around the year 2000, there was discussion about China transitioning to a “rule-of-law state.” The idea is that you can build a strong independent judiciary, and gradually bring institutionalisation of the bureaucracy, checks and balances, and introduce elections. Hong Kong was the basis for that model. How do you make sense of the idea of democratic transition through rule of law? Was it ever feasible?
It’s a potential pathway. One of the options for democratic evolution is gradually expanding the aperture of democratic competition. 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 it evolves, becomes more serious, scales up, and so on.
One critical factor is to build up what [Robert A.] Dahl called “a system of mutual security,” to build up trust and confidence among the authoritarian elites that they won’t be eliminated, or targeted with retribution if they lose, that they have enough standing in society, enough wealth and power so that they can afford to take some risks, because their fundamental interests are still protected.
I think Gorbachev’s experiment put the nail in the coffin of “let’s do rule of law first and see what happens.”
This is the Taiwan model. Gradually, competition became more serious and the ruling party realised that, if it lost, it could still come back to power. It may still have a substantial or commanding position in the legislature, and power in the business community. But you need some considerable self-confidence and overarching commitment to democratic principles, or some other set of incentives or drivers that lead you to feel that the risks of democratisation 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 democratisation happens when the risks and costs of repression are greater than the risks and costs of tolerating opposition and accepting democratic competition.
So you have to ask: What could have prompted the Chinese Communist Party to see that the risks [of repression] were increasing and the costs [of democratic competition] were decreasing? A long period of partial competition might have gotten them comfortable with that. But they closed that off when they hollowed out village elections and stopped scaling up competitive elections.
The most compelling other example is Singapore. It’s one of the most successful developmental states in human history. It grew from absolute poverty to breathtaking prosperity in the space of two or three generations. 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? 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.
There’s a limit to what outside actors can do in China because change will be authored from within.
I frequently floated the idea in my writings that the best we could hope for in the near term — something imaginable though unlikely — is that China would become Singapore, an authoritarian state that gradually depoliticised the judiciary, reduced party control over the commanding heights of the economy and organisational 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 Hungarian Goulash communism or Gorbachev-style communism. But one of the most trite generalisations about this era in the history of communist China is that they live in fear of becoming like Gorbachev and the fall of the Soviet Union. I think Gorbachev’s experiment put the nail in the coffin of that pathway of the incremental “let’s do rule of law first and see what happens” political reform.
How important is the brutality of repression in explaining China’s failure to democratise? 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 society.
I’m afraid that’s true. The most obvious thing you could say about authoritarian regimes is that, ultimately, they survive by their monopoly on the use of force and 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. Repression is key. Ultimately, it was legal police repression, jailing large numbers of people, pounding others into exile, that defeated the virus of democratic mobilisation in Hong Kong.
You don’t give up. There’s a lot to be learned from Václav Havel and his principle of living in truth and quiet resistance. Promoting independent flows of communication and ideas is extremely important.
And how can people fight that, in your opinion?
You don’t give up. There’s a lot to be learned from Václav Havel and his principle of living in truth and quiet resistance. Promoting independent flows of communication and ideas is extremely important. 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.
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 and knowledge, including the knowledge of China’s own history, is something that we can facilitate and support the Chinese in doing for their own society and culture.
China can and will democratise someday. But it is difficult to anticipate when or how that will happen.
I think that China can and will democratise someday. But it is difficult to anticipate when or how that will happen. We’re already seeing — to use one of Marx’s favorite words — contradictions in the Chinese system. The lack of accountability allows for errors of judgment and policy, not to mention moral calculus, on the titanic level of what Mao had. And even if you don’t characterise Xi Jinping’s calamities now by comparison to the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward, they’re pretty cataclysmic. I think there are vulnerabilities. I don’t rule out the possibility of some kind of sudden unraveling. After all, very few people saw the end of the Soviet Union coming.
There are two enormous mistakes we should avoid. The first is to think that because Chinese Communist Party rule is so morally grotesque, or because it’s taking on or fomenting a growing range of profound contradictions and dysfunctions, that therefore it will inevitably fall, and we don’t have to worry about the geopolitical risk that it poses because it won’t be around for long.
The second error is to think the party is infallible, it will go on forever and nothing can be done to bring it down. People should be thinking about what might be scenarios for change and factors that would accelerate change.
Changing China outside China
Although you’re not a China scholar, your China work has mushroomed in the past years. Why did you decide to broaden your work on China?
Because the two most important questions that will affect the future of freedom in the world are, “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?”
If China can shed 75 years of communism and move toward a pluralistic democracy and a rule of law state, that would be one of the most important world historical developments of all time. I can’t imagine anything more important to the future of freedom in the world than this question: Will China democratise? For me, it’s a fascinating intellectual puzzle.
It should be obvious to even a casual observer of world affairs that China is the principal enemy of democracy in the world.
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. It’s not the only one, of course. Russia is playing an active 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. I don’t want to use the word “war,” but there is certainly a global struggle.
I don’t want to think of the People’s Republic of China as an enemy — God help us if China and the United States fight a war — but it is an enemy of freedom in the world. It is an enemy of human rights, rule of law, and popular sovereignty principles and aspirations. That is likely to be the case, certainly as long as Xi Jinping is the paramount leader of China, and possibly well after.
But I favor trying to cooperate with China where possible, because we have a lot of problems to manage in the world. I’m not one of those people who thinks we have to have nothing but containment and conflict with China. That’s a short-sighted view. But in the end, this is a communist regime, and if we are not alert to their ambitions and 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.
This is an enormous, deeply sobering historical obligation, to know thy adversary and rise to the challenge of meeting them and thwarting them from achieving their hegemonic aims.
Who most influenced your China knowledge?
The two most important ones have been Andy Nathan and Minxin Pei.
I have respect for people with a less critical view of the Chinese Communist Party and argue for its institutional capacity and its achievements. But I am not an admirer of communist regimes. I’ve been disappointed in a lot of the 1989 generation, and in their effort to bury the Chinese Communist Party to endorse an autocrat, like Trump. That’s been a painful experience.
Do you know the 1989 generation well?
Wang Juntao I got to know through conferences and things. He did his dissertation with Andy Nathan at Columbia. But I lost touch with him. Wang Dan I came into contact with and engaged periodically in Taiwan and here. Wang Dan was more persistent in his intellectual and political work of monitoring and resisting Chinese authoritarianism and the way it has evolved.
I find it sad and deeply frustrating when democrats in other parts of the world endorse an autocrat like Trump.
I like him personally, but many people in Taiwan made this mistake: They got so wrapped up in their own purpose, mission, and need to confront the Chinese communist dictatorship that they weren’t able to develop a 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.
I find it sad and deeply frustrating when democrats in other parts of the world endorse 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.
What can the diaspora aim to achieve within their home society?
The most important thing diaspora can do is wage the battle of information and ideas and redirect these information flows, ideological discussions, and truthful currents of reporting back into China.
It can’t 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 Chinese people that other Chinese people can relate to.
It will be a very long and challenging campaign, in which people in exile or the diaspora in China will have extremely important roles to play as leaders of thought, opinion, analysis, advocacy, and imagining about China’s political future. Business people can also play important roles when they can get their resources out of the country, funding the intellectual and cultural work to advocate for fundamental political change in China.
Autocrats, democrats, and the global struggle for democracy
What role should the U.S. play in the mission of global democracy today, especially given the events in Iraq that dampened the U.S.’s global reputation?
We know what we should not do, right? I was not in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I wasn’t 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 promoting 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.
So if you take away the use of force and a neocolonial enterprise, then you see that the mission of the U.S. and of its peer liberal democracies should be to help other people achieve free and democratic societies and political systems. We can do this by the power of our example, and through financial assistance to support civil society, technical and organisational assistance, solidarity, advocacy within international circles for democratic change and for the protection and defense of human rights.
You don’t have to be a communist to take ideas and political arguments seriously.
We have to be true to our values. We have to show consistency and willingness to fight for them in a non-violent sense, to struggle for them, and to wage a normative battle, an informational battle for freedom, popular sovereignty, political competition, rule of law, human rights, political accountability, and open society.
If we don’t mount a defense of these values, no one else will do so. The field will be clear, ideologically, normatively to democracy’s worst enemies. So I cannot emphasise enough: You don’t have to be a communist to take ideas and political arguments seriously. Democrats need to become better and bolder at making those arguments and waging the ideological struggle for freedom, for democracy, against one-party rule, against the doctrine of centralised leadership and anti-pluralism.
I really liked reading Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc. She touches on the topic of how autocrats work together and mobilise resources, and how, because they’re autocrats, they control state resources and can distribute them as they like.
But for democratic states, resource mobilisation and international global cooperation require voters to be interested in global alliances, in global democracy, rather than retreating from the rest of the world. There is certainly a political undercurrent in the West right now of isolationism, of cutting off from global supply chains and bringing manufacturing jobs back, not paying for the security of other states, and just focusing on America’s or Europe’s own problems.
What’s your take on that? How can Western governments and democracy movement builders mobilise Western societies to essentially defend the movement from isolationism?
It was almost inevitable that the world’s leading autocracies would find one another, repair their historic divisions, and craft alliances of cynical mutual interest. They are nervous and 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 solidarity and cooperation to unify their ranks in the face of the much more powerful, durable, forthright, and positive alliances of NATO, and of the emerging cooperative security architecture in East Asia. The more desperate they grow, the more they may cling to and cooperate with one another.
There were previous moments in world history that offered much more profound and overwhelming reasons for despair than what we face today.
We face parallel legitimacy challenges, because a lot of people have lost ground in an era of globalisation and deindustrialisation in Europe and the United States. There’s angst, cultural churning, and anxiety, and then immigration has been a hugely destabilizing and polarizing factor.
We have to find answers in the advanced liberal democracies to our own challenges of governance. And 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. We will not be fully effective in competing against Russia and China until we do a better job of transcending our polarisation 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 polarisation as a result of social media in the way that Russia in particular, but increasingly China and maybe Iran, are manipulating it.
Your generation has seen multiple waves of democracy and many unexpected but positive historical moments. For me and others who don’t have those life experiences, who came into a world of democracy being dominant and seeing it corroding and falling apart, it’s difficult to maintain hope. In an environment where things are worse than yesterday, how can people keep their hopes up?
I’d say the first thing is: It does pay to study history. 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. One hopes that it’s not going to take another massive global war to turn the corner on this period of authoritarian momentum. But 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.
History teaches that the tides of authoritarianism have been reversed, and that they can and will be again. History moves in these waves. When you’re in the middle of a bleak wave, it’s very important to understand that and to see that you may be nearer to coming out of it than you realise.
A positive, joyful, optimistic spirit to mobilisation has always been a factor in democratic success.
The second thing is that we do need some wins for democracy, 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 the right-wing, illiberal Law and Justice ruling party, and 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, and then the massive string of municipal victories against the Erdogan regime in municipal elections in Turkey earlier this year, we need to spread the news about those and the implications of those and the lessons of those with more vigor and creativity.
And the last thing is about morale. A positive, joyful, optimistic spirit to mobilisation has always been a factor in democratic success. You decide to walk up to a line of soldiers 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. Thinking about how to make it socially meaningful and creative and joyful and celebratory and resolute, and elevating 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.
Recommended readings
Robert A. Dahl, 1972, Polyarchy, Yale University Press
Andrew J. Nathan, Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, 2013, Will China Democratize?, Johns Hopkins University Press
Anne Applebaum, 2024, Autocracy, Inc., Doubleday
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!
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