Authoritarian Learning in China's Civil Society Regulations: Towards a Multi-Level Framework

Abstract

How do authoritarian governments learn? What kind of events and experiences can lead them to adopt more or less restrictive policies towards social actors? And, how are such lessons from others' experiences integrated into new policies? These questions have been addressed and answered quite differently from various disciplinary perspectives, focusing either on international dynamics such as “authoritarian diffusion” or on domestic policy learning. This article seeks to integrate different perspectives on authoritarian learning by proposing a typological framework of positive and negative learning from three distinct sources: authoritarian peers, democratic countries, and subnational policy experiments. I argue that such a comprehensive framework better accounts for both the relative importance and for the interaction of different kinds of learning in national-level policy processes. To illustrate the framework's added analytical value, I use an exemplary case study of recent legislative changes to China's civil society policy, which have been alternatively interpreted as part of an authoritarian “wave” or as another step in incremental domestic learning processes.

The Evolution of Authoritarianism and Contentious Action in Russia

“…Violence in Syria (Heydemann, 2013) (Heydemann & Leenders, 2011), and adopting each other's strategies deemed efficient to preempt increased contention, such as preemptive censorship and large-scale bans in Kazakhstan following the Chinese model of authoritarian stability (Hall & Ambrosio, 2017). The capacity to adapt to challenges by observing the examples of others has been interpreted as the authoritarian regime's ability to learn from both fellow authoritarian regimes and democracies (Heydemann & Leenders, 2014;Lang, 2018;Ortmann & Thompson, 2020). However, evidence also suggests that in their process of authoritarian learning, regimes may often be guided by negative examples, not merely adopting policies deemed successful in other authoritarian contexts.…”

“…However, evidence also suggests that in their process of authoritarian learning, regimes may often be guided by negative examples, not merely adopting policies deemed successful in other authoritarian contexts. Instead, they take preemptive steps to avoid similar pitfalls (Heydemann & Leenders, 2011;Lang, 2018). While it is true that authoritarian regimes engage with one another, the decision on which repressive strategies to borrow and implement is far from straightforward.…”

Embeddedness Beyond Borders: Examining the Autonomy of Chinese NGOs in Their Global Endeavours

“…Effective since 2017, China's Foreign NGO Law mandates that foreign NGOs must register with public security agencies, officialising the role of the national security system in NGO management. The shift of management to public security agencies shows that the leadership of China views that INGOs can be sources of threat to national security (Lang, 2018). At least two leaders of the NGOs researched for this study, including both GONGOs and independent NGOs, have been investigated by these security systems for their accidental or indirect involvement with suspicious international forces.…”

Multilevel political connections and nonprofit revenues under authoritarianism: Evidence from Chinese foundations

“…Like other states in the authoritarian world, China's nonprofit sector has become a mixture of politically and nonpolitically connected organizations that may share a similar revenue structure to those of their Western peers (Ni & Zhan, 2017). Second, authoritarian states learn from each other (Lang, 2018). For example, China drew measures for overseas nongovernmental organizations from Russia and adopted the Vietnamese principle that no registration would be granted if a similar nonprofit already existed in a given jurisdiction.…”