The wars in Ukraine and Iran have laid bare a stark reality: some of the world’s most autocratic regimes are bound together by a far-reaching international mutual support structure. This loose but potent network operates not only across these conflicts, but well beyond them.
Thousands of North Korean troops have fought on the side of the Russians against Ukraine, in turn enabling Kim Jong Un’s “hermit kingdom” to learn new methods of modern warfare. The regime in Pyongyang also has accounted for upwards of 50 percent of the artillery used in some Russian units on the Ukrainian front.
The Kremlin also has had assistance from Iran, which supplied Russia with Shahed attack drones, as well as technical support and training to operate Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles, while helping Russia to develop its domestic drone production capabilities.
Since the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran in February 2026, Moscow has returned the favor, providing the Iranian authorities with intelligence to enhance battlefield awareness. North Korea, meanwhile, has supplied its technology and expertise to help Iran sustain parts of its missile capability.
The dictatorship in Belarus has played its own corrosively supportive role, serving as a staging area for Moscow for logistics and operations against Ukraine. Recent reports suggest that Moscow and Minsk may be “setting conditions to justify Russia launching drone strikes at Ukraine from Belarus.” The authorities in Minsk also have offered strong diplomatic backing for the authorities in Iran, including propaganda on the Iranian regime’s behalf condemning of US and Israeli strikes.
But one power, China, stands apart as a pivotal enabler of authoritarian regimes. It is in a class of its own when it comes to the scale, range, and sophistication of support it provides to authoritarian causes worldwide.
China Modernizing Authoritarian Rule – and Exporting It
It is clear now that, after the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy activists in 1989, the most consequential long-term global effect was not just that the Chinese Communist Party survived. It was that, over the subsequent decades, the party learned how to modernize authoritarian rule, build networks of like-minded regimes, and project authoritarianism outward into the international system.
In Russia’s war against Ukraine, for example, the Chinese leadership claims neutrality, but it supplies sizable amounts of “dual-use” components and materials and provides vital support for Russia’s military-industrial base. In late 2025, China also reportedly trained Russian soldiers secretly in China. These soldiers then returned to fight in Ukraine. As noted in a report released today by the Center for European Policy Analysis, where I work, the regime in Beijing has helped keep Russia afloat despite unprecedented western sanctions through trade, energy purchases, and diplomatic cover. As then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at the July 2024 NATO Summit in Washington, DC, China is “a decisive enabler” of Moscow’s war machine.
The Chinese authorities also nourish the Iranian regime’s war-making capacity. China reportedly pays for Iranian oil through covert channels, while helping Iran survive economically and sustain its military-industrial base. Beijing is integral for Iran’s capacity to access foreign funds and generate income to avoid economic collapse, with Chinese banks continuing to be embedded within Iranian money laundering and sanctions evasion networks. China by some U.S. government assessments serves as Iran’s most important economic partner and financial lifeline, helping it weaken the impact of western sanctions.
As with Moscow, Beijing also provides diplomatic and propaganda support for Tehran at the United Nations, for instance, but more broadly through the Chinese state’s formidable international information infrastructure, which skews public narratives against the United States and U.S. allies.
Of course China has long been an ally of North Korea. But Beijing’s support of like-minded regimes in Moscow and Tehran in the context of the current major military conflicts is extensive. It represents only the tip of the iceberg, however, in a far more sweeping support structure that China affords autocrats — and those aspiring to be — so that they can stay ahead of the curve in political, economic, technological, and ideological terms. By doing so, the Chinese party state suppresses fundamental freedoms at home and abroad.
Beijing’s Global Authoritarian Support Services
Over the past two decades, the Chinese government has made sustained investments in and brought to scale what can be seen as global “concierge services” on behalf of authoritarianism. Such “services” are often viewed by outsiders as piecemeal, rather than as an integrated instrument of global influence.
Simply put, the Chinese party-state has become the world’s most important external supporter of authoritarian standards and behaviors. Beijing affords a full-spectrum approach that makes repression cheaper, more technologically sophisticated, and more resistant to outside pressure.
First, China exports methods of authoritarian governance itself.
Beijing, for example, as I’ve noted previously, functions as a “stealth exporter of secrecy abroad.” As the Chinese government has projected its power internationally, its model of concealment has proliferated. Today, countries doing deals with Beijing discover that “they are expected to follow China’s lead, limiting transparency and accountability just as Chinese leaders do at home.” As a result, global norms of transparency and open government gradually buckle under pressure.
China trains African political leaders to maintain state power and single-party rule at the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Kibaha, Tanzania. The Nyerere School is supported by China’s Central Party School and offers ideological training to cadres from African liberation parties. While these parties “all ostensibly adhere to multiparty political systems, many have been largely intolerant of opposition challenges and have employed wide ranging measures to stifle, constrain, and even dismantle opposition parties.” A key goal of the school is to build party capacity to maintain and consolidate state control.
Other authoritarian-friendly training afforded by China that promotes state control includes upgrading the capabilities of foreign police and security officials in surveillance, riot management, and population monitoring. Beijing’s approach frames civil society and dissent as security threats rather than inalienable rights. China’s leadership privileges internet-governance models that normalize censorship, data control, and state-directed information systems. All of these elements bolster transnational repression, which Beijing also works hard to normalize. Transnational repression occurs when foreign governments reach beyond their borders to intimidate, harass, censor, or harm dissidents, media professionals, and activists living abroad. This represents the Chinese leadership’s effort to transpose its repressive governance standard to the wider world.
A second element of Beijing’s full-spectrum approach to spreading authoritarianism is economic support, which serves as a crucial vector for Chinese party state influence. China supplies loans, investment, and emergency financing to governments that Western institutions have isolated for corruption or human rights abuses. As noted above, China also weakens the impact of sanctions by continuing trade and investment with regimes such as Russia, Iran, Myanmar, and North Korea, reducing the leverage democratic states might otherwise possess.
China’s Digital Silk Road initiative is an example of Beijing’s ability to use an economic platform for technological leverage. Across Africa and other regions, Chinese companies have become major providers of mobile and fiber-optic networks, often supported by concessional financing that makes competing alternatives difficult to match. This creates opportunities for surveillance access, as well as longer-term political leverage. Governments whose communications systems depend heavily on Chinese-built infrastructure may become structurally reliant on Beijing’s continued support, reinforcing political and economic ties over time. Chinese companies such as Huawei, Hikvision, and ZTE sell facial-recognition systems, mass-camera networks, internet monitoring platforms, and “smart city” security systems across the developing world. Such tools are marketed for purposes of public safety, but too often are repurposed for identifying dissidents, monitoring activists, and censorship.
The authorities in China are rapidly refining methods of techno-authoritarianism, including predictive policing and population monitoring, enabling systems designed to identify potential threats before opposition movements can organize. China’s Integrated Joint Operations Platform, for instance, combines biometric, financial, and behavioral data to flag individuals deemed “suspicious,” invariably without transparency or public oversight. First developed and extensively tested in Xinjiang, this model gives governments the ability to detect and disrupt dissent before it develops into coordinated political action.
In some cases, Chinese firms have reportedly provided direct operational assistance to local security services. In Uganda, for example, as Josh Chin and Liza Lin observe in their book “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control,” Huawei employees reportedly worked alongside security services and helped authorities deploy spyware against political opponents in real time.
In the sphere of diplomacy, China uses its influence at the U.N. and other multilateral institutions to shield authoritarian partners from international pressure. Beijing has repeatedly opposed or weakened efforts to impose stronger international responses against regimes accused of severe repression, including Myanmar after the 2021 coup and Belarus after the 2020 protests, and more recently in the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Finally, China provides authoritarian governments with ideological backing. Through party-to-party exchanges, state media, and a range of development forums, Beijing promotes the argument that economic growth, political stability, and technological modernization do not require democracy or liberal rights. The message is clear: regimes can modernize while retaining centralized political control. This ideological emphasis is backed up by global information operations that put the United States and other democracies at a strategic disadvantage.
Together, these elements form a mutually reinforcing system that provides surge capacity to authoritarianism and affords the Chinese party state a competitive advantage.
In its own way, the leadership in Beijing has achieved the best of both worlds: it invests in intrusive activities the world over that have the effect of spreading authoritarian standards and behaviors such as secrecy, censorship, surveillance, and corruption. But relatively few observers see this for what it is: autocracy promotion.
Conclusion
The wars in Ukraine and Iran illustrate how authoritarian powers support each other in ways that are inimical to U.S. security and interests. China plays a crucial role more broadly, serving as the keystone for authoritarian assistance globally. Beijing is also cooperating more intensively with like-minded regimes in ways that afford further opportunities to bolster authoritarian standards and practices.
Given these circumstances, the United States and its democratic allies do not have much margin for error in this context of intense contestation. The extent of the threat is evident. As I observed in CEPA’s “China-Russia Meta Threat” report: “The United States and its democratic allies must…prepare for a long-term and comprehensive strategic competition with these authoritarian adversaries. The only safe assumption is that the leaders of Russia and China, both of whom prioritize regime survival above all else, will continue to adapt and challenge U.S. interests and security.” For these reasons, if the world’s democracies are to defend essential interests, they will need to act with far greater unity, purpose, and strategic coherence.
