2021.11.15 坏人正在获胜

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IDEAS
THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING
If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

By Anne Applebaum
Illustrations by Michael Houtz
NOVEMBER 15, 2021
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The future of democracy may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town.

I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team—more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists—was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn’t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she probably won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.

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Here is the first thing she said to me: “My story is a little bit different from other people.” This is what she tells everyone—that hers was not the typical life of a dissident or budding politician. Before the spring of 2020, she didn’t have much time for television or newspapers. She has two children, one of whom was born deaf. On an ordinary day, she would take them to kindergarten, to the doctor, to the park.

Then her husband bought a house and ran into the concrete wall of Belarusian bureaucracy and corruption. Exasperated, he started making videos about his experiences, and those of others. These videos yielded a YouTube channel; the channel attracted thousands of followers. He went around the country, recording the frustrations of his fellow citizens, driving a car with the phrase “Real News” plastered on the side. Siarhei Tsikhanouski held up a mirror to his society. People saw themselves in that mirror and responded with the kind of enthusiasm that opposition politicians had found hard to create in Belarus.

“At the beginning it was really difficult because people were afraid,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told me. “But step-by-step, slowly, they realized that Siarhei isn’t afraid.” He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth as he saw it; his absence of fear inspired others. He decided to run for president. The regime, recognizing the power of Siarhei’s mirror, would not allow him to register his candidacy, just as it had not allowed him to register the ownership of his house. It ended his campaign and arrested him.

Tsikhanouskaya ran in his place, with no motive other than “to show my love for him.” The police and bureaucrats let her. Because what harm could she do, this simple housewife, this woman with no political experience? And so, in July 2020, she registered as a candidate. Unlike her husband, she was afraid. She woke up “so scared” every morning, she told me, and sometimes she stayed scared all day long. But she kept going. Which was, though she doesn’t say so, incredibly brave. “You feel this responsibility, you wake up with this pain for those people who are in jail, you go to bed with the same feeling.”

Read: When women lead protest movements

Unexpectedly, Tsikhanouskaya was a success—not despite her inexperience, but because of it. Her campaign became a campaign about ordinary people standing up to the regime. Two other prominent opposition politicians endorsed her after their own campaigns were blocked, and when the wife of one of them and the female campaign manager of the other were photographed alongside Tsikhanouskaya, her campaign became something more: a campaign about ordinary women—women who had been neglected, women who had no voice, even just women who loved their husbands. In return, the regime targeted all three of these women. Tsikhanouskaya received an anonymous threat: Her children would be “sent to an orphanage.” She dispatched them with her mother abroad, to Vilnius, and kept campaigning.

Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others.
On August 9, election officials announced that Lukashenko had won 80 percent of the vote, a number nobody believed. The internet was cut off, and Tsikhanouskaya was detained by police and then forced out of the country. Mass demonstrations unfolded across Belarus. These were both a spontaneous outburst of feeling—a popular response to the stolen election—and a carefully coordinated project run by young people, some based in Warsaw, who had been experimenting with social media and new forms of communication for several years. For a brief, tantalizing moment, it looked like this democratic uprising might prevail. Belarusians shared a sense of national unity they had never felt before. The regime immediately pushed back, with real brutality. Yet the mood at the protests was generally happy, optimistic; people literally danced in the streets. In a country of fewer than 10 million, up to 1.5 million people would come out in a single day, among them pensioners, villagers, factory workers, and even, in a few places, members of the police and the security services, some of whom removed insignia from their uniforms or threw them in the garbage.

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Tsikhanouskaya says she and many others naively believed that under this pressure, the dictator would just give up. “We thought he would understand that we are against him,” she told me. “That people don’t want to live under his dictatorship, that he lost the elections.” They had no other plan.

At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security services, flew from Moscow to Minsk. Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change. Stephen Biegun, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, describes the change as a shift to “more sophisticated, more controlled ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.

The Lukashenko rescue package, reminiscent of the one Putin had designed for Bashar al-Assad in Syria six years earlier, contained economic elements too. Russian companies offered markets for Belarusian products that had been banned by the democratic West—for example, smuggling Belarusian cigarettes into the European Union. Some of this was possible because the two countries share a language. (Though roughly a third to half of the country speaks Belarusian, most public business in Belarus is conducted in Russian.) But this close cooperation was also possible because Lukashenko and Putin, though they famously dislike each other, share a common way of seeing the world. Both believe that their personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people. Both believe that a change of regime would result in their death, imprisonment, or exile.

Both also learned lessons from the Arab Spring, as well as from the more distant memory of 1989, when Communist dictatorships fell like dominoes: Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others. The anti-corruption, prodemocracy demonstrations of 2014 in Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych’s government, reinforced this fear of democratic contagion. Putin was enraged by those protests, not least because of the precedent they set. After all, if Ukrainians could get rid of their corrupt dictator, why wouldn’t Russians want to do the same?

Lukashenko gladly accepted Russian help, turned against his people, and transformed himself from an autocratic, patriarchal grandfather—a kind of national collective-farm boss—into a tyrant who revels in cruelty. Reassured by Putin’s support, he began breaking new ground. Not just selective arrests—a year later, human-rights activists say that more than 800 political prisoners remain in jail—but torture. Not just torture but rape. Not just torture and rape but kidnapping and, quite possibly, murder.

Lukashenko’s sneering defiance of the rule of law—he issues stony-faced denials of the existence of political repression in his country—and of anything resembling decency spread beyond his borders. In May 2021, Belarusian air traffic control forced an Irish-owned Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk so that one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a young dissident living in exile, could be arrested; he later made public confessions on television that appeared to be coerced. In August, another young dissident living in exile, Vitaly Shishov, was found hanged in a Kyiv park. At about the same time, Lukashenko’s regime set out to destabilize its EU neighbors by forcing streams of refugees across their borders: Belarus lured Afghan and Iraqi refugees to Minsk with a proffer of tourist visas, then escorted them to the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland and forced them at gunpoint to cross, illegally.

Anne Applebaum: A dictator is exploiting these human beings

Lukashenko began to act, in other words, as if he were untouchable, both at home and abroad. He began breaking not only the laws and customs of his own country, but also the laws and customs of other countries, and of the international community—laws regarding air traffic control, homicide, borders. Exiles flowed out of the country; Tsikhanouskaya’s team scrambled to book hotel rooms or Airbnbs in Vilnius, to find means of support, to learn new languages. Tsikhanouskaya herself had to make another, even more difficult transition—from people’s-choice candidate to sophisticated diplomat. This time her inexperience initially worked against her. At first, she thought that if she could just speak with Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron, one of them could fix the problem. “I was sure they are so powerful that they can call Lukashenko and say, ‘Stop! How dare you?’ ” she told me. But they could not.

So she tried to talk as foreign leaders did, to speak in sophisticated political language. That didn’t work either. The experience was demoralizing: “It’s very difficult sometimes to talk about your people, about their sufferings, and see the emptiness in the eyes of those you are talking to.” She began using the plain English that she had learned in school, in order to convey plain things. “I started to tell stories that would touch their hearts. I tried to make them feel just a little of the pain that Belarusians feel.” Now she tells anyone who will listen exactly what she told me: I am an ordinary person, a housewife, a mother of two children, and I am in politics because other ordinary people are being beaten naked in prison cells. What she wants is sanctions, democratic unity, pressure on the regime—anything that will raise the cost for Lukashenko to stay in power, for Russia to keep him in power. Anything that might induce the business and security elites in Belarus to abandon him. Anything that might persuade China and Iran to keep out.

To her surprise, Tsikhanouskaya became, for the second time, a runaway success. She charmed Merkel and Macron, and the diplomats of multiple countries. In July, she met President Joe Biden, who subsequently broadened American sanctions on Belarus to include major companies in several industries (tobacco, potash, construction) and their executives. The EU had already banned a range of people, companies, and technologies from Belarus; after the Ryanair kidnapping, the EU and the U.K. banned the Belarusian national airline as well. What was once a booming trade between Belarus and Europe has been reduced to a trickle. Tsikhanouskaya inspires people to make sacrifices of their own. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, told me that his country was proud to host her, even if it meant trouble on the border. “If we’re not free to invite other free people into our country because it’s somehow not safe, then the question is, can we consider ourselves free?”

Tsikhanouskaya has acquired many other supporters and admirers. She has not only the talented young activists in Vilnius, but colleagues in Poland and Ukraine as well. She promotes values that unite millions of her compatriots, including pensioners like Nina Bahinskaya, a great-grandmother who has been filmed shouting at the police, and ordinary working people like Siarhei Hardziyevich, a 50-year-old journalist from a provincial town, Drahichyn, who was convicted of “insulting the president.” On her side she also has the friends and relatives of the hundreds of political prisoners who, like her own husband, are paying a high price just because they want to live in a country with free elections.

Most of all, though, Tsikhanouskaya has on her side the combined narrative power of what we used to call the free world. She has the language of human rights, democracy, and justice. She has the NGOs and human-rights organizations that work inside the United Nations and other international institutions to put pressure on autocratic regimes. She has the support of people around the world who still fervently believe that politics can be made more civilized, more rational, more humane, who can see in her an authentic representative of that cause.

But will that be enough? A lot depends on the answer.

a lattice consisting of multiple photos of male hands in dark suits in a handshake on red background
Michael Houtz
All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. No one country leads this group. Washington likes to talk about Chinese influence, but what really bonds the members of this club is a common desire to preserve and enhance their personal power and wealth. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.

Thus in theory, Belarus is an international pariah—Belarusian planes cannot land in Europe, many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the U.S., Belarus’s shocking brutality has been criticized by many international institutions. But in practice, the country remains a respected member of Autocracy Inc. Despite Lukashenko’s flagrant flouting of international norms, despite his reaching across borders to break laws, Belarus remains the site of one of China’s largest overseas development projects. Iran has expanded its relationship with Belarus over the past year. Cuban officials have expressed their solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN, calling for an end to “foreign interference” in the country’s affairs.

In theory, Venezuela, too, is an international pariah. Since 2008, the U.S. has repeatedly added more Venezuelans to personal-sanctions lists; since 2019, U.S. citizens and companies have been forbidden to do any business there. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors maintain sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia and China. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers, as well as security technology, to the country’s rulers. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo López, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, has observed that although Maduro’s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it’s “nothing comparable with what Maduro has received.”

Like the Belarusian opposition, the Venezuelan opposition has charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have persuaded millions of people to go out into the streets and protest. If their only enemy was the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime, they might win. But Lopez and his fellow dissidents are in fact fighting multiple autocrats, in multiple countries. Like so many other ordinary people propelled into politics by the experience of injustice—like Sviatlana and Siarhei Tsikhanouski in Belarus, like the leaders of the extraordinary Hong Kong protest movement, like the Cubans and the Iranians and the Burmese pushing for democracy in their countries—they are fighting against people who control state companies and can make investment decisions worth billions of dollars for purely political reasons. They are fighting against people who can buy sophisticated surveillance technology from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they are fighting against people who have inured themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Because Autocracy Inc. grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible and yet just as important: impunity.

How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along.
The leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the 20th century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system and they objected when it was criticized. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously brandished his shoe at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate had expressed sympathy for “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights.”

Today, the most brutal members of Autocracy  Inc. don’t much care if their countries are criticized, or by whom. The leaders of Myanmar don’t really have any ideology beyond nationalism, self-enrichment, and the desire to remain in power. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela dismiss the statements of foreigners on the grounds that they are “imperialists.” The leaders of China have spent a decade disputing the human-rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many people around the world that these “Western” concepts don’t apply to them. Russia has gone beyond merely ignoring foreign criticism to outright mocking it. After the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was arrested earlier this year, Amnesty International designated him a “prisoner of conscience,” a venerable term that the human-rights organization has been using since the 1960s. Russian social-media trolls immediately mounted a campaign designed to draw Amnesty’s attention to 15-year-old statements by Navalny that seemed to break the group’s rules on offensive language. Amnesty took the bait and removed the title. Then, when Amnesty officials realized they’d been manipulated by trolls, they restored it. Russian state media cackled derisively. It was not a good moment for the human-rights movement.

Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats are using aggressive tactics to push back against mass protest and widespread discontent. Putin was unembarrassed to stage “elections” earlier this year in which some 9 million people were barred from being candidates, the progovernment party received five times more television coverage than all the other parties put together, television clips of officials stealing votes circulated online, and vote counts were mysteriously altered. The Burmese junta is unashamed to have murdered hundreds of protesters, including young teenagers, on the streets of Yangon. The Chinese government boasts about its destruction of the popular democracy movement in Hong Kong.

At the extremes, this kind of contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic calls the “Maduro model” of governance, which may be what Lukashenko is preparing for in Belarus. Autocrats who adopt it are “willing to pay the price of becoming a totally failed country, to see their country enter the category of failed states,” accepting economic collapse, isolation, and mass poverty if that’s what it takes to stay in power. Assad has applied the Maduro model in Syria. And it seems to be what the Taliban leadership had in mind this summer when they occupied Kabul and immediately began arresting and murdering Afghan officials and civilians. Financial collapse was looming, but they didn’t care. As one Western official working in the region told the Financial Times, “They assume that any money that the west doesn’t give them will be replaced by China, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.” And if the money doesn’t come, so what? Their goal is not a flourishing, prosperous Afghanistan, but an Afghanistan where they are in charge.

The widespread adoption of the Maduro model helps explain why Western statements at the time of Kabul’s fall sounded so pathetic. The EU’s foreign-policy chief expressed “deep concern about reports of serious human rights violations” and called for “meaningful negotiations based on democracy, the rule of law and constitutional rule”—as if the Taliban was interested in any of that. Whether it was “deep concern,” “sincere concern,” or “profound concern,” whether it was expressed on behalf of Europe or the Holy See, none of it mattered: Statements like that mean nothing to the Taliban, the Cuban security services, or the Russian FSB. Their goals are money and personal power. They are not concerned—deeply, sincerely, profoundly, or otherwise—about the happiness or well-being of their fellow citizens, let alone the views of anyone else.

How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along. Some of those people, and some of those countries, might surprise you.

a toppled chess piece with stars and the head of an eagle casts a shadow on red background
Michael Houtz
If the stories told by the young dissidents in Vilnius make you angry, the stories told by the Uyghurs of Istanbul will haunt your dreams.

A few months ago, in a hot, airless apartment over a dress shop, I met Kalbinur Tursun. She was dressed in a dark-green gown with ruffled sleeves. Her face, framed by a tightly drawn headscarf, resembled that of a saint in a medieval triptych. Her small daughter, in Mickey Mouse leggings, played with an electronic tablet while we spoke.

Tursun is a Uyghur, a member of China’s predominantly Muslim Chinese minority, born in the territory that the Chinese call Xinjiang and that many Uyghurs know as East Turkestan. Tursun had six children—too many in a country where there are strict rules limiting births. Also, she wanted to raise them as Muslims; that, too, was a problem in China. When she became pregnant again, she feared being harassed by police, as women with more than two children often are. She and her husband decided to move to Turkey. They got passports for themselves and for their youngest child, but were told the other passports would take longer. Because of her pregnancy, the three of them came to Istanbul anyway; after she and her daughter were settled, her husband returned for the rest of the family. Then he disappeared.

Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps

That was five years ago. Tursun has not spoken with her husband since. In July 2017, she spoke with her sister, who promised to take care of her remaining children. Then they lost contact. A year after that, Tursun came across a video being passed around on WhatsApp. Shot at what appeared to be a Chinese orphanage, it showed Uyghur children, heads shaved and all dressed alike, learning to speak Chinese. One of the children was her daughter Ayshe.

Tursun showed me the video of her daughter. She also showed me a picture of her husband standing in an Istanbul mosque. She cannot speak to either one of them, or to any of the rest of her children in China. She has no way to know what they are thinking. They might not know she has searched for them. They might believe she has abandoned them on purpose. They might have forgotten she exists. Meanwhile, time is passing. The child in the Mickey Mouse leggings, who sang to herself while we talked, is the one born in Turkey. She has never met her father, or her brothers and sisters in China. But she knows something is very wrong; when Tursun fell silent for a moment, overcome with emotion, the girl put down her tablet and put her arms around her mother’s neck.

Sinister though it sounds, Tursun’s story is not unique. The translator for my conversation with Tursun was Nursiman Abdureshid. She is also a Uyghur, also from Xinjiang, also married, also with a daughter, also now living in Istanbul. Abdureshid came to Turkey as a student, convinced that she had the backing of the Chinese state. A graduate of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, she had studied business administration, learned excellent Turkish and English, made ethnic-Chinese friends. She had never thought of herself as a rebel or a dissident. Why would she have? She was a Chinese success story.

Abdureshid’s break with her old life came in June 2017, when, after an ordinary conversation with her family back in China, they stopped answering her calls. She texted and got no response. Weeks passed. After many months, she contacted the consulate in Istanbul—she asked a Turkish friend to call for her—and officials there finally told her the truth: Her father, mother, and younger brother were in prison camps, each for “preparing to commit terrorist activities.”

A similar charge was thrown at Jevlan Shirmemet, another Uyghur student in Istanbul. Like Abdureshid, he realized something was wrong when his mother and other relatives stopped responding to texts. Then they blocked him on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. Nearly two years later, he learned that they were in prison camps. Chinese diplomats accused him of having “anti-Chinese” contacts in Egypt, as well. Shirmemet told them he had never been to Egypt. Prove it, they responded, then added: Cooperate with us, tell us who all of your friends are, list every place you have ever been, become an informer. He refused and—though not temperamentally inclined to be a dissident either—decided to speak out on social media instead. “I had remained silent, but my silence didn’t protect my family,” he told me.

Turkey is home to some 50,000 exiled Uyghurs, and there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of such stories there. İlyas Doğan, a Turkish lawyer who has represented some of the Uyghurs, told me that, until 2017, very few of them were politically active. But after friends and relatives began disappearing into “reeducation camps”—concentration camps, in fact—set up by the Chinese state, the situation changed.

Tursun and a group of other women who had lost children staged a protest walk from Istanbul to Ankara, a distance of more than 270 miles, and then stood in front of a UN building, demanding to be heard. Abdureshid spoke at the conference of one of the Turkish opposition parties. “I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for four years,” she told the audience. A video of the speech went viral; when we had lunch at a restaurant in a Uyghur neighborhood, a waiter recognized her and thanked her for it.

In another era—in a world with a different geopolitical configuration, at a time when the language of human rights had not been so comprehensively undermined—these dissidents would have plenty of official sympathy in Turkey, a nation that is singularly linked to the Uyghur community by ties of religion, ethnicity, and language. In 2009, even before the concentration camps were opened, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was then the Turkish prime minister, called the Chinese repression of the Uyghurs a “genocide.” In 2012, he brought businessmen with him to Xinjiang and promised to invest in Uyghur businesses there. He did this because it was popular. To the extent that ordinary Turks know what is happening to their Uyghur cousins, they sympathize.

Yet since then, Erdoğan—who became president in 2014—has himself turned against the rule of law, independent media, and independent courts at home. As he has become openly hostile to former European and NATO allies, and as he has arrested and jailed his own dissidents, Erdoğan’s interest in Chinese friendship, investment, and technology has increased, along with his willingness to echo Chinese propaganda. On the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, his party’s flagship newspaper published a long, solemn article—which was in fact sponsored content—beneath the headline “The Chinese Communist Party’s 100 Years of Glorious History and the Secrets to Its Success.” Alongside these changes, government policy toward the Uyghurs has shifted too.

In recent years, the Turkish government has surveilled and detained Uyghurs on bogus terrorism charges, and deported some, including four who were sent to Tajikistan and then immediately turned over to China in 2019. In Istanbul, I met one Uyghur—he preferred to remain anonymous—who had spent time in a Turkish detention center, along with some of his family, following what he said were bogus charges of “terrorism.” The presence of pro-Chinese forces in Turkish media, politics, and business has been growing, and lately they are keen to belittle the Uyghurs. Curiously, Abdureshid’s speech was cut from the public-television broadcast of the opposition-party conference she attended. After it started circulating on social media, she was publicly attacked by a Turkish politician, Doğu Perinçek, a former Maoist who is pro-Chinese, anti-Western, and quite influential. After Perinçek described her as a “terrorist” on television, a wave of online attacks followed.

The atmosphere worsened in late 2020, when a delayed Chinese shipment of COVID-19 vaccines coincided with Beijing’s pressure on Turkey to sign an extradition treaty that would have made deportation of Uyghurs even easier. After opposition parties objected, both the Turkish and Chinese governments denied that delivery of the vaccine shipment was in any way conditioned on deporting Uyghurs, but the timing remains suspicious. Several Uyghurs in Istanbul told me that corrupt elements in the Turkish police work directly with the Chinese already. They have no proof, and Doğan, the Turkish lawyer, told me that he doubts this is the case; still, he thinks that, despite all of the old cultural ties, the Turkish government might not mind if the Uyghurs stopped protesting or quietly moved elsewhere.

For the moment, the Uyghurs in Turkey are still protected by what remains of democracy there: the opposition parties, some of the media, public opinion. A government that faces democratic elections, even skewed ones, must still take these things into account. In countries where opposition, media, and public opinion matter less, the balance is different. You can see this even in Muslim countries, which might be expected to object to the oppression of other Muslims. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has stated baldly that “we accept the Chinese version” of the Chinese-Uyghur dispute. The Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Egyptians have all allegedly arrested, detained, and deported Uyghurs without much discussion. Not coincidentally, these are all countries that seek good economic relations with China, and that have purchased Chinese surveillance technology. For autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world, the Chinese offer a package that looks something like this: Agree to follow China’s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights more broadly. Buy Chinese surveillance equipment. Accept massive Chinese investment (preferably into companies you personally control, or that at least pay you kickbacks). Then sit back and relax, knowing that however bad your image becomes in the eyes of the international human-rights community, you and your friends will remain in power.

3 ornate wood and velvet chairs on top of a black and white map of the world on red background
Michael Houtz
And how different are we? We Americans? We Europeans? Are we so sure that our institutions, our political parties, our media could never be manipulated in the same way? In the spring of 2016, I helped publish a report on the Russian use of disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe—the now familiar Russian efforts to manipulate political conversations in other countries using social media, fake websites, funding for extremist parties, hacked private communications, and more. My colleague Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and I took it to Capitol Hill, to the State Department, and to anyone in Washington who would listen. The response was polite interest, nothing more. We are very sorry that Slovakia and Slovenia are having these problems, but it can’t happen here.

A few months later, it did happen here. Russian trolls operating from St. Petersburg sought to shift the outcome of an American election in much the same way they had done in Central Europe, using fake Facebook pages (sometimes impersonating anti-immigration groups, sometimes impersonating Black activists), fake Twitter accounts, and attempts to infiltrate groups like the National Rifle Association, as well as weaponizing hacked material from the Democratic National Committee. Some Americans actively welcomed this intervention, and even sought to take advantage of what they imagined might be broader Russian technical capabilities. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote to an intermediary for a Russian lawyer who he believed had access to damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Trump Jr. had told a business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” and in 2016, Russia’s long-term investment in the Trump business empire paid off. In the Trump family, the Kremlin had something better than spies: cynical, nihilistic, indebted, long-term allies.

The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to autocratic regimes is very long.
Despite the raucous national debate on Russian election interference, we don’t seem to have learned much from it, if our thinking about Chinese influence operations is any indication. The United Front is the Chinese Communist Party’s influence project, subtler and more strategic than the Russian version, designed not to upend democratic politics but to shape the nature of conversations about China around the world. Among other endeavors, the United Front creates educational and exchange programs, tries to mold the atmosphere within Chinese exile communities, and courts anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. But in 2019, when Peter Mattis, a China expert and democracy promoter, tried to discuss the United Front program with a CIA analyst, he got the same kind of polite dismissal that Lucas and I had heard a few years earlier. “This is not Australia,” the CIA analyst told him, according to testimony Mattis gave to Congress, referring to a series of scandals involving Chinese and Chinese Australian businesspeople allegedly attempting to buy political influence in Canberra. We are very sorry that Australia is having these problems, but it can’t happen here.

Can’t it? Controversy has already engulfed many of the Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes set up at American universities, some of whose faculty, under the guise of offering benign Chinese-language and calligraphy courses, got involved in efforts to shape academic debate in China’s favor—a classic United Front enterprise. The long arm of the Chinese state has reached Chinese dissidents in the U.S. as well. The Washington, D.C., and Maryland offices of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a group named after one of China’s most famous democracy activists, have been broken into more than a dozen times in the past two decades. Ciping Huang, the foundation’s executive director, told me that old computers have disappeared, phone lines have been cut, and mail has been thrown in the toilet. The main objective seems to be to let the activists know that someone was there. Chinese democracy activists living in the U.S. have, like the Uyghurs in Istanbul, been visited by Chinese agents who try to persuade them, or blackmail them, to return home. Still others have had strange car accidents—mishaps regularly happen while people are on their way to attend an annual ceremony held in New York on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Chinese influence, like authoritarian influence more broadly, can take even subtler forms, using carrots rather than sticks. If you go along with the official line, if you don’t criticize China’s human-rights record, opportunities will emerge for you. In 2018, McKinsey held a tone-deaf corporate retreat in Kashgar, just a few miles away from a Uyghur internment camp—the same kind of camp where the husbands, parents, and siblings of Tursun, Shirmemet, and Abdureshid have been imprisoned. McKinsey had good reasons not to talk about human rights at the retreat: According to The New York Times, the consulting giant at the time of that event advised 22 of the 100 largest Chinese-state companies, including one that had helped construct the artificial islands in the South China Sea that have so alarmed the U.S. military.

But perhaps it’s unfair to pick on McKinsey. The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long. During the heavily manipulated and deliberately confusing Russian elections in September 2021, both Apple and Google removed apps that had been designed to help Russian voters decide which opposition candidates to select, after Russian authorities threatened to prosecute the companies’ local employees. The apps had been created by Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, the most viable opposition movement in the country, which was itself not allowed to participate in the election campaign. Navalny, who remains in prison on ludicrous charges, made a statement via Twitter excoriating American democracy’s most famous corporate moguls:

It’s one thing when the Internet monopolists are ruled by cute freedom-loving nerds with solid life principles. It is completely different when the people in charge of them are both cowardly and greedy … Standing in front of the huge screens, they tell us about “making the world a better place,” but on the inside they are liars and hypocrites.
The list of other industries that might be similarly described as “cowardly and greedy” is also very long, extending even to Hollywood, pop music, and sports. When distributors became nervous about a possible Chinese backlash to a 2012 MGM remake of a Cold War–era movie that recast the Soviet invaders as Chinese, the studio had the film digitally altered to make the bad guys North Korean instead. In 2019, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, along with a number of basketball stars, expressed remorse to China after the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted support for the democrats of Hong Kong. Even more abject was Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, a fawning eight-hour documentary about the life of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the brutal longtime ruler of Kazakhstan, produced in 2021 by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone. Or consider what the rapper Nicki Minaj did in 2015, when she was criticized for giving a concert in Angola, hosted by a company co-owned by the daughter of that country’s dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos. Minaj posted two photos of herself on Instagram, one in which she’s draped in the Angolan flag and another alongside the dictator’s daughter, captioned with these immortal words: “Oh no big deal … she’s just the 8th richest woman in the world. (At least that’s what I was told by someone b4 we took this photo) Lol. Yikes!!!!! GIRL POWER!!!!! This motivates me soooooooooo much!!!!”

If the autocrats and the kleptocrats feel no shame, why should American celebrities who profit from their largesse? Why should their fans? Why should their sponsors?

If the 20th century was the story of a slow, uneven struggle, ending with the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. Freedom House, which has published an annual “Freedom in the World” report for nearly 50 years, called its 2021 edition “Democracy Under Siege.” The Stanford scholar Larry Diamond calls this an era of “democratic regression.” Not everyone is equally gloomy—Srdja Popovic, the democracy activist, argues that confrontations between autocrats and their populations are growing harsher precisely because democratic movements are becoming more articulate and better organized. But just about everyone who thinks hard about this subject agrees that the old diplomatic toolbox once used to support democrats around the world is rusty and out of date.

The tactics that used to work no longer do. Certainly sanctions, especially when hastily applied in the aftermath of some outrage, do not have the impact they once did. They can sometimes seem, as Stephen Biegun, the former deputy secretary of state, puts it, “an exercise in self-gratification,” on par with “sternly worded condemnations of the latest farcical election.” That doesn’t mean they have no impact at all. But although personal sanctions on corrupt Russian officials might make it impossible for some Russians to visit their homes in Cap Ferrat, say, or their children at the London School of Economics, they haven’t persuaded Putin to stop invading other countries, interfering in European and American politics, or poisoning his own dissidents. Neither have decades of U.S. sanctions changed the behavior of the Iranian regime or the Venezuelan regime, despite their indisputable economic impact. Too often, sanctions are allowed to deteriorate over time; just as often, autocracies now help one another get around them.

The centrality of democracy in American foreign policy has been declining for many years.
America does still spend money on projects that might loosely be called “democracy assistance,” but the amounts are very low compared with what the authoritarian world is prepared to put up. The National Endowment for Democracy, a unique institution that has an independent board (of which I am a member), received $300 million of congressional funding in 2020 to support civic organizations, non-state media, and educational projects in about 100 autocracies and weak democracies around the world. American foreign-language broadcasters, having survived the Trump administration’s still inexplicable attempt to destroy them, also continue to serve as independent sources of information in some closed societies. But while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty spends just over $22 million on Russian-language broadcasting (to take one example) every year, and Voice of America just over $8 million more, the Russian government spends billions on the Russian-language state media that are seen and heard all over Eastern Europe, from Germany to Moldova to Kazakhstan. The $33 million that Radio Free Asia spends to broadcast in Burmese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese pales beside the billions that China spends on media and communications both inside its borders and around the world.

Our efforts are even smaller than they look, because traditional media are only a part of how modern autocracies promote themselves. We don’t yet have a real answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which offers infrastructure deals to countries around the globe, often enabling local leaders to skim kickbacks and garnering positive China-subsidized media coverage in return. We don’t have the equivalent of a United Front, or any other strategy for shaping debate within and about China. We don’t run online influence campaigns inside Russia. We don’t have an answer to the disinformation, injected by troll farms abroad, that circulates on Facebook inside the U.S., let alone a plan for countering the disinformation that circulates inside autocracies.

President Biden is well aware of this imbalance and says he wants to reinvigorate the democratic alliance and America’s leading role within it. To that end, the president is convening an online summit on December 9 and 10 to “galvanize commitments and initiatives” in aid of three themes: “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.”

That sounds nice, but unless it heralds deep changes in our own behavior it means very little. “Fighting corruption” is not just a foreign-policy issue, after all. If we in the democratic world are serious about it, then we can no longer allow Kazakhs and Venezuelans to purchase property anonymously in London or Miami, or the rulers of Angola and Myanmar to hide money in Delaware or Nevada. We need, in other words, to make changes to our own system, and that may require overcoming fierce domestic resistance from the business groups that benefit from it. We need to shut down tax havens, enforce money-laundering laws, stop selling security and surveillance technology to autocracies, and divest from the most vicious regimes altogether. “We” here will need to include Europe, especially the U.K., as well as partners elsewhere—and that will require a lot of vigorous diplomacy.

The same is true of the fight for human rights. Statements made at a diplomatic summit won’t achieve much if politicians, citizens, and businesses don’t act as if they matter. To effect real change, the Biden administration will have to ask hard questions and make big decisions. How can we force Apple and Google to respect the rights of Russian democrats? How can we ensure that Western manufacturers have excluded from their supply chains anything produced in a Uyghur concentration camp? We need a major investment in independent media around the world, a strategy for reaching people inside autocracies, new international institutions to replace the defunct human-rights bodies at the UN. We need a way to coordinate democratic nations’ response when autocracies commit crimes outside their borders—whether that’s the Russian state murdering people in Berlin or Salisbury, England; the Belarusian dictator hijacking a commercial flight; or Chinese operatives harassing exiles in Washington, D.C. As of now, we have no transnational strategy designed to confront this transnational problem.

This absence of strategy reflects more than negligence. The centrality of democracy to American foreign policy has been declining for many years—at about the same pace, perhaps not coincidentally, as the decline of respect for democracy in America itself. The Trump presidency was a four-year display of contempt not just for the American political process, but for America’s historic democratic allies, whom he singled out for abuse. The president described the British and German leaders as “losers” and the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and “weak,” while he cozied up to autocrats—the Turkish president, the Russian president, the Saudi ruling family, and the North Korean dictator, among them—with whom he felt more comfortable, and no wonder: He has shared their ethos of no-questions-asked investments for many years. In 2008, the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev paid Trump $95 million—more than twice what Trump had paid just four years earlier—for a house in Palm Beach no one else seemed to want; in 2012, Trump put his name on a building in Baku, Azerbaijan, owned by a company with apparent links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump feels perfectly at home in Autocracy Inc., and he accelerated the erosion of the rules and norms that has allowed it to take root in America.


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At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that “democracy” belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy—not out of greed and cynicism but out of a loss of faith in democracy at home. Convinced that the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else, they don’t see the value of making common cause with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Nursiman Abdureshid, or any of the other ordinary people around the world forced into politics by their experience of profound injustice. Focused on America’s own bitter problems, they no longer believe America has anything to offer the rest of the world: Although the Hong Kong prodemocracy protesters waving American flags believe many of the same things we believe, their requests for American support in 2019 did not elicit a significant wave of youthful activism in the United States, not even something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.

Incorrectly identifying the promotion of democracy around the world with “forever wars,” they fail to understand the brutality of the zero-sum competition now unfolding in front of us. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics. If America removes the promotion of democracy from its foreign policy, if America ceases to interest itself in the fate of other democracies and democratic movements, then autocracies will quickly take our place as sources of influence, funding, and ideas. If Americans, together with our allies, fail to fight the habits and practices of autocracy abroad, we will encounter them at home; indeed, they are already here. If Americans don’t help to hold murderous regimes to account, those regimes will retain their sense of impunity. They will continue to steal, blackmail, torture, and intimidate, inside their countries—and inside ours.






理念
坏人正在获胜
如果说20世纪是自由民主战胜其他意识形态--共产主义、法西斯主义、恶性民族主义--的缓慢而不平衡的进展故事，那么到目前为止，21世纪则是一个相反的故事。

作者：Anne Applebaum
插图：Michael Houtz
2021年11月15日
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民主的未来很可能是在维尔纽斯郊区的一栋单调的办公楼里决定的，旁边是一条挤满了出城的不耐烦的司机的高速公路。

今年春天，我在那里见到了斯维亚特拉娜-齐哈努斯卡娅，在一个摆放着一张会议桌、一块白板的房间里，没有其他东西。她的团队--十几个年轻的记者、博客、视频博客和活动家--正在更换办公室。但这并不是这个空间感觉陈旧和敷衍的唯一原因。他们中没有人，尤其是Tsikhanouskaya，真的想在这个丑陋的建筑里，或者在立陶宛的首都。她在那里是因为她可能赢得了2020年白俄罗斯的总统选举，而且因为她可能击败的白俄罗斯独裁者亚历山大-卢卡申科在之后立即迫使她离开该国。立陶宛为她提供了庇护。她的丈夫Siarhei Tsikhanouski仍然被监禁在白俄罗斯。

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以下是她对我说的第一句话。"我的故事与其他人有一点不同"。这是她告诉大家的--她的故事不是一个持不同政见者或崭露头角的政治家的典型生活。在2020年春天之前，她没有多少时间看电视或报纸。她有两个孩子，其中一个天生就是聋子。在一个普通的日子里，她会带他们去幼儿园，去看医生，去公园。

后来，她的丈夫买了一栋房子，却遇到了白俄罗斯官僚主义和腐败的水泥墙。气愤之余，他开始制作视频，讲述自己和他人的经历。这些视频产生了一个YouTube频道；该频道吸引了成千上万的追随者。他驾驶着一辆侧面贴有 "真实新闻 "字样的汽车，走遍全国，记录他的同胞们的挫折。西亚尔海-齐哈努斯基为他的社会举起了一面镜子。人们在这面镜子中看到了自己，并以反对派政治家在白俄罗斯难以创造的那种热情作出回应。

"一开始真的很困难，因为人们很害怕，"斯维亚特拉娜-齐哈努斯卡娅告诉我。"但一步一步地，慢慢地，他们意识到，西亚尔海并不害怕。" 他并不害怕说出他所看到的真相；他的无畏激励了其他人。他决定竞选总统。当局认识到西亚尔海镜子的力量，不允许他登记参选，就像不允许他登记房屋所有权一样。它结束了他的竞选活动并逮捕了他。

Tsikhanouskaya代替他竞选，除了 "显示我对他的爱 "之外，没有其他动机。警察和官僚们允许她这样做。因为她能做什么，这个简单的家庭主妇，这个没有政治经验的女人？于是，在2020年7月，她登记成为一名候选人。与她丈夫不同，她很害怕。她告诉我，她每天早上醒来时都 "非常害怕"，有时她一整天都在害怕。但她还是坚持了下来。虽然她没有这么说，但这是令人难以置信的勇气。"你感觉到了这种责任，你带着对那些在监狱里的人的痛苦醒来，你带着同样的感觉去睡觉。"

阅读。当女性领导抗议运动时

出乎意料的是，Tsikhanouskaya获得了成功--不是因为她没有经验，而是因为她没有经验。她的竞选活动成为一场关于普通人站出来反对政权的运动。另外两位著名的反对派政治家在自己的竞选活动受阻后支持了她，当其中一位的妻子和另一位的女性竞选经理与齐哈努斯卡娅一起被拍到时，她的竞选活动变得更有意义：一场关于普通妇女的竞选活动--那些被忽视的妇女，那些没有发言权的妇女，甚至只是那些爱自己丈夫的妇女。作为回报，该政权将所有这三个妇女作为目标。Tsikhanouskaya收到了一个匿名威胁：她的孩子将被 "送进孤儿院"。她把孩子们和她的母亲一起送到了国外的维尔纽斯，并继续开展竞选活动。

民主革命是会传染的。如果你能在一个国家消灭它们，你可能会阻止它们在其他国家开始。
8月9日，选举官员宣布，卢卡申科赢得了80%的选票，这个数字没有人相信。互联网被切断，Tsikhanouskaya被警察拘留，然后被迫离开该国。大规模的示威活动在白俄罗斯各地展开。这既是一种自发的情绪爆发--民众对被盗选举的反应，也是一个精心协调的项目，该项目由年轻人实施，其中一些人在华沙，几年来一直在尝试使用社交媒体和新的通信形式。在一个短暂的、诱人的时刻，这种民主起义看起来可能获胜。白俄罗斯人分享了一种他们从未感受过的民族团结的感觉。政权立即进行了反击，并采取了真正的残酷手段。然而，抗议活动的气氛普遍是快乐的、乐观的；人们真的在街上跳舞。在一个不到1000万人口的国家，一天之内会有多达150万人出来，其中有养老金领取者、村民、工厂工人，甚至在一些地方还有警察和安全部门的成员，他们中的一些人把制服上的徽章摘下来，或者把它们扔进垃圾箱。

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Tsikhanouskaya说，她和其他许多人天真地认为，在这种压力下，独裁者会直接放弃。"我们以为他会明白我们在反对他，"她告诉我。"人们不想生活在他的独裁统治之下，他在选举中失败了。" 他们没有其他计划。

起初，卢卡申科似乎也没有计划。但他的邻居们有。8月18日，一架属于俄罗斯安全局（FSB）的飞机从莫斯科飞往明斯克。此后不久，卢卡申科的策略发生了巨大的变化。当时担任美国副国务卿的斯蒂芬-比贡（Stephen Biegun）将这一变化描述为转向 "以更复杂、更有控制的方式镇压民众"。白俄罗斯成为记者威廉-J-多布森（William J. Dobson）所说的 "独裁者的学习曲线 "的一个教科书式的例子。过去在俄罗斯成功用于镇压人群的技术被无缝地转移到了白俄罗斯，同时还有了解如何部署这些技术的人员。俄罗斯电视记者来到白俄罗斯，取代罢工的白俄罗斯记者，并立即加紧宣传，将示威活动描绘成美国人和其他外国 "敌人 "的作品。俄罗斯警察似乎补充了他们的白俄罗斯同事，或者至少给他们提供了建议，并开始实施有选择的逮捕政策。正如弗拉基米尔-普京很久以前就发现的那样，如果你能监禁、拷打或可能谋杀几个关键人物，那么大规模逮捕是不必要的。其余的人将被吓得呆在家里。最终，他们会变得冷漠，因为他们相信没有什么可以改变。

卢卡申科的救援方案让人想起六年前普京为叙利亚的巴沙尔-阿萨德设计的方案，其中也包含经济因素。俄罗斯公司为被民主的西方国家禁止的白俄罗斯产品提供了市场--例如，将白俄罗斯的香烟走私到欧盟。这其中有些是可能的，因为这两个国家有共同的语言。(虽然全国大约有三分之一到一半的人讲白俄罗斯语，但白俄罗斯的大部分公共事务是用俄语进行的）。但这种密切合作也是可能的，因为卢卡申科和普京，尽管他们以不喜欢对方而闻名，但有一个共同的方式看待世界。两人都认为，他们的个人生存比其人民的福祉更重要。两人都认为，政权的改变会导致他们的死亡、监禁或流放。

两人也都从 "阿拉伯之春 "以及更遥远的1989年的记忆中吸取了教训，当时共产主义独裁政权像多米诺骨牌一样倒下。民主革命是会传染的。如果你能在一个国家消灭它们，你可能会阻止它们在其他国家开始。2014年乌克兰的反腐、支持民主的示威活动导致维克多-亚努科维奇总统的政府被推翻，加强了这种对民主传染的恐惧。普京被这些抗议活动激怒了，这主要是因为它们开创了一个先例。毕竟，如果乌克兰人能够摆脱他们腐败的独裁者，为什么俄罗斯人不愿意做同样的事情呢？

卢卡申科欣然接受了俄罗斯的帮助，转而反对他的人民，并将自己从一个专制、宗法制的祖父--一种全国性的集体农场老板--变成了一个陶醉于残忍的暴君。在普京的支持下，他开始开拓新的领域。不仅仅是有选择的逮捕--一年后，人权活动家说有800多名政治犯仍在监狱中--而是酷刑。不仅仅是酷刑，还有强奸。不仅仅是酷刑和强奸，还有绑架，以及很可能是谋杀。

卢卡申科对法治的冷漠蔑视--他面无表情地否认他的国家存在政治压迫，也否认任何类似于体面的东西，这一点已经超出了他的国界。2021年5月，白俄罗斯空中交通管制部门强迫一架爱尔兰人拥有的瑞安航空客机在明斯克降落，以便逮捕其中一名乘客--流亡的年轻持不同政见者罗曼-普罗塔塞维奇；他后来在电视上公开招供，似乎是被胁迫的。8月，另一位流亡的年轻持不同政见者维塔利-希肖夫（Vitaly Shishov）被发现在基辅的一个公园里被绞死。大约在同一时间，卢卡申科政权开始通过强迫难民流跨越欧盟邻国的边界来破坏其稳定。白俄罗斯以旅游签证为诱饵，将阿富汗和伊拉克难民吸引到明斯克，然后将他们护送到立陶宛、拉脱维亚和波兰的边境，用枪逼迫他们非法越境。

安妮-阿普尔鲍姆：一个独裁者正在剥削这些人

换句话说，卢卡申科开始采取行动，仿佛他在国内和国外都是不可触摸的。他不仅开始违反自己国家的法律和习俗，而且还违反其他国家和国际社会的法律和习俗--关于空中交通管制、杀人、边界的法律。流亡者纷纷离开这个国家；齐哈努斯卡娅的团队争相在维尔纽斯预订酒店房间或Airbnbs，寻找支持手段，学习新的语言。茨哈努斯卡娅本人不得不做出另一个甚至更困难的转变--从人民选择的候选人到成熟的外交家。这一次，她的经验不足最初对她不利。起初，她认为，如果她能与安格拉-默克尔或埃马纽埃尔-马克龙交谈，他们中的一个就能解决问题。"我确信他们是如此强大，以至于他们可以给卢卡申科打电话说，'停！你怎么敢？ "她告诉我。但他们无法做到。

所以她试图像外国领导人那样说话，用复杂的政治语言说话。这也没有用。这种经历让人士气低落："有时候，谈论你的人民，谈论他们的苦难，看到那些与你交谈的人眼中的空虚，是非常困难的。" 她开始使用她在学校学到的平实的英语，以传达平实的东西。"我开始讲述能够触动他们心灵的故事。我试图让他们感受到白俄罗斯人的一点点痛苦"。现在，她告诉任何愿意听的人，她告诉我的就是这个。我是一个普通人，一个家庭主妇，两个孩子的母亲，我从政是因为其他普通人在牢房里被打得一丝不挂。她想要的是制裁、民主团结、对政权施加压力--任何能够提高卢卡申科继续执政的成本，以及俄罗斯让他继续执政的成本。任何可能促使白俄罗斯的商业和安全精英们放弃他的东西。任何可能劝说中国和伊朗退出的东西。

令她惊讶的是，齐哈努斯卡娅第二次获得了巨大的成功。她迷住了默克尔和马克龙，以及多个国家的外交官。7月，她会见了美国总统乔-拜登，拜登随后扩大了美国对白俄罗斯的制裁，包括几个行业（烟草、钾肥、建筑）的主要公司及其高管。欧盟已经禁止了一系列来自白俄罗斯的人员、公司和技术；在瑞安航空绑架案发生后，欧盟和英国也禁止了白俄罗斯国家航空公司。白俄罗斯和欧洲之间曾经蓬勃发展的贸易已经减少到了涓涓细流。Tsikhanouskaya激励人们做出自己的牺牲。立陶宛外交部长Gabrielius Landsbergis告诉我，他的国家为能接待她而感到自豪，即使这意味着在边境上有麻烦。"如果我们不能自由地邀请其他自由人进入我们的国家，因为它在某种程度上不安全，那么问题是，我们能认为自己是自由的吗？"

Tsikhanouskaya获得了许多其他支持者和崇拜者。她不仅拥有维尔纽斯的有才华的年轻活动家，还有波兰和乌克兰的同事。她提倡的价值观团结了数百万同胞，包括像尼娜-巴因斯卡娅这样的养老金领取者，她是一位曾被拍到向警察大喊大叫的曾祖母，以及像西亚雷-哈季耶维奇这样的普通劳动者，他是一位来自省城德拉希钦的50岁记者，因 "侮辱总统 "被定罪。在她身边还有数百名政治犯的朋友和亲属，他们和她自己的丈夫一样，仅仅因为想生活在一个有自由选举的国家而付出了高昂的代价。

不过，最重要的是，齐哈努斯卡娅的身边有我们曾经称之为自由世界的综合叙述能力。她有人权、民主和正义的语言。她有非政府组织和人权组织，这些组织在联合国和其他国际机构内工作，对专制政权施加压力。她得到了世界各地的人们的支持，他们仍然热切地相信政治可以变得更文明、更理性、更人道，他们可以在她身上看到这一事业的真实代表。

但这就够了吗？很大程度上取决于答案。

由多张身着深色西装的男性双手在红色背景上握手的照片组成的格子
迈克尔-胡茨
我们所有人的脑海中都有一个关于专制国家的卡通形象。顶层有一个坏人。他控制着警察。警察用暴力威胁着人民。有邪恶的合作者，也许还有一些勇敢的持不同政见者。

但在21世纪，这幅漫画与现实几乎没有什么相似之处。如今，专制国家不是由一个坏人来管理，而是由腐败的金融结构、安全部门（军队、警察、准军事团体、监视）和专业宣传人员组成的复杂网络。这些网络的成员不仅在某一国家内有联系，而且在许多国家之间也有联系。一个独裁国家的腐败、国家控制的公司与另一个国家的腐败、国家控制的公司进行交易。一个国家的警察可以武装、装备和训练另一个国家的警察。宣传人员共享资源--促进一个独裁者宣传的巨魔农场也可以用来促进另一个独裁者的宣传--以及主题，将民主的弱点和美国的邪恶等相同的信息打入人心。

这并不是说有一些超级秘密的房间，像詹姆斯-邦德电影中的坏人会面。新的专制主义联盟也没有一个统一的意识形态。在现代专制者中，有自称为共产主义者、民族主义者和神权主义者的人。没有一个国家领导这个群体。华盛顿喜欢谈论中国的影响，但真正把这个俱乐部的成员联系在一起的是维护和提高他们个人权力和财富的共同愿望。与其他时间和地点的军事或政治联盟不同，这个集团的成员并不像一个集团那样运作，而是像一个公司的集合体--称之为专制主义公司。他们之间的联系不是通过理想，而是通过交易--旨在消除西方经济抵制的影响，或使他们个人致富的交易--来巩固的，这就是为什么他们可以跨越地理和历史界限进行运作。

因此在理论上，白俄罗斯是一个国际弃儿--白俄罗斯的飞机不能在欧洲降落，许多白俄罗斯的商品不能在美国销售，白俄罗斯令人震惊的残暴行为被许多国际机构批评。但实际上，这个国家仍然是专制主义公司的一个受人尊敬的成员。尽管卢卡申科公然藐视国际准则，尽管他跨越国界触犯法律，白俄罗斯仍然是中国最大的海外发展项目之一。在过去的一年里，伊朗扩大了与白俄罗斯的关系。古巴官员在联合国表达了对卢卡申科的声援，呼吁结束对该国事务的 "外国干涉"。

从理论上讲，委内瑞拉也是一个国际贱民。自2008年以来，美国一再将更多的委内瑞拉人列入个人制裁名单；自2019年以来，美国公民和公司被禁止在那里做任何生意。加拿大、欧盟和委内瑞拉的许多南美邻国都保持着对该国的制裁。而尼古拉斯-马杜罗政权却从俄罗斯和中国获得贷款以及石油投资。土耳其为委内瑞拉的非法黄金贸易提供便利。古巴长期以来一直向该国统治者提供安全顾问以及安全技术。国际麻醉品贸易使该政权的个别成员获得了充足的名牌鞋和手袋。曾经的反对派明星、现在流亡西班牙的莱奥波尔多-洛佩斯（Leopoldo López）指出，尽管马杜罗的反对者得到了一些外国援助，但 "与马杜罗所得到的援助相比，根本无法相提并论。"

与白俄罗斯的反对派一样，委内瑞拉的反对派也有富有魅力的领导人和敬业的基层活动家，他们说服了数百万人走上街头进行抗议。如果他们唯一的敌人是腐败的、破产的委内瑞拉政权，他们可能会赢。但洛佩兹和他的持不同政见者实际上是在与多个国家的多个专制者作战。就像其他许多被不公正的经历所推动的普通人一样--就像白俄罗斯的斯维亚特拉纳和西亚里-齐哈努斯基，就像非凡的香港抗议运动的领导人，就像古巴人、伊朗人和缅甸人在他们的国家推动民主一样--他们正在与那些控制国有公司并可以纯粹出于政治原因做出价值数十亿美元的投资决定的人作斗争。他们正在与那些可以从中国购买先进的监控技术或从圣彼得堡购买机器人的人作斗争。最重要的是，他们正在与那些使自己适应其国民的感受和意见，以及其他人的感受和意见的人进行斗争。因为专制公司给予其成员的不仅是金钱和安全，还有一些不太实在但同样重要的东西：有罪不罚。

现代专制者是如何实现这种不受惩罚的？部分原因是说服了许多其他国家的许多人一起玩。
苏联是20世纪下半叶最强大的专制国家，其领导人非常关心他们在全世界的形象。他们大力宣传其政治制度的优越性，并在其受到批评时予以反对。1960年，当苏联领导人尼基塔-赫鲁晓夫在联合国大会的一次会议上挥舞着他的鞋子时，这是因为一位菲律宾代表对 "东欧和其他地方被剥夺了自由行使其公民和政治权利的人民 "表示同情。

今天，专制主义公司最残暴的成员并不太在乎他们的国家是否受到批评，或者受到谁的批评。缅甸的领导人除了民族主义、自我充实和继续执政的愿望之外，并没有任何真正的意识形态。伊朗的领导人对西方异教徒的观点充满信心。古巴和委内瑞拉的领导人以外国人是 "帝国主义者 "为由否定他们的言论。中国领导人花了十年时间对国际机构长期使用的人权语言提出异议，成功地说服了世界上许多人，这些 "西方 "概念不适用于他们。俄罗斯已经不仅仅是无视外国的批评，而是直接嘲弄它。今年早些时候，俄罗斯持不同政见者阿列克谢-纳瓦尔尼被捕后，国际特赦组织将他定为 "良心犯"，这是一个古老的术语，该人权组织自1960年代以来一直在使用。俄罗斯社交媒体巨头立即发起了一场运动，旨在吸引大赦国际注意纳瓦尔尼15年前的言论，这些言论似乎违反了该组织关于冒犯性语言的规定。大赦国际上钩了，并删除了标题。然后，当大赦国际官员意识到他们被巨魔操纵时，他们又恢复了这个标题。俄罗斯国家媒体嘲笑地笑了起来。这对人权运动来说不是一个好时机。

现代独裁者对国际上的批评无动于衷，他们正在使用积极的策略来回击大规模的抗议和普遍的不满。普京毫无顾忌地在今年早些时候举行了 "选举"，其中约900万人被禁止成为候选人，亲政府的政党得到的电视报道比其他所有政党加起来还要多五倍，官员窃取选票的电视片断在网上流传，投票数被神秘地改变。缅甸军政府不耻下问，在仰光街头杀害了数百名抗议者，包括年轻的青少年。中国政府吹嘘自己摧毁了香港的民众民主运动。

在极端情况下，这种蔑视会演变成国际民主活动家Srdja Popovic所说的 "马杜罗模式 "的治理，这可能是卢卡申科在白俄罗斯准备采取的做法。采用这种模式的独裁者 "愿意付出成为一个完全失败的国家的代价，看到他们的国家进入失败国家的行列"，接受经济崩溃、孤立和大规模贫困，如果这就是保持权力的代价。阿萨德在叙利亚应用了马杜罗的模式。而这似乎也是塔利班领导人今年夏天占领喀布尔并立即开始逮捕和谋杀阿富汗官员和平民时的想法。金融崩溃迫在眉睫，但他们并不在意。正如一位在该地区工作的西方官员告诉《金融时报》："他们认为，西方不给他们的任何钱都会被中国、巴基斯坦、俄罗斯和沙特阿拉伯取代。" 如果钱没有来，那又怎样？他们的目标不是一个繁荣昌盛的阿富汗，而是一个他们掌控的阿富汗。

对马杜罗模式的广泛采用有助于解释为什么在喀布尔陷落时西方的声明听起来如此可悲。欧盟的外交政策负责人表示 "对严重侵犯人权的报告深表关切"，并呼吁 "在民主、法治和宪政的基础上进行有意义的谈判"--好像塔利班对这些都感兴趣一样。无论是 "深切关注"、"真诚关注 "还是 "深刻关注"，无论是代表欧洲还是罗马教廷表达，都不重要了。像这样的声明对塔利班、古巴安全部门或俄罗斯联邦安全局来说毫无意义。他们的目标是金钱和个人权力。他们并不关心--深深地、真诚地、深刻地或其他地--他们的同胞的幸福或福祉，更不用说其他任何人的意见。

现代专制者是如何实现这种不受惩罚的？部分原因是说服了许多其他国家的许多人一起玩。其中一些人和一些国家，可能会让你感到惊讶。

红色背景上有星星和鹰头的翻转棋子投下阴影
迈克尔-胡茨
如果维尔纽斯的年轻持不同政见者讲述的故事让你感到愤怒，那么伊斯坦布尔的维吾尔人讲述的故事会让你魂牵梦绕。

几个月前，在一家服装店上方的一个炎热、没有空气的公寓里，我见到了卡尔比努尔-图尔荪。她穿着一件深绿色的长袍，袖子有褶皱。她的脸被一条紧绷的头巾框住，就像中世纪三联画中的圣人一样。在我们交谈时，她的小女儿穿着米老鼠紧身裤，玩着一个电子平板电脑。

吐尔逊是维吾尔族人，是中国以穆斯林为主的少数民族成员，出生在被中国人称为新疆的地区，许多维吾尔人称之为东突厥斯坦。吐尔逊有六个孩子--在一个有严格限制生育规定的国家里，孩子太多了。此外，她想把孩子们培养成穆斯林；这在中国也是一个问题。当她再次怀孕时，她担心会受到警察的骚扰，因为有两个以上孩子的妇女往往会受到骚扰。她和她的丈夫决定搬到土耳其。他们为自己和最小的孩子办理了护照，但被告知其他护照的办理时间会更长。由于她怀孕了，他们三个人还是来到了伊斯坦布尔；在她和女儿安顿好之后，她的丈夫为了家庭的其他成员返回。然后他就失踪了。

阅读。我的朋友一个接一个地被送进集中营

那是五年前的事了。此后，图尔逊再也没有和她的丈夫说过话。2017年7月，她与她的姐姐通话，后者承诺照顾她剩下的孩子。然后他们失去了联系。此后一年，图尔逊看到了WhatsApp上流传的一段视频。该视频拍摄于一家中国孤儿院，视频中的维吾尔族儿童剃着光头，穿着相同，正在学习说中文。其中一个孩子是她的女儿Ayshe。

吐尔逊给我看了她女儿的视频。她还给我看了一张她丈夫站在伊斯坦布尔清真寺里的照片。她不能和他们中的任何一个人说话，也不能和她在中国的其他孩子说话。她没有办法知道他们在想什么。他们可能不知道她在寻找他们。他们可能认为她是故意抛弃他们的。他们可能已经忘记了她的存在。同时，时间在流逝。那个穿着米老鼠紧身裤的孩子，在我们谈话时自顾自地唱歌，是在土耳其出生的孩子。她从来没有见过自己的父亲，也没有见过自己在中国的兄弟姐妹。但她知道有些事情很不对劲；当图尔逊因情绪激动而沉默片刻时，这个女孩放下平板电脑，用胳膊搂住她母亲的脖子。

虽然听起来很邪恶，但图尔逊的故事并不独特。我与图尔逊谈话的翻译是努尔西曼-阿不都拉西德。她也是维吾尔人，同样来自新疆，同样已婚，同样有一个女儿，同样现在住在伊斯坦布尔。阿布杜勒希德以学生身份来到土耳其，相信她有中国国家的支持。作为上海财经大学的毕业生，她学习了工商管理，学会了出色的土耳其语和英语，结交了华裔朋友。她从来没有想过自己是一个反叛者或持不同政见者。她为什么要这样做呢？她是一个中国人的成功故事。

2017年6月，Abdureshid与她的旧生活决裂，当时，在与她在中国的家人进行了一次普通的谈话后，他们不再接听她的电话。她发了短信，但没有得到回应。几个星期过去了。几个月后，她联系了伊斯坦布尔的领事馆--她让一位土耳其朋友帮她打电话--那里的官员终于告诉了她真相：她的父亲、母亲和弟弟被关在监狱里，每个人都被指控 "准备实施恐怖活动"。

伊斯坦布尔的另一名维吾尔族学生杰夫兰-谢尔梅特也受到了类似的指控。与Abdureshid一样，当他的母亲和其他亲戚不再回复短信时，他意识到事情不对劲。然后，他们在微信上屏蔽了他，也就是中国的信息传递应用程序。近两年后，他得知他们被关进了监狱。中国外交官指责他在埃及也有 "反华 "联系人。Shirmemet告诉他们他从来没有去过埃及。他们回答说，请证明这一点，然后补充说：与我们合作，告诉我们你所有的朋友是谁，列出你曾经去过的每一个地方，成为一名线人。他拒绝了，并且--虽然从气质上来说也不倾向于成为一个持不同政见者--决定在社交媒体上发表意见。"他告诉我，"我一直保持沉默，但我的沉默并不能保护我的家人。

土耳其有大约5万名流亡的维吾尔族人，那里有几十个、几百个，也许是几千个这样的故事。曾代表一些维吾尔人的土耳其律师伊利亚斯-多安(İlyas Doğan)告诉我，直到2017年，他们中很少有人在政治上活跃。但在朋友和亲戚开始消失在 "再教育营"--事实上是由中国政府设立的集中营之后，情况发生了变化。

吐尔逊和其他一群失去孩子的妇女举行了一次抗议活动，从伊斯坦布尔走到安卡拉，距离超过270英里，然后站在联合国大楼前，要求听取意见。阿布杜勒希德在土耳其反对党之一的会议上发言。"她告诉听众："我已经四年没有听到我母亲的声音了。演讲的视频被传开了；当我们在一个维吾尔族社区的餐厅吃午饭时，一个服务员认出了她，并为此向她表示感谢。

在另一个时代--一个具有不同地缘政治结构的世界，在人权语言还没有被如此全面地破坏的时候--这些持不同政见者在土耳其会得到很多官方的同情，这个国家通过宗教、种族和语言的联系与维吾尔族社区有着独特的联系。2009年，甚至在集中营开放之前，时任土耳其总理的雷杰普-塔伊普-埃尔多安就称中国对维吾尔人的镇压为 "种族灭绝"。2012年，他带着商人来到新疆，并承诺对那里的维吾尔族企业进行投资。他这样做是因为这很受欢迎。只要普通土耳其人知道他们的维吾尔族表亲发生了什么，他们就会同情。

然而，从那时起，2014年成为总统的埃尔多安自己却在国内反对法治、独立媒体和独立法院。随着他对前欧洲和北约盟友的公开敌视，以及他逮捕和监禁自己的持不同政见者，埃尔多安对中国的友谊、投资和技术越来越感兴趣，同时他也愿意响应中国的宣传。在中国共产党成立100周年之际，他所在政党的旗舰报纸在 "中国共产党的百年辉煌历史及其成功秘诀 "的标题下发表了一篇长篇大论--实际上是赞助内容。伴随着这些变化，政府对维吾尔人的政策也发生了变化。

近年来，土耳其政府以虚假的恐怖主义指控监视和拘留了维吾尔人，并驱逐了一些人，包括四名被送往塔吉克斯坦，然后在2019年立即被移交给中国。在伊斯坦布尔，我遇到了一位维吾尔人，他不愿透露姓名，他和他的一些家人曾在土耳其的一个拘留中心呆过一段时间，他说这是虚假的 "恐怖主义 "指控。亲中国的势力在土耳其媒体、政治和商业中的存在越来越多，最近他们热衷于贬低维吾尔人。奇怪的是，Abdureshid的演讲被从她参加的反对党会议的公共电视转播中删去。在社交媒体上开始流传后，她受到了土耳其政治家多乌-佩林切克的公开攻击，佩林切克是一位前毛泽东主义者，亲中国、反西方，并且相当有影响力。佩林切克在电视上将她描述为 "恐怖分子 "后，随之而来的是一波网上攻击。

2020年末，气氛恶化了，当时中国延迟运送COVID-19疫苗，恰逢北京向土耳其施压，要求其签署引渡条约，这将使驱逐维吾尔人更加容易。在反对党的反对下，土耳其和中国政府都否认这批疫苗的交付是以驱逐维吾尔人为条件的，但这个时间点仍然令人怀疑。伊斯坦布尔的几个维吾尔人告诉我，土耳其警察中的腐败分子已经直接与中国人合作。他们没有证据，土耳其律师Doğan告诉我，他对这种情况表示怀疑；但他仍然认为，尽管有各种古老的文化联系，土耳其政府可能不会介意维吾尔人停止抗议或悄悄转移到其他地方。

目前，在土耳其的维吾尔人仍然受到那里仅存的民主的保护：反对党、一些媒体、公众舆论。一个面临民主选举的政府，即使是有偏差的选举，仍然必须考虑到这些东西。在那些反对派、媒体和公众舆论不太重要的国家，平衡是不同的。你甚至可以在穆斯林国家看到这一点，这些国家可能会反对对其他穆斯林的压迫。巴基斯坦总理伊姆兰-汗（Imran Khan）直截了当地表示，在中国-维吾尔族的争端中，"我们接受中国的版本"。据称，沙特、阿联酋和埃及都曾逮捕、拘留和驱逐维吾尔人，而没有进行过多讨论。并非巧合的是，这些国家都在寻求与中国建立良好的经济关系，并购买了中国的监控技术。对于世界各地的独裁者和潜在的独裁者，中国人提供了一个类似于这样的方案。同意在香港、西藏、维吾尔族和更广泛的人权问题上跟随中国的步伐。购买中国的监控设备。接受大量的中国投资（最好是投资于你个人控制的公司，或者至少是给你回扣的公司）。然后坐下来放松，知道无论你的形象在国际人权界眼中变得多么糟糕，你和你的朋友都会继续掌权。

红色背景的黑白世界地图上有3把华丽的木质和天鹅绒椅子
迈克尔-胡茨
而我们有多大的不同呢？我们美国人？我们欧洲人？我们如此确信我们的机构、我们的政党、我们的媒体永远不可能被以同样的方式操纵吗？2016年春天，我帮助发表了一份关于俄罗斯在中欧和东欧使用虚假信息的报告--现在人们熟悉的俄罗斯利用社交媒体、虚假网站、对极端主义政党的资助、被黑客攻击的私人通信等操纵其他国家政治对话的努力。我的同事、欧洲政策分析中心的高级研究员爱德华-卢卡斯(Edward Lucas)和我把它带到了国会山，带到了国务院，也带到了华盛顿任何愿意倾听的人面前。得到的回应是礼貌性的兴趣，仅此而已。我们对斯洛伐克和斯洛文尼亚遇到这些问题感到非常遗憾，但它不可能发生在这里。

几个月后，它确实发生在这里。从圣彼得堡行动的俄罗斯巨魔试图以他们在中欧所做的同样方式改变美国选举的结果，利用虚假的Facebook页面（有时冒充反移民团体，有时冒充黑人活动家）、虚假的Twitter账户，并试图渗透到全国步枪协会等团体，以及将民主党全国委员会的黑客材料作为武器。一些美国人积极欢迎这种干预，甚至试图利用他们想象的可能是更广泛的俄罗斯技术能力。"如果是你说的那样，我很喜欢，"小唐纳德-特朗普给一位俄罗斯律师的中间人写道，他认为这位律师可以获得有关希拉里-克林顿的破坏性信息。2008年，小特朗普曾在一次商业会议上说："俄罗斯人在我们的很多资产中占了相当大的比例。"2016年，俄罗斯对特朗普商业帝国的长期投资得到了回报。在特朗普家族，克里姆林宫有比间谍更好的东西：愤世嫉俗、虚无主义、负债累累的长期盟友。

陷入与专制政权的个人、金融和商业联系的纠结网络中的美国大公司名单非常长。
尽管在全国范围内对俄罗斯的选举干预进行了喧闹的辩论，但如果我们对中国影响力行动的思考有任何迹象的话，我们似乎并没有从中学到什么。联合阵线是中国共产党的影响力项目，比俄罗斯的版本更微妙，更具战略性，其目的不是为了颠覆民主政治，而是为了塑造世界各地关于中国的谈话的性质。在其他工作中，统一战线创建了教育和交流项目，试图塑造中国流亡社区的氛围，并追求任何愿意成为中国事实上的发言人的人。但在2019年，当中国专家和民主促进者彼得-马蒂斯试图与中央情报局的一名分析员讨论联合阵线项目时，他得到了卢卡斯和我在几年前听到的那种礼貌性的拒绝。根据马蒂斯向国会提供的证词，"这不是澳大利亚，"中情局分析员告诉他，指的是一系列涉及中国和中澳商人据称试图在堪培拉购买政治影响力的丑闻。我们对澳大利亚出现这些问题感到非常遗憾，但这不可能发生在这里。

不能吗？争议已经席卷了许多由中国出资在美国大学设立的孔子学院，其中一些教师在提供良性的中文和书法课程的幌子下，参与了塑造有利于中国的学术辩论的努力--典型的联合阵线企业。中国国家的长臂也伸向了美国的中国异议人士。以中国最著名的民主活动家之一命名的魏京生基金会在华盛顿特区和马里兰州的办公室在过去20年中被闯入十几次。该基金会的执行董事黄慈平告诉我，旧电脑消失了，电话线被切断，邮件被扔进厕所。主要目的似乎是让活动家们知道有人在那里。生活在美国的中国民主活动人士，就像伊斯坦布尔的维吾尔人一样，被中国特工拜访，试图说服他们，或勒索他们，让他们回国。还有一些人发生了奇怪的车祸--人们在去参加每年在纽约举行的天安门广场大屠杀周年纪念仪式的路上经常发生事故。

中国的影响，就像更广泛的威权主义影响一样，可以采取更微妙的形式，使用胡萝卜而不是大棒。如果你顺应官方路线，如果你不批评中国的人权记录，就会有机会出现在你面前。2018年，麦肯锡在喀什举行了一次语气暧昧的公司务虚会，离一个维吾尔族拘留营只有几英里远--也就是图尔逊、希尔梅特和阿不都热西提的丈夫、父母和兄弟姐妹被关押的那种营地。麦肯锡有充分的理由不在务虚会上谈论人权问题。据《纽约时报》报道，在那次活动中，这家咨询巨头为100家最大的中国国有企业中的22家提供咨询，其中包括一家曾帮助在南中国海建造令美国军方震惊的人造岛屿的企业。

但是，挑选麦肯锡也许是不公平的。陷入与中国、俄罗斯和其他专制国家的个人、金融和商业联系的纠结网络中的美国大公司名单非常长。在2021年9月被严重操纵和故意混淆的俄罗斯选举期间，在俄罗斯当局威胁要起诉这些公司的当地雇员后，苹果和谷歌都删除了旨在帮助俄罗斯选民决定选择哪个反对派候选人的应用程序。这些应用程序是由阿列克谢-纳瓦尔尼的反腐运动创建的，该运动是该国最有活力的反对派运动，其本身不允许参与选举活动。纳瓦尔尼因可笑的指控仍在狱中，他通过推特发表声明，痛斥美国民主最有名的企业大亨们。

当互联网垄断者被热爱自由的可爱书呆子统治，拥有坚实的生活原则，这是一回事。当掌管它们的人既懦弱又贪婪时，情况就完全不同了......站在巨大的屏幕前，他们告诉我们 "让世界变得更美好"，但在内心，他们是骗子和伪君子。
其他可能被类似地描述为 "懦弱和贪婪 "的行业的名单也非常长，甚至延伸到好莱坞、流行音乐和体育。2012年，米高梅公司翻拍了一部冷战时期的电影，将苏联侵略者重塑为中国人，当发行商对中国人可能产生的反弹感到紧张时，该公司对影片进行了数字修改，将坏人改为朝鲜人。2019年，在休斯顿火箭队的总经理在推特上支持香港的民主人士后，NBA专员亚当-西尔弗与一些篮球明星一起向中国表示悔意。更为卑劣的是《Qazaq：金人的历史》，这是一部关于哈萨克斯坦残暴的长期统治者努尔苏丹-纳扎尔巴耶夫生活的八小时纪录片，由好莱坞导演奥利弗-斯通在2021年制作。或者考虑一下说唱歌手尼基-米娜在2015年的所作所为，当时她因在安哥拉举办音乐会而受到批评，该音乐会由该国独裁者的女儿何塞-爱德华多-多斯桑托斯(José Eduardo dos Santos)共同拥有的一家公司主办。米娜在Instagram上发布了两张自己的照片，一张是她披着安哥拉国旗的照片，另一张是她和独裁者女儿一起的照片，标题是这些不朽的文字。"哦，没什么大不了的......她只是世界上第八个最富有的女人。(至少在我们拍摄这张照片之前，有人这样告诉我）笑。Yikes!!!!! 女孩的力量!!!!! 这让我很有动力，!!!!"

如果专制者和贪污者不感到羞耻，为什么从他们的慷慨中获利的美国名人应该感到羞耻？为什么他们的粉丝要这样做？他们的赞助商为什么要这样做？

如果说20世纪是一个缓慢的、不平衡的斗争的故事，以自由民主战胜其他意识形态--共产主义、法西斯主义、激烈的民族主义而告终，那么到目前为止，21世纪是一个相反的故事。自由之家（Freedom House）近50年来每年都会发布一份 "世界自由度 "报告，它将2021年的报告称为 "被围困的民主"。斯坦福大学学者拉里-戴蒙德称这是一个 "民主倒退 "的时代。并非所有人都同样悲观--民主活动家波波维奇（Srdja Popovic）认为，专制者和他们的人民之间的对抗越来越严厉，正是因为民主运动正变得更加清晰和更好地组织。但是，几乎所有认真思考这个问题的人都同意，曾经用来支持世界各地的民主人士的旧外交工具箱已经生锈和过时了。

过去行之有效的策略已不再适用。当然，制裁，尤其是在某些暴行发生后匆忙实施的制裁，已经没有以前的影响力了。正如前副国务卿斯蒂芬-比贡（Stephen Biegun）所说，它们有时似乎是 "一种自我满足的做法"，与 "对最近的闹剧性选举进行措辞严厉的谴责 "不相上下。这并不意味着它们完全没有影响。但是，尽管对腐败的俄罗斯官员的个人制裁可能使一些俄罗斯人无法访问他们在费拉角的家，或者他们在伦敦经济学院的孩子，但他们并没有说服普京停止入侵其他国家，干涉欧洲和美国政治，或毒害他自己的持不同政见者。美国几十年的制裁也没有改变伊朗政权或委内瑞拉政权的行为，尽管其经济影响是无可争议的。很多时候，制裁被允许随着时间的推移而恶化；同样多的是，专制国家现在互相帮助，绕过制裁。

多年来，民主在美国外交政策中的中心地位一直在下降。
美国仍然在一些可以宽泛地称为 "民主援助 "的项目上花钱，但与专制国家准备投入的资金相比，其数额非常低。国家民主基金会是一个拥有独立董事会的独特机构（我是董事会成员），在2020年获得了3亿美元的国会资金，用于支持世界各地约100个专制国家和薄弱民主国家的公民组织、非国家媒体和教育项目。美国的外语广播公司在经历了特朗普政府仍然令人费解的摧毁它们的企图后，也继续在一些封闭的社会中充当独立的信息来源。但是，尽管自由欧洲电台/自由电台每年在俄语广播上的花费仅有2200多万美元（仅举一例），美国之音也仅有800多万美元，但俄罗斯政府却在整个东欧，从德国到摩尔多瓦到哈萨克斯坦都能看到和听到的俄语国家媒体上花费了数十亿美元。自由亚洲电台为缅甸语、粤语、高棉语、韩语、老挝语、普通话、藏语、维吾尔语和越南语广播所花费的3300万美元，与中国在其境内和世界各地的媒体和通信方面所花费的数十亿美元相比，显得微不足道。

我们的努力甚至比它们看起来还要小，因为传统媒体只是现代专制国家宣传自己的一部分。对于中国的 "一带一路 "倡议，我们还没有一个真正的答案。"一带一路 "倡议向全球各国提供基础设施交易，往往使当地领导人能够收取回扣，并获得中国补贴的媒体报道作为回报。我们没有相当于统一战线的东西，也没有任何其他战略来影响中国内部和关于中国的辩论。我们没有在俄罗斯境内开展在线影响活动。对于在美国国内Facebook上流传的由国外巨魔农场注入的虚假信息，我们没有答案，更不用说对抗专制国家内部流传的虚假信息的计划了。

拜登总统清楚地意识到这种不平衡，并表示他希望重振民主联盟和美国在其中的领导作用。为此，总统将于12月9日和10日召开一次在线峰会，以 "激发承诺和倡议"，支持三个主题。"抵御独裁主义，打击腐败，促进对人权的尊重"。

这听起来不错，但除非它预示着我们自身行为的深刻变化，否则意义不大。毕竟，"打击腐败 "不仅仅是一个外交政策问题。如果我们民主世界的人对此认真对待，那么我们就不能再允许哈萨克人和委内瑞拉人在伦敦或迈阿密匿名购买房产，或者允许安哥拉和缅甸的统治者在特拉华州或内华达州藏钱。换句话说，我们需要对我们自己的系统进行改革，而这可能需要克服来自从中受益的商业团体的激烈的国内阻力。我们需要关闭避税天堂，执行洗钱法，停止向专制国家出售安全和监控技术，并完全从最邪恶的政权撤资。这里的 "我们 "将需要包括欧洲，特别是英国，以及其他地方的合作伙伴--这将需要大量积极的外交活动。

争取人权的斗争也是如此。如果政治家、公民和企业不采取相应的行动，在外交峰会上发表的声明就不会取得什么成果。为了实现真正的变革，拜登政府将不得不提出艰难的问题并做出重大决定。我们如何才能迫使苹果和谷歌尊重俄罗斯民主人士的权利？我们如何才能确保西方制造商从其供应链中排除任何在维吾尔族集中营生产的东西？我们需要对世界各地的独立媒体进行重大投资，需要有一个接触专制国家内部人民的战略，需要有新的国际机构来取代联合国那些已经失效的人权机构。我们需要一种方法来协调民主国家在专制国家境外犯罪时的反应--无论是俄罗斯国家在柏林或英国索尔兹伯里谋杀人民；白俄罗斯独裁者劫持商业航班；还是中国特工人员在华盛顿特区骚扰流亡者。

这种战略的缺失反映的不仅仅是疏忽。多年来，民主在美国外交政策中的核心地位一直在下降--与美国国内对民主的尊重下降的速度差不多，也许不是巧合。特朗普担任总统的四年时间里，不仅表现出对美国政治进程的蔑视，而且表现出对美国历史上的民主盟友的蔑视，他把这些盟友挑出来虐待。总统将英国和德国领导人描述为 "失败者"，将加拿大总理描述为 "不诚实 "和 "软弱"，而他则与专制者--土耳其总统、俄罗斯总统、沙特统治家族和朝鲜独裁者--打成一片，他对这些人感到更舒服，这也难怪。多年来，他一直认同他们的无问西东的投资精神。2008年，俄罗斯寡头德米特里-雷波洛夫列夫(Dmitry Rybolovlev)向特朗普支付了9,500万美元--是特朗普四年前支付的两倍多--用于购买棕榈滩一栋似乎无人问津的房子；2012年，特朗普在阿塞拜疆巴库的一栋大楼上写上了自己的名字，该公司显然与伊朗革命卫队有联系。特朗普在 "专制公司 "里感觉非常自在，他加速了对规则和规范的侵蚀，使其在美国扎根。


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与此同时，一部分美国左派已经放弃了 "民主 "属于美国外交政策核心的想法--不是因为贪婪和愤世嫉俗，而是因为对国内的民主失去了信心。他们确信美国的历史是种族灭绝、奴隶制、剥削的历史，而不是其他的历史，因此他们看不到与斯维亚特拉娜-齐哈努斯卡娅、努尔西曼-阿布杜雷希德或世界上任何其他因经历深刻的不公正而被迫从政的普通人建立共同事业的价值。他们专注于美国自己的痛苦问题，不再相信美国能给世界其他国家带来什么。尽管挥舞着美国国旗的香港民主抗议者相信许多与我们相同的东西，但他们在2019年要求美国支持的请求并没有在美国引起一波重大的青年活动，甚至没有与1980年代的反种族隔离运动相提并论。

他们不正确地将在世界各地促进民主与 "永远的战争 "相提并论，没有理解现在在我们面前展开的零和竞争的残酷性。自然界厌恶真空，地缘政治也是如此。如果美国将促进民主从其外交政策中删除，如果美国不再关心其他民主国家和民主运动的命运，那么专制国家将迅速取代我们的位置，成为影响、资金和思想的来源。如果美国人与我们的盟友一起，不能与国外的专制主义习惯和做法作斗争，我们将在国内遇到它们；事实上，它们已经在这里了。如果美国人不帮助追究杀人政权的责任，这些政权就会保留其有罪不罚的意识。他们将继续在他们的国家和我们的国家里进行偷窃、勒索、酷刑和恐吓。