slug: china-authoritarianism name: China & Authoritarianism category: Geopolitics type: concept

China & Authoritarianism

Definition & Origins

China and authoritarianism is the theme that dominates George Soros's late-period writing: the analysis of Xi Jinping's China as the most powerful closed society in history — armed with artificial intelligence, integrated into the global economy, and committed to a model that Soros sees as the antithesis of the open society.

The theme marks one of the great reversals of Soros's public life. For decades he was an advocate of engagement: he set up a foundation in Beijing in 1986 (closed in 1989), cultivated Chinese reformers, and as late as 2015 argued in A Partnership with China to Avoid World War that US–China cooperation was the key to world order. By 2019 he had concluded that engagement had failed, declaring in Davos 2019 that China under Xi Jinping is "the most dangerous opponent of those who believe in the concept of open society."

The mature position is set out in a series of 2021–2022 texts: Xi's Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State (Wall Street Journal, August 2021), Investors in Xi's China Face a Rude Awakening (August 2021), BlackRock's China Blunder (September 2021), and the Hoover Institution remarks (January 2022).

Core Ideas

Xi's rule is a throwback, not a modernization. Soros's thumbnail history of the Chinese Communist Party (Hoover 2022) argues that the reform era of Deng Xiaoping was a partial opening that Xi has reversed: abolishing term limits, reasserting party control over the economy, and personalizing power to a degree unseen since Mao. "Xi Jinping, the ruler of China, suffers from several internal inconsistencies which greatly reduce the cohesion and effectiveness of his leadership" (Xi's Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State).

Technology makes this closed society qualitatively new. Previous dictatorships lacked the tools for total surveillance; Xi's China is building them. Soros's analysis of AI-enabled control — social credit, ubiquitous data collection, the fusion of platform monopolies and state power — is developed in the AI & control page. His Hoover claim: Xi "collects personal data for the surveillance of his citizens more aggressively than any other ruler in history."

The economy is subordinated to politics. Soros reads the 2020–2021 crackdowns — Ant Financial's cancelled IPO, the tech and tutoring campaigns, "common prosperity," the Evergrande property crisis — as proof that Xi's priority is party control over economic efficiency. Foreign investors who miss this, he warns, face "a rude awakening": they are investing in a system whose rules can be rewritten overnight for political reasons.

Engagement now strengthens the adversary. Hence his campaign against Western financial flows into China: BlackRock's China Blunder argues that pouring client money into Chinese securities is a "tragic mistake" that damages "the national security interests of the US and other democracies."

The party itself is a battleground. A subtler strand of the Hoover analysis: Xi's enemies are not only outside China. Soros traces factional conflict inside the CCP — between Xi's loyalists and the networks built under earlier leaders — and argues that the anti-corruption campaigns, however popular, have functioned also as instruments of factional consolidation. The practical consequence he draws: outsiders should stop treating "China" as a single-minded actor and attend to the internal brittleness that personalization of power produces.

Yet the closed system carries the seeds of failure. True to his theory of fallibility, Soros argues Xi's personalization of power destroys feedback: sycophancy replaces information, demographic decline compounds, zero-COVID persisted past reason, and "the current situation doesn't look promising for Xi" (Hoover 2022). The closed society is powerful but brittle — the central lesson of his boom/bust reading of history (see boom-bust cycles).

Practical Application

Investor warnings. The 2021 WSJ/FT series was explicitly addressed to asset managers and pension funds: understand that in Xi's China political risk is the first risk; index inclusion is not safety; and fiduciary duty requires pricing the possibility that Chinese assets become stranded. Investors in Xi's China Face a Rude Awakening details the crackdown sequence; BlackRock's China Blunder takes the argument directly to the world's largest asset manager.

Policy advocacy. Soros has urged the US and Europe to treat China as a systemic rival: defend democratic institutions against Chinese influence operations, restrict technology transfer in strategic sectors (his Huawei essay, 2019), and coordinate rather than compete in confronting Beijing's model (Europe Must Recognize China for What It Is, 2019).

The values contest is winnable. Unlike pure realists, Soros insists the open society holds structural advantages in the long contest: innovation requires freedom of thought, prosperity requires trust, and alliances require consent rather than coercion. His 2019 Davos argument — that the US and its allies should compete vigorously but on the terrain of institutions and ideas — rests on this reading: China's model can mobilize resources but cannot easily generate the self-correcting feedback that open societies take for granted (see open society).

The world-order stake. In Davos 2022 and the 2023 Munich remarks, China is folded into his largest frame: the contest between open and closed societies — with Ukraine as the current battlefield — will decide the future of civilization.

Common Misconceptions

"Soros was always anti-China." False — he funded reform-era institutions, argued for including the renminbi in the SDR, and championed US–China partnership into the mid-2010s (A Partnership with China to Avoid World War, The US-China Dialogue of the Deaf). His break is with Xi's trajectory.

"He predicts China's imminent collapse." He does not. His claim is about tendencies: closed systems suppress error-correction, accumulate hidden distortions, and become brittle over time. He consistently cautions that China remains formidable.

"The critique is economic rivalry dressed as values." Soros's China analysis is continuous with the philosophy he has held since reading Karl Popper in the 1940s: the open/closed distinction is his master key, applied to the USSR in 1987, to market fundamentalism in 1998, and to Xi now.

"He wants confrontation." His position is deterrence plus ideological competition, not war: he pairs every China warning with calls for cooperation on climate and nuclear risk — the threats he ranks even higher.

Soros's Own Words

Thought Evolution

Key Writings & Related Concepts