The current global landscape is fragmented and changing. The stability of the perception of the world order remains in question. Since the end of the Cold War, Western liberal democracy has seemed to cement its status as the dominant force on the global stage. Recently, however, the entire world has experienced democratic backsliding.
Autocratic Powers in the 21st Century
The authoritarian regimes driving the resurgence of autocratic power share common strategies of centralized control, suppression of dissent, and perhaps most importantly, projections of power. While inhumane, coercive, and mechanized authoritarian forces are slowly eroding the liberal international order and reshaping the global balance towards the East.
At the heart of the shift is the “Dictator Trio”: Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Xi Jinping of China. To the general public, these names generally sound the same, symbolic of all dictators. However, the specific way each of them wields power makes the three fundamentally different from one another.
Because of North Korea’s relative isolation, it heavily relies on nuclear posturing and close economic cooperation with newly emerging nations, especially those in Africa (e.g., training in Uganda), Southeast Asia (especially for cyber operations and sanctions evasions), and Latin America. This is especially dangerous due to the ideological manipulation and power that North Korea holds over these emerging economies. This is historically rooted in “Juche diplomacy,” a model for which Pyongyang sought to mold post-colonial states. Meanwhile, Putin’s Russia is currently entirely focused on the Ukraine War. It has primarily been driven by revanchism, a desire to reclaim Soviet-era influence and revenge through military power to reclaim lost territory with aggressive rhetoric and military policies.
Xi Jinping, by contrast, is a whole different challenge and threat to the global order. Though China has been corrosive to the current world order through its structural and strategic influence, China under Xi has fused authoritarian control with technocratic governance and economic dominance. China’s extraordinarily long history grants Xi a unique level of legitimacy and power. Even with the revisionist and modernized focus, which largely casts a negative light on pre-communist history, Xi has claimed selective legacies and nostalgic sentiments to strengthen nationalist legitimacy. This bolsters China’s soft power, especially in terms of diplomacy, economic partnerships, and ideological outreach. For instance, the “Three Summits” of 2022 illustrate how Beijing institutionalized its influence via the binding of Gulf Economies to Chinese digital infrastructure and energy cooperation frameworks. The main reason why Xi was able to gain respect from these Gulf leaders is due to his strategic recalling of pre-colonial trade routes between China and the Arab World. With that cultural affinity and long-standing historical ties, Xi plays into historical rhetoric and frames China and other states as equals. This is a good reason why countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, are more skeptical of modern Western nation-states than China.
Due to the increasing ideological foothold that these authoritarian regimes have claimed, democratic systems have been weakening around the world. Specifically, authoritarian regimes target elections, media, and economic networks, undermining transparency and stability. China and North Korea have been engaging with the Global South, echoing the past strategic alignments of the Cold War through partnerships and political blocs that challenge Western leadership. This is especially true in the Middle East and Africa, where China’s involvement in local economies, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, has strengthened diplomatic relations. This is compounded by China aiding the Global South through technological exchange, supporting innovation, and building human capital, further legitimizing China’s role in the Global South. Thus, the global south tends to have more positive opinions of China than the United States. The tension between the United States and China on the question of leading emerging economies and the upcoming world order is fracturing the current balance of the world.
At a conference at Yale, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce Shanghai, Eric Zheng, remarked that “policymakers in Washington want U.S. companies to leave China, [because] they see China as a threat, an adversary, [and] nothing more than competition.” However, what this zero-sum thinking misses is that China’s strategy isn’t about challenging America directly. Instead, China’s strategy is to use aesthetics and order to focus on repositioning Asia as the center of gravity of world politics. Reminiscent of 1984 by George Orwell, China is seeking to alter the memory of the world through its posturing. Whether through massive parades, martial discipline, or rewriting history, China has implicitly set a significant precedent in abolishing the previous liberal international order.
Strategies of Positioning or Posturing
China’s self-presentation is all about spectacle: military formations that synchronize and blur, leaders framed against blood-red backdrops, ancient Chinese motifs in drone light shows. These displays aren’t mere aesthetic displays, but show of power. They’re meant to impress China’s controlling governance.
To the domestic Mainland China audience, these displays are meant to unify and broadcast a message of stability. To the international audience, these displays are meant to be juxtaposed against the United States’ lackluster displays of power, contrasting its new, futuristic architecture and the outdated Western infrastructure. These parades broadcast China’s argument to the world that ironclad order triumphs over disorder. China also draws on centuries of Chinese cultural codes in these displays, such as discipline, hierarchy, and harmony. More specifically, they draw on the Confucian idea of li (ritual), stating that beauty is proof of virtue. China has rebranded authoritarianism into efficiency instead of oppression. Even if it is posturing, China sees it as an emblem of its civilization.
Core Case Study
Take the 80th Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese aggression: 12,000 troops, 500 weapon systems, and Xi flanked by Putin and Kim. From a Western perspective, this parade is clearly propaganda. However, propaganda is too small a word to describe the occasion. It’s a historical theatre, a deliberate rewriting of the history and memory of the 20th century: The United States’ version of World War II positions itself as the liberator and trailblazer of peace, while China’s version of history replaces the American narrative with a story of moving from victimhood to salvation. This precisely recalls an imagery of a phoenix, reborn from the ashes, leaving imperialism and the Century of Humiliation behind and transforming it instead into moral capital.
In this Chinese version, China is not just powerful, it is also righteous. Its Victory Day celebration combines spectacle and scripture, which philosopher Benedict Anderson may call a ritual of “imagined community.” This is the subtle genius of China. While America individualizes its triumphs via Hollywood war heroes, lone rangers, freedom as self-expression, and individualism, China collectivizes its memory. Its message isn’t “look what we did,” but more “look who we are,” and that message has traveled across the whole world.
China’s narrative has landed most persuasively in the Global South, where countries are disillusioned by Western paternalism yet still hungry for alternative models of hope. Lin & Wang (2025) note that China’s diplomatic outreach increasingly frames Beijing as a “partner in sovereignty” instead of a patron, which resonates far more deeply than the paternalistic framing of the United States. Leaders in Dhaka, Jakarta, and Colombo yearn for partners instead of neoimperialism. Through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, digital Silk Roads, and security partnerships, China has built a network that combines infrastructure with ideology. In Pakistan, Chinese projects are marketed as investments into respectful partnerships. In Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Chinese aid arrives without the moral lectures characteristic of Western institutions.
Thus, for many leaders across the Global South, Beijing’s message of “order without interference” sounds more appealing than Washington’s offer of “freedom without conditions.” This is especially compounded by China’s roots in anti-colonial memory, which dovetails with South Asia’s own historical wounds. In essence, China doesn’t sell power to the Global South; instead, it sells dignity.
Furthermore, the symbolic inclusion of foreign troops and observers at the parades and Asian leaders in Chinese media coverage contributes to a sense that Asia’s voice is finally being heard. Perhaps this is the most revolutionary aspect of China’s rise: Asian dialogue is speaking for itself as a dominant, independent voice instead of being shadowed or paralleling that of the West.
Still, China’s view of order is paradoxical. Its harmony is enforced, not organic, so it depends on silence. For their structure and enforcement to work, they have to repress dissent, erase minority stories, and tighten borders. The unity that it presents is maintained through internal fractures and fragmentation. This tension exposes the limits of China’s narrative power. Their order is so perfect that it’s brittle. Southeast Asian nations understand this: their pragmatism toward China is equally rooted in caution. Case in point, Vietnam tentatively cooperates with China economically while still preparing militarily through securitization in the South China Sea. India, too, resists absorption, building its own network of influence through the Global South.
Consequently, the question lies in whether China’s aesthetic of order can survive contact with Asia’s plural realities, or whether it will unravel due to its rigidity. For now, though, China only needs admiration, not unanimity. Even beyond geopolitics, China is playing a long-term game with epistemic legitimacy, i.e., the right to define what is “normal” in world politics. In reframing World War II and staging military order as moral order, elevating Asian unity as global virtue, China has tentatively succeeded in rewriting belief systems. The West once convinced the world that legitimacy comes from democracy and the rule of law. China, on the other hand, has proposed a new source: performance. In this view, legitimacy doesn’t come from elections and the political efficacy of the people. Legitimacy comes from the ability to deliver stability, growth, and continuity.
If this argument takes root in the Global South, international relations will evolve quickly. The world is currently rooted in a binary dynamic of liberal versus authoritarian and democracy versus autocracy. However, this doesn’t truly capture the moral imagination of the world beyond the West. Instead, the emerging world order is a contest of narratives of order, and China is currently in the lead.
The trio of Xi, Putin, and Kim may represent autocracy, but their alignment represents a realignment. China’s rise, especially, is economic, military, and, most importantly, a moral narrative.
When future historians describe this era, they might not speak of “great power competition” but instead of a civilizational shift from the Atlantic’s democracy to Asia’s discipline and concrete order. Especially with Global South countries quickly evolving through the Demographic Transition Model and Western countries facing the worries of an aging workforce, the Global South will soon determine the fate of the new world order.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Global South will follow China’s script. South Asia, Southeast Asia, and smaller powers across the Global South still have agency. They can determine for themselves what “order” means next. Still, ignoring China’s narrative of history, ritual, and diplomacy into legitimacy would be blindness. The parade was never just a spectacle to counter Trump’s weak military parade. It’s an announcement that the axis of history is tilting eastward. As the EU, IMF, UN, and other Western democracies debate themselves into paralysis, Asia, led, but not wholly defined, by China, is slowly but stably recapturing the global stage.
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: World leaders attending the 2025 China Victory Day Parade (2), Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made