By Minxin Pei
The Chinese Communist Party’s placement of regime security over national security interests is typical of autocracies. It’s also very dangerous.
Veteran China watchers have always wondered what kind of foreign policy China would have adopted had the country been a democracy. There are two schools of thought. One, the realist school, insists that it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. States pursue power and seek security regardless of the type of political regimes in control. What influences the behavior of states is the amount of power they possess and the external constrains on the use of such power. From this perspective, Chinese behavior is determined by its power, not by its political regime. For example, China’s abandonment of its low-profile foreign policy in favor of a more assertive one in recent years is the result of growing Chinese power, not a change in its domestic political system (which has remained the same).
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