China has gotten a new image, but the dictatorship is the same

China is now more popular than the USA for the first time. Behind the country's improved image lies a long-term strategic work with soft power – but also benevolent voices in the West who naively embrace the idea of a benevolent superpower, writes Martin Gelin. An excerpt from Dagens Nyheter, 2026-10-17 19:30 Original source of the article: https://www.dn.se/kultur/martin-gelin-kina-har-fatt-en-ny-image-men-diktaturen-ar-densamma/ Martin Gelin: China has gained a new image, but the dictatorship is the same Get more from DN as a logged-in user Do you know you can create a free account on DN? As a logged-in user you can access several smart features. - Follow your interests - Newsletter In a world where many feel like frogs in a boiling pot, there are certain moments when it actually boils over. I recently listened to an interview with one of the world's most cited security policy analysts, Ian Bremmer, where he recounts that he stopped taking a so-called burner phone when traveling to China – a second phone that lacks private mobile history and data, which is recommended for most who visit the country from Western companies and authorities. – China already knows everything about me, including which phones I have. If I leave them behind, it only increases the risk of raising a red flag that leads to me being more thoroughly persecuted on the spot, says Bremmer. A consultant based in London, who regularly undertakes assignments for the world's most powerful politicians, assumes that China knows everything about him, even when he lands at the airport in Beijing. The scope of China's authoritarian ambitions stands in stark contrast to the romantic image of the country that has grown in recent years, mainly on digital platforms, among young Chinese enthusiasts in the West now called "Generation Xi," as well as among intellectuals, businesspeople, and established politicians. A historic wave of Chinamaxxing is underway not only on TikTok but also in think tanks, in both Europe and North America. It is connected to larger, world-political factors that are now making China more popular. In the summer, the Pew Research Institute reported that China is for the first time more liked than the USA in global trust measurements. Fresh opinion polls show that a majority in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada now say that it is "better to depend on China than to depend on the USA." This can largely be understood as a result of Donald Trump's active sabotage of the US image, but it is also due to a long-term strategic work from Beijing. As early as 2007, China's then-president Hu Jintao put forward a new strategy to strengthen the country's global influence, where he promised a "renewal of China that will be accompanied by the flourishing of Chinese culture. We must strengthen our culture to strengthen our soft power." If Hu Jintao wanted to build a cultural superpower, where China would compete with Hollywood, Xi Jinping has raised the ambition level to establish a new image as the world's benevolent future land – the first "electrified" country, led by innovation in green energy, electric vehicles, batteries, robots, high-speed trains, and AI – industries in which China has invested significantly more than both the USA and the EU. Instead of copying the USA, Xi wants to prioritize what China is actually good at – fast and comprehensive transitions in infrastructure, technology, and innovation. He has clearly expressed the goal to "win the battle for the most important technologies." In recent years, China's leading technology companies have launched open-source AI models that make them more attractive to other countries. Kevin Xu, a leading global investor in the AI industry, says in an interview with The New York Times that China has finally cracked the code for how to gain new friends around the world: "Open source is a form of technical soft power," he says. He calls it China's "equivalent to Hollywood and Big Mac." The USA's biggest geopolitical self-interest in the struggle for soft power is perhaps to let China take the lead in the green transition. The USA's biggest geopolitical self-interest in the struggle for soft power is perhaps to let China take the lead in the green transition. China is now producing more solar cells and soon even more electric vehicles than the rest of the world together. This not only gives China an industrial advantage but also contributes to new narratives about the two superpowers, where the USA appears backward-looking, while China can present itself as the generous and future-oriented actor. Respected left-leaning economists like Adam Tooze now consistently praise China as a future country, due to the achievements in solar energy, despite the country having simultaneously surpassed the USA not only as the world's largest single nation for climate-damaging emissions, but also as the country that has accumulated the largest emissions historically. Tooze's enthusiasm for China is hopefully not based on a secret craving for dictatorship, but rather on frustration with the USA's backward energy policy under Trump, but when Tooze uncritically repeats Beijing's own statements about China as the greenest nation in the world, he risks painting a country that at the same time is opening record amounts of coal power plants, punishing European countries that try to regulate the country's environmentally damaging industries and fast fashion companies (which currently account for more emissions than the global aviation industry). China has also, in just ten years, destroyed more than 10 percent of all forests in Africa, which destroys the carbon sinks that can actually tame the climate crisis. A political jockeying effect has now emerged in Western countries where right-wing extremist parties and the left-wing radical fringe meet in their craving for China, as an alternative to the "liberal establishment" in the homelands. When the German far-right AFD recently achieved great success in local elections, there were big headlines about the party's Putin-friendly politics, but less attention is paid to party leader Alice Weidel's deep admiration for China. Weidel, who speaks fluent Mandarin and has a doctorate in Chinese economics, recently accused Prime Minister Friedrich Merz of pursuing an economic "war against China" which she promises to end immediately. From the left, we see a growing movement of so-called tankists – after the dogmatic left that supported the Soviet tanks in Yugoslavia in 1956 – who enthusiastically defend authoritarian regimes like China, Iran, and Russia as alternatives to the "West." They gain momentum from popular podcasts from figures like Hasan Piker in the USA and Aaron Bastani in the UK, who reach millions of listeners with programs where they often defend China with Maoist loyalty. In recent years, China's digital propaganda has also become more sophisticated. When I spoke with the British journalist Peter Pomerantsev recently, he said that China has long produced more political disinformation than Russia, but now they have also become as strategically skilled as the Kremlin, using AI tools that make it much harder to detect linguistic and visual details that previously would have revealed that content comes from Beijing. The waves of positive stories about China on social media have replaced the image of an Orwellian surveillance state and a brutal dictatorship that imprisons dissidents, with a new story of a formidable future land, as an influencer summarizes it: "clean cities, futuristic tech and dancing aunts in the square." In the art world, we also see remarkable enthusiasm for China, which is claimed to offer a more dynamic and open art scene than the Western metropolises. In the venerable art magazine Art in America, an article was recently published with the sensational headline "I saw a fantastic art exhibition in China that would have been censored in the USA." There, an exhibition of contemporary art in Shanghai is praised for being politically radical in a way that is claimed to be impossible in today's USA. It may be the worst researched cultural article of the year, as it took me hardly two minutes to find exhibitions in the USA with practically all the artists shown in Shanghai. There is no reason to underestimate the US democratic crisis, but the most constructive reaction to the USA becoming 50 percent authoritarian is perhaps not to wholeheartedly embrace a country that is 100 percent dictatorship. The article's naive image of China as a creative free zone and an alternative to an authoritarian West is connected to a broader trend among cultural writers and left-wing intellectuals who have begun to see China as a more benevolent superpower, with only peaceful ambitions. In reality, China is now investing historic resources in building the world's largest army, with military power to expand the country's geographical borders. In reality, China is now investing historic resources in building the world's largest army, with military power to expand the country's geographical borders. Furthermore, China is today the single most important factor for Russia to continue its brutal invasion of Ukraine (even though Trump has made it clear that he also wants to help Putin). In Victor Galaz's important new book "Sea of Islands," he portrays two of the great existential risks of our time – the climate crisis and nuclear arms race – through the perspective of the Pacific island nations, where the threats from China are now becoming increasingly tangible. According to analyses of satellite images of Chinese military bases, the country has begun to prepare to resume underground nuclear tests and in the summer, China fired a ballistic missile into the Pacific from an atom-powered submarine built to carry nuclear weapons. For the first time in recent years, it has been discovered how extensive China's nuclear weapons program was even under Mao. Galaz writes that China "tried to build a reputation as a nuclear power with conscience and a unique inclination for rational self-control. New research shows a completely different picture. The country conducted 46 nuclear tests between 1964 and 1996. Documents show that Mao Zedong did not shy away from pursuing a future where half of the world's population was sacrificed in a nuclear war – if it could lead to a complete victory for socialism in the world." So, were countries really China's soft power, with these contradictory currents over the last decades? For too long, the Western world's view of China has been clouded by a kind of updated orientalism. Instead of the old Western chauvinism, where China was dismissed as an inferior, lagging culture, Western intellectuals, foreign policy experts and opportunists on both the left and right have now adopted an equally reduced and exotic view of China, where everything Beijing does is seen as the result of some brilliant, secret plan, with Xi Jinping playing four-dimensional chess with all Western leaders, who will never be able to understand the extent of his strategic genius. The old condescending attitude towards Chinese leaders is replaced by an equally prejudiced view of them as superhumanly absorbed. Pick up a fresh report on the new world-political order from a European think tank and you will be exposed to a steady stream of observers who wrap the most banal Chinese statements in a veil of mystery and are misunderstood as world-changing Confucian wisdom. For too long, the Western world's view of China has been clouded by a kind of updated orientalism. A concrete example of the consequences of this mythology is the popular anecdote from the meeting between the American diplomat Henry Kissinger and China's then-prime minister Zhou Enlai in the 1970s. When Kissinger asked Zhou about his opinion on the French Revolution, it was said he replied: "It is too early to say." This was long cited as an example of the Chinese leaders' incredible ability to see the long arc of history, proof of how far behind the West they were. The anecdote was based on a misunderstanding. Zhou Enlai was not referring to the French Revolution of 1789, but to the student protests in France in 1968, which took place shortly before the meeting with Kissinger. His answer was therefore reasonable; in the 1970s, it was too early to say how these protests would affect the future. It was only the Western overestimation of China's mysterious wisdom that attributed the quote a much deeper, completely false meaning. The anecdote's popularity explains why Western exoticism so often prevents a more nuanced understanding of China, which is why we end up in this irrational pendulum swing between extremes. Perhaps the most dangerous myth about modern China is that Xi Jinping has no imperialist ambitions, that he is completely satisfied with the power within the country's borders. On the contrary, China constantly drives its ideological and cultural struggle against the democratic world and expresses obvious ambitions to win the global battle for soft power, even when using hard methods. There is a reason they are building the world's largest army, that they are arming their nuclear arsenal, and engaging in an increasingly comprehensive information war. China wants much more power and much more influence over the land and people, far from its own shores.