Human rights and the internet also stand out as areas where Moscow and Beijing are trying to construct alternative rules that favor autocracies over democracies. International law contains a sizable body of UN declarations and covenants on human rights that most countries have signed and ratified. Neither China nor Russia has set out to wreck the UN’s elaborate human rights regime. Instead, both have worked from the inside to reshape the discourse that shapes the regime’s goals and methods.

With help from the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, Moscow has labored to replace the open liberal discourse of individual rights with language that upholds tradition and cultural difference. In 2006 Nataliya Narochnitskaya (see Chapter 6), a leading Russian anti-liberal thinker, joined a group of clergy and laity in producing a “Declaration of the Rights and Dignity of the Human Being.” It read: “We recognize the rights and freedoms of the person to the extent that they facilitate the ascent of the personality towards good, protect him from internal and external evil, and permit him to realize himself positively in society.” Rights correctly understood aimed at helping the individual achieve dignity, and dignity entailed duties to family, local community, nation, and humanity. Rights that did not respect traditional values would endanger “the existence of the Fatherland.” The UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Russian declaration said, was a recipe for moral and social chaos. Elements of the Russian critique of mainstream liberal human rights were similar to some Western critiques, such as those calling for more emphasis on community and less on individual autonomy. Yet Russia added a strong dose of nationalism and ultimately was using the critique to safeguard its authoritarian regime.

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The Chinese delegation supported the Russians, asserting that “disrespect for culture was itself a human rights violation.” For the Chinese Communist Party, the UN’s liberal conception of human rights sullies China’s reputation, exposes it to possible economic sanctions, and can even reach inside of China itself to elevate opposition to party rule. Since Tiananmen Square, the party has labored behind the scenes to alter the way the UN talked about human rights. It worked with the Like-Minded Group, a coalition of two dozen developing states that shared its interest in fending off meddling liberals and their insulting human rights reports. In 2005 the UN was in the process of replacing its old Commission on Human Rights with a new Human Rights Council. China, Russia, and the rest of the Like-Minded Group succeeded in opening the council’s membership to all countries, including those with atrocious human rights records. They also successfully barred human rights experts and NGOs from participating in the writing of UN human rights reports, thus closing off significant sources of critical information and analysis. They failed, however, to bar the council from conducting periodic reports on specific countries.

Under Xi, China has acted still more assertively. It has pressed for a particularistic norm of human rights by proposing “human rights with Chinese characteristics.” As the Chinese delegation said in protesting a 2013 UN report, “Whether the shoes fit, only the person knows. . . . The Chinese are in the best position to know the situation of human rights in China.” Beijing’s biannual South-South Human Rights Forum has cultivated an alternative language of human rights among developing countries. The 2017 forum declaration was typical in stating that human rights must take into account regional, national, and historical contexts.

All of this writing, talking, and lobbying has met with some success. The UN Human Rights Council has passed resolutions introduced by Beijing that “suggest that human rights depend on ‘people-centered’ development.” The UN, it said, should stop “naming and shaming” alleged rights violators. Instead, economic development of the nation must come first; “‘mutually beneficial cooperation,’ constructive dialogue, technical assistance, and capacity-building should be the primary tools for promoting human rights.” The Like-Minded Group has defended China’s actions in its Xinjiang province in the name of national sovereignty and attacked U.S. and European countries for hypocrisy. Chinese media have praised the country’s “growing influence and ability to set the agenda in international human rights governance.”

The story in the realm of global cyber governance is similar. Nowhere does the regime-power dilemma confront Beijing and Moscow more clearly than in the digital revolution. These authoritarian powers cannot do without the internet. By making information cheaper than ever, it has increased the returns to openness for countries seeking national development and competitiveness. Yet, openness brings heavy risks to both regimes because it brings an unending flood of foreign ideas that include new identities and affiliations that could challenge the power of the Chinese and Russian regimes. As Xi has put the matter, “Western anti-China forces have continually tried in vain to use the internet to ‘pull down’ China.”

“Multi-stakeholderism” is the clumsy term for the original global internet norm of complete openness. A product of Silicon Valley culture as underwritten by America’s open liberal regime, multi-stakeholderism is a bottom-up, decentralized norm in which “technical communities, civil society, and the private sector,” rather than states, play the leading roles in governance. Multi-stakeholderism envisages an internet free of governmental censorship, stretching across all national borders, bringing individuals in all nations together for unencumbered interaction, mutual benefit, and emancipation. The United States has backed the multi-stakeholder vision out of liberal principle but also because the world’s major internet companies have been American.

Beijing and Moscow have led what analysts call the “post-liberal challenge” to the U.S.-sponsored global internet order. They both aim for a new worldwide norm of national internet sovereignty (in Mandarin, wangluo zhuquan). Within China, the Chinese Communist Party controls, monitors, and harnesses all social media, transforming them from a threat into a support. It has used its considerable market power to prevail on U.S. internet giants to censor social media and to pressure anyone critical of Chinese policies, including foreign entertainers and sports executives. The party’s 2010 “White Paper” on the internet lays out China’s distinctive concepts and policies, particularly on what constitutes a threat to “security.” “National situations and cultural traditions differ among countries, and so concern about internet security also differs,” reads the White Paper. “Concerns about internet security of various countries should be fully respected.” In Russia the state has not monopolized the internet—Putin has focused more on traditional broadcast media—but has tightened its control over time and has pushed in the same direction as China.

Excerpted from The Ecology of Nations published by Yale University Press ©2023