Why freedom can be lost without a single shot, and what the free world owes those who refuse to surrender it.
By Félix Maradiaga, President of the WLC
Jimmy Lai, a publisher and a devout practising Catholic, has spent more than five years in a prison cell in Hong Kong. I never met him as a free man, but I know his son Sebastien and his daughter Claire Lai, and I have watched them fight for their father’s freedom with a dignity that has deepened my own commitment. Hong Kong should have closed the door on a dangerous illusion: the belief that prosperity automatically liberalizes dictatorships. The opposite happened. Prosperity strengthened the coercive capacity of the Chinese Communist Party, and a free society was suffocated through security laws, fear, and exemplary punishment. That lesson is not an Asian story. It is a universal one.
The distinction I am drawing is both moral and strategic. My concern is not Chinese civilization, Chinese culture, or the Chinese people, for whom I hold deep admiration. The Chinese people are not the authors of this system. They are among its first victims. The problem is the Chinese Communist Party as a political structure and a strategic actor, and that distinction must be held consistently. Within the World Liberty Congress I have the honor of working alongside courageous Chinese democrats and dissidents who resist at enormous personal cost. They are living proof that the Party’s claim to speak for all Chinese-speaking peoples is false.
That same falsehood is written across the lives of the Uyghurs, subjected to mass detention and a campaign to erase their culture, and across Tibet, where Beijing has pursued the systematic dismantling of a people’s identity. I want to honor the Tibetan people, inside Tibet and across the exile, who have preserved their language, their faith, and their sense of who they are against a regime determined to annul both their identity and their existence as a distinct people. Their endurance, like that of persecuted Christians and jailed dissidents, is a window into the Party’s operating code. A regime that perfects surveillance, forced conformity, and religious control within its borders will not behave liberally beyond them.
Here lies the trap that should concern us most. When Beijing invokes the Thucydides Trap, the supposed inevitability of conflict between a rising and an established power, it poses a question designed to induce a caution that slides into capitulation. The harder question is not only whether war can be avoided, but whether free societies can avoid ceding, step by step, the political, technological, and moral ground on which liberty depends. That is the danger of strategic passivity: preserving stability by tolerating coercion, confusing the absence of war with the presence of peace.
The most dangerous outcome of our era would not be a new Cold War. It would be an authoritarian peace. A world in which war is avoided but freedom retreats, in which trade continues but sovereignty erodes, in which summits produce stability but dissidents remain in prison and the capacity to say no quietly dissolves. That would not be peace. It would be defeat under another name. The Soviet Union threatened the free world from outside the arteries of global commerce. The Chinese Communist Party operates from within them, as manufacturer, creditor, standard-setter, and exporter of the surveillance technology that other dictatorships are eager to buy.
This is what makes the cooperation among autocracies so consequential. Beijing does not act alone. It anchors a widening collaboration with Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang, bound together not by ideology but by a shared fear of free societies and a shared interest in making repression sustainable. In the Berlin Manifesto, adopted in November 2025 at our General Assembly, the World Liberty Congress named this convergence for what it is, a coordinated challenge to freedom that demands an equally coordinated response. As President of the Congress, I have made confronting this authoritarian peace a central priority of my term, because the dictators have already learned to collaborate, and democrats cannot afford to remain divided.
What, then, should the free world do? The United States must rebuild the foundations of its own power and credibility, because a distracted and polarized America cannot lead. But this cannot be an American project alone. The scale of the Party-state can be matched only when the United States, Europe, the democratic Indo-Pacific, and free societies everywhere act as force multipliers rather than as separate actors. Fracturing that coalition is Beijing’s chief objective, and preserving it is the free world’s decisive advantage. The infrastructure, telecommunications, and data systems that will govern this century must be shielded from authoritarian control, not treated as mere technical convenience.
Taiwan deserves its own place in this strategy. It is not a bargaining chip but a democratic fact, a free Chinese-speaking society whose existence refutes the Party’s claim that liberty and Chinese civilization are incompatible. Protecting Taiwan’s freedom is not a regional concern. Its survival tells every dictator on earth whether coercion pays. So too does the defense of human rights, which belongs at the core of strategy, not its margins: the release of Jimmy Lai, the protection of the Uyghurs and the Tibetans, the freedom of every prisoner of conscience.
War with China would be catastrophic, and no serious person should want it. But avoiding war cannot mean making aggression profitable, and stability cannot mean silence. While Jimmy Lai remains in his cell, the authoritarian peace is the outcome that free societies, if they still mean what they say, must refuse to accept.
