The New York Times
By Gary J. Bass
June 15, 2019
ILL WINDS
Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency By Larry Diamond
China today holds as many as a million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in “political education” camps. Across China, Xi Jinping is pioneering a technological despotism of ubiquitous cameras, facial-recognition software and mass surveillance. In Vietnam, Belarus, Egypt and elsewhere, resilient tyrants rule through police monitoring, ethnic division and brute coercion. Burma’s liberalization ended in renewed military supremacy and the bloody expulsion of some 730,000 Rohingya Muslims into neighboring Bangladesh. In its 2019 report, Freedom House notes that last year, more countries became more oppressive than more free — the 13th consecutive year of more decline than progress.
