It has recently been suggested that a link exists between the rise of authoritarian powers such as China and Russia, and the phenomenon of receding democracy. This paper quantitatively examines whether China, as an emerging autocratic power, is a force of autocracy promotion in the world. Against the background of a political economy argument, this paper argues that autocratic powers should prefer other states to become autocratic too. Reliant on the distribution of private goods to bind domestic supporters, autocratic leaders benefit from other similar small winning coalition governments, because it is easier to extract resources from other small winning coalitions which can then be distributed at home. Given these considerations, it is supposed that increased cooperation between autocrats is a cause of regime convergence rather than a mere consequence of regime similarity as is usually assumed. These hypotheses are tested by making use of an innovative data set on China’s foreign relations. The regression analysis finds that China’s cooperation is conditional on resource abundance and regime type. Moreover, the results suggest that increased cooperation between the Chinese government and other autocrats generally improves the likelihood of survival for dictators during the last decade.
