Bolstering Democratic Resilience to PRC Foreign Authoritarian Influence
A Field Guide
This field guide builds upon years of efforts by IRI to study and counter the many ways the People’s Republic of China (PRC)-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) party-state influences and corrodes democratic institutions around the world. While many people have studied and written about the PRC’s actions, there is relatively little work designed to guide civil society, journalists, academia, and concerned officials on the best ways to respond. This guide seeks to fill that gap, providing tools and strategies to bolster democratic resilience to authoritarian influence.
The guide opens with a brief overview of the PRC’s growing global influence and discusses why its negative impact on global democratic institutions has made a guide like this necessary. It next examines the various ways PRC economic influence, political influence, and influence in the information space can corrode other countries’ democratic institutions. It recommends the best responses to PRC influence, using case studies to illustrate how both the problem and its solutions play out in the real world. It closes with an appendix that includes the open-source tools and databases IRI and our partners have found most useful for researching and understanding PRC influence.
This guide offers the best responses to PRC influence as identified by IRI and our worldwide network of partners. However, this work is constantly evolving; we have learned that the best solutions come from deep local understanding of the problem, of potential windows for change, and of which narratives best resonate. Rather than being the final word, we hope this guide can be a start for readers who want to develop their own unique approaches to PRC influence together with a global community of like-minded journalists, activists, scholars, and politicians.
Top