“Larry Diamond has no equal in the field of democracy studies. He is a giant not only in scholarship regarding how democracies rise, function and sometimes fail, he has long applied his knowledge to improve the practice of democracy through his work with international organizations and here at Stanford.” said Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL and FSI Senior Fellow. She added that “Larry Diamond is truly an inspiration. I can think of no better way to celebrate this extraordinary person than with an extraordinary honor like the Mosbacher Senior Fellowship in Global Democracy. I am so grateful to the Mosbacher family for all that they have done for CDDRL, and for this especially wonderful tribute to Larry’s life and work.”

Diamond has served on the Stanford faculty since 1985. He is a senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution and holds courtesy appointments in the departments of political science and sociology. He has taught and mentored thousands of students, including those in the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL, FSI’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP) program, and democracy activists from around the world through CDDRL’s Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program, among others at Stanford. Among his many accolades, Larry received the Richard W. Lyman Award in 2013 for his service and generosity to Stanford alumni, as well as the Dinkelspiel Award in 2007 for excellence in teaching and mentoring Stanford undergraduates.

Diamond has also been an institution-builder both inside and outside of Stanford, having made contributions not only to CDDRL and Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service (where he served as co-director from 2010-2016) but also to the National Endowment for Democracy where he serves as senior consultant to the International Forum for Democratic Studies. He has worked to shape public policy in many ways, from working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, to campaigning more recently on behalf of ranked-choice voting initiatives in a variety of American states and cities.

“What Larry presciently labeled a ‘democratic recession’ a decade ago has metastasized into a very dark period for global politics,” said Michael McFaul, the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “This newly endowed position will ensure FSI continues to be at the cutting edge of research, policy impact and education in the field of global democracy for many years to come.”

During his career of service to FSI and Stanford, Diamond has authored books like The Spirit of Democracy and Ill Winds, countless articles and edited books on democracy in various country and regional settings. He also served as a founding editor of The Journal of Democracy, which has become the most important academic source for writing on the subject.

“I am deeply honored by this generous gift from the Mosbacher family,” said Diamond. “Their extraordinary support will enable us to sustain and deepen our study of global democracy during an era when it faces its greatest challenge in decades. Working closely with brilliant Stanford colleagues, students and visitors is a great privilege, and I look forward to advancing the field well into the future.”

Learn More About Larry Diamond's Research

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is an interdisciplinary center for research on development in all of its dimensions:  political, economic, social, and legal, and the ways in which these different dimensions interact with one another.

"It has been a great honor to lead CDDRL over the past seven years," said Francis Fukuyama. "This has been a turbulent time for global democracy, which has forced many changes in the Center's research and training agenda. CDDRL has become a focal point for the study of democratic institutions, and is well-positioned to take on coming challenges. I'd like to thank the faculty and staff of CDDRL for all of their hard work and comradeship over this period, and wish Kathryn Stoner the best as she takes over the directorship."

An equally important aspect of CDDRL’s mission is engagement with future and current policymakers. CDDRL hosts an undergraduate honors program and graduate fellowships for students, and four unique leadership development programs to train and mentor emerging public service leaders from around the world.

“We really want our students to be not just multidisciplinary, but interdisciplinary,” Stoner emphasizes. “Different disciplines often look at the same problem and don't always come up with the best solution, because they're ignoring what another discipline can offer. We’re trying to develop unique perspectives and solutions to enduring developmental problems by working across disciplines.”

Prior to arriving at Stanford in 2004, Stoner was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson School). She was awarded the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship for outstanding junior faculty while at Princeton, and also served as a visiting associate professor of political science at Columbia University, and an assistant professor of political science at McGill University. A dual Canadian/American citizen, Kathryn Stoner has a B.A and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.

At Stanford she continues her research and teaching on contemporary Russia and nations in democratic transitions. She is the author or co-editor of six books, including her most recent, Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford, 2021).

“I am thrilled to take the torch at CDDRL from Francis Fukuyama," said Stoner. "He has provided outstanding leadership at CDDRL, and I look forward to continuing its successful undergraduate, graduate and faculty programming and to establishing new research directions on democracy, global populism, and modern autocracy, among others. CDDRL’s work is especially vital at a time when the veracity and efficacy of democracies worldwide is in question."

At first, I almost didn’t apply to the Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP). As someone with primarily Eastern European heritage, I doubted that I had a unique perspective to add to a coalition of students dedicated to learning more about Japan’s rich culture, economics, history, and society. In my mind, my personal experience couldn’t have been further from the course’s content. However, as a recent graduate of the RSP, my experience has completely shattered my previous misconceptions. Stanford’s RSP isn’t just an online program that gives students a comprehensive, in-depth view of Japan—it brings together a community of academically and socially diverse individuals from across the United States, along with their manifold perspectives, to build future leaders in the U.S.–Japan relationship. 

My path to the RSP began in Model United Nations (MUN) and my tenth-grade world history class that encouraged me to delve deeper into the political and ideological theories that govern and shape our society. Japan was a major focus for multiple of my MUN conferences, where I descended into multiple Wikipedia rabbit-holes on a wide range of topics, from Japan’s stance on sustainable development to socio-political effects on Japanese gender equality quotas. Furthermore, throughout my dual enrollment in a MicroMasters program in international jurisprudence and a course on East Asian culture and law, I learned more about the intricacies of Japan’s Eurocentric depiction in the geo-political sphere. In the international law resources I was exposed to, Japan was often portrayed as “lawless,” while the Western legal system was presented as the “key” to maintaining a proper rule of law in East Asia. Through the latter course which focused on the intersection between Japanese culture and law, Japanese law was accurately shown as an extension of the rich Japanese culture I had learned about in my history classes; in this regard, each cultural facet needed to be taken into account with the legal theory of the state. Since then, I’ve been hooked on understanding the role of implicit motives in shaping international policy and cultural precedent in jurisprudence. At the RSP, I have been able to pursue my passions alongside like-minded peers.

From the first week of the RSP, the diversity of students was evident. Each of my fellow peers offered their own outlook on topics ranging from “Religions in Japan” to “The Power of Popular Culture.” Across online forums and virtual classrooms, complex concepts were thoroughly discussed through witty back-and-forth banter, new ideas were buttressed by comprehensive research, and interconnected themes were explored via collaboration. The RSP’s inclusive and dynamic environment was one of my favorite aspects of the program. Weekly Zoom meetings with our instructor, Ms. Naomi Funahashi, and my peers allowed me to grasp unfamiliar concepts and take a deep dive into the things I didn’t previously know through active engagement. Moreover, at each virtual classroom, we had the opportunity to meet government officials, business leaders, and scholars at the forefront of U.S.–Japan relations. Each speaker’s ideas will forever retain importance to my understanding of the Japanese American experience, which remains equally relevant in the modern day.

The RSP’s commitment to educating the future leaders of the U.S.–Japan relationship is shown in its culmination. Near the final months of the 20-week RSP, students are given the opportunity to explore a topic of their choosing related to Japan or the U.S.–Japan dynamic. In my final paper, titled “The Rite of Rights: An Examination of Socio-Cultural Precedent in Japanese Law,” I coalesced my RSP education with my interest in international and Japanese jurisprudence. Even after its conclusion, the RSP continues the discussion on U.S.–Japan relations for the years to come by compiling and sharing all the research papers written within that year’s program. 

Ultimately, I am grateful to the Reischauer Scholars Program for creating a mosaic of different experiences and cultures by bringing together my peers. Throughout my involvement in the RSP, I have strengthened my belief in the cross-cultural intersections that bind us all together. It is through these bonds, along with empathy and compassion, that the RSP helps students weave themselves into the U.S.–Japan international tapestry, shaping the world. 

The next session of the Reischauer Scholars Program will run from February to June 2022. The application will open September 6, 2021.

This essay was first published in the political quarterly Democracy Journal. It is part of a four-essay collection, titled The Stakes in Asia, on the future of U.S.-Asian relations. This essay focuses on the nations of Southeast Asia, the three other essays on China, Japan, and South and North Korea. 

Geography and geology are not the same. Of the five mainland countries, four have seacoasts; only Laos is land-locked. All of the six maritime states are entirely or partly archipelagic. But Malaysia and Singapore are subcontinental in that they occupy the southernmost end of peninsular Southeast Asia. A projected three-stranded set of overland railroads connecting Malaysia and Singapore to mainland China, if completed, could socioeconomically enhance their subcontinental character. The strands would run southward from Kunming, the capital city of China’s Yunnan province, through Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam to Bangkok in Thailand and onward through Malaysia to Singapore. Completing these north-south connections has been a priority of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Fears of “mainlandization”—Sinification—have arisen in that context. China’s presence is already amply manifest in the northern parts of Myanmar and Laos, where economic and cultural enclaves have formed around the influxes of tourists and immigrants from the PRC. Expatriate and local Chinese dominate the economy of Myanmar’s second largest city, Mandalay, where young Ma Kyal Sin died. Mandarin is widely spoken there. If the BRI succeeds, if the north-south tracks are laid and maintained, and if traffic then flourishes back and forth to the mutual “win-win” benefit of China and all of the five Southeast Asian economies along the way, Beijing could further enlarge its footprint in the region.

Could does not mean will. The world economy shrank by more than 4 percent in 2020. Infrastructure is costly, and its returns are long-term. To varying extents in different countries, envisioned connectivity has become a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic, as governments have closed borders to reduce transmission of the virus and its variants. In 2019-2020, the pace of overseas lending by China’s policy banks slowed, and Chinese spending on megaprojects in the BRI fell to its lowest level ever. China’s latest five-year plan calls for “dual circulation,” abroad as well as at home, but the domestic economy is given priority.

That said, China’s economic growth in 2021 could reach 8 percent and thereby fuel Beijing’s campaign for influence in mainland Southeast Asia. In Laos, for example, aggressive Chinese lenders and corrupt local elites have indebted that country to the point that its lucrative electricity exports may soon be controlled by China. As one of the poorest members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Laos needs those revenues. Majority control over the country’s network of high-voltage power lines could give Beijing leverage that it could wield to ensure that Laos remains a compliant “friend” of China.

As illustrated by the case of China-facing Laos, the distribution of despotism in Southeast Asia tends to reinforce the mainland-maritime divide. “Many have said over the years that ASEAN is a club of dictators,” a Human Rights Watch official observed in 2016.

That harsh judgment is less of an exaggeration than one would wish. According to Freedom House, six of the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are “Not Free”: Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. More than half of ASEAN is despotic by this measure, and of those six authoritarian members, five are on the mainland. The only maritime autocracy is tiny Brunei, an absolute monarchy perched on the coast of Borneo facing the South China Sea. The remaining four ASEAN states—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore—are all maritime and rated “Partly Free.” The lone “Free” country in the region is Timor-Leste, which occupies three neighboring bits of territory in the Indonesian archipelago and is not a member of ASEAN, although it would like to join.

Three crude descriptions follow: First, mainland Southeast Asia is autocratic. Second, maritime Southeast Asia is semi-democratic—a middle or mixed position reflected in the balance between the two smallest sea-linked states by population, autocratic Brunei and democratic Timor-Leste. Third, ASEAN’s membership tilts authoritarian, being six-tenths autocratic, four-tenths semi-democratic, and zero tenths democratic by Freedom House standards.

China’s Role: ‘Stability’ Over Democracy

How should China and its strategy be factored into these comparisons? Is geography destiny? Xi Jinping and his advisors would like their Southeast Asian counterparts to think so. Consider Beijing’s proposal for an ASEAN-China Community of Common Destiny. Does “community of common destiny” express China’s empathy, its presumption, or its intention to possess and preempt? Beijing wants its Southeast Asian neighbors to treat the idea of sharing a community as reassuring proof of how much and how sincerely China cares about them and their region. But a common destiny precludes divergent scenarios and destinations. If China’s destiny is to remain a party-state dictatorship under one leader for life, does Beijing want that same fate to encompass the rest of Southeast Asia? Does it strive to “mainlandize” the entire region by reinforcing top-down rule in “Not Free” Southeast Asia and making the “Partly Free” maritime states “Not Free” as well?

China is not evangelically despotic toward its neighbors in an ideological sense. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is an unexportable mishmash—oxymoronic in theory, contingent in practice, and parochial by its very name. As a candidate for travel beyond the PRC, it lacks legs. Nor is China counting on converting Southeast Asians into loyal fans of a Chinese model. Beijing is vigorously trying to bolster its soft power and incentivize its neighbors to acknowledge and join a Chinese sphere of regional influence voluntarily. The ASEAN states collectively are already China’s largest trading partner and vice versa. But if public diplomacy and economic embraces fail, it is fatalism, not communism, that Beijing is betting on.

Shorn of all pretense, Xi Jinping’s hope is that China’s southern neighbors will look at a map and give up. Why? Because, as the PRC’s current top diplomat Yang Jiechi famously told his ASEAN counterparts in 2010, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.” As if big China were saying to its small neighbors: Our common destiny is to experience and accept the disparity between us, for we and you are destined to remain unequal, whether you like it or not. Take the South China Sea. We—the PRC—were always destined to absorb nearly all of that body of water based on Chinese sovereignty “formed over the course of over two thousand years,” to quote Jiechi in 2016.

The South China Sea is not lebensraum. It is not viewed in Beijing the way Berlin saw Poland in August 1939. Nevertheless, Xi’s China continues to manufacture destiny with Chinese characteristics in the heartwater of Southeast Asia by creating maritime facts on the water that Southeast Asians cannot reverse. These include China’s forcible possession of land features claimed by ASEAN’s littoral states; its conversion of those features into military bases from which it can threaten the region; and its orchestration of at-sea collisions, near-collisions, encirclements, and swarmings to stop Southeast Asians from fishing or from lifting undersea oil and gas even within their own Exclusive Economic Zones, all in clear violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Beijing hopes that someday its control over the South China Sea and the land features it has weaponized there will be “just a fact” that ASEAN’s members will have had to accept, their lack of China’s size and strength having convinced them that they have no choice but to kowtow. Rather than trying to seed the region with despotisms in China’s image, Beijing prefers to encourage Southeast Asian fatalism, and with it the passivity and resignation to subservience that sheer necessity would imply.

Although China’s political template is authoritarian, Xi is not an evangelist for autocracy in Southeast Asia. If, as has been claimed, Xi’s China is “ideologically bankrupt,” it has no surplus in ideas to spend convincing the world to mimic its doctrine. As exportable advice, the formula that Beijing does represent—regime legitimation by economic performance—is more pragmatic than ideological. There are, nevertheless, three ways in which Chinese foreign policy in Southeast Asia affects, and is affected by, the more despotic character of ASEAN’s mainland compared with its maritime member states.

As it seeks to influence its neighbors and the world beyond, Xi’s China may be ideologically promiscuous. But Beijing does love stability. When Adam Prezorskwi described democracy as “institutionalized uncertainty,” he noted its potentially beneficial effect. The unpredictability of electoral outcomes in a democratic system is stabilizing insofar as it motivates a losing candidate not to turn against the system but rather to run again within it. The chance of victory—positive uncertainty—may warrant another try.

But institutionalized uncertainty is anathema to the Communist Party of China. The power and authority of the CPC under a could-be leader for life supplies the institutionalized certainty that a stable dictatorship needs—or thinks it needs—to survive. Rapid economic growth and the systematic forestalling of civil society in China continue at least to postpone recourse to another Tiananmen massacre. In roughly comparable ways, institutionalized repression in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam has helped keep those dictatorships stable—so far. Beijing’s faith in the stabilizing power of institutionalized certainty makes dealing with foreign despots a subjectively rational choice. And doing so can at least simplify Chinese diplomacy. Democracies have more actors who need to be taken into account, including critics of China whose barbs are protected speech.

Consider Myanmar. Given Beijing’s economic and strategic stake in using Myanmar as a way station for greater Chinese access to the Indian Ocean, Xi is probably furious that Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has rendered Myanmar unstable and unpredictable. The general’s regime is not innately pro-China. But Beijing likely calculates that a democratic alternative to military rule could jeopardize China’s position even more. In the days immediately following the Tatmadaw’s seizure of power, Beijing did not even acknowledge that a coup had taken place, calling it a mere “cabinet reshuffle” and blocking the UN Security Council from criticizing what had occurred. Inside Myanmar, anti-China protests ensued, with accusations stemming from rumors that China might even have encouraged the coup due to its own despotic character and inclination. The rumors sound unfounded, but the fact that they circulated among democracy-minded opponents of the junta could only reinforce Beijing’s preference for military rule.

Xi’s China craves praise. Chinese “wolf warrior” diplomats in Southeast Asia have not been shy about urging and thus implicitly requiring recipients of Chinese “gifts,” including vaccines for local use against the COVID-19 virus, to publicly thank China for its generosity—preferably in profuse terms. In a democracy that values personal worth more than hierarchical deference and obligatory gratitude, kowtowing may be unpopular. In contrast, under a despot, obligatory upward fawning may be normal and thus more easily performed to please a foreign donor. An authoritarian patron may welcome such expressions of fealty as signs of submission. In addition, China’s often visceral dismissal of foreign criticism, compared with the normality of critique in democratic states, would suggest that Beijing prefers to deal with leaders of governments that enforce gratitude for reasons of material dependence on China, as opposed to those who refuse to self-censor. Looking back and forward toward the future, China’s history as a presumptuous empire and its Xi-led quest for “rejuvenation” to recover former glory, before its “century of humiliation” by the West, are not conducive to comportment as a Westphalian state dealing on a basis of equality with other states.

Third and finally, if authoritarian China is about product with little regard for process, whereas democratic society reverses those priorities, it stands to reason that China’s policymakers may, other things being equal, prefer to partner with autocratic heads of state who can get things done, never mind how.

Pushing Back and Looking Forward

Deterministically structural explanations of China’s influence in Southeast Asia—size, proximity, a magnetic economy—overlook the human factor: the capacity of the region’s people and leaders to question and reject dependence on tectonic conditions that stack the deck in China’s favor. To Beijing’s likely chagrin, that capacity is amply evident in the opinions of elite-level Southeast Asians who follow their countries’ foreign affairs. The ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s consecutive annual surveys of the views of these individuals have revealed their rising mistrust of China and, conversely, their rising trust of the United States.

Sampled in 2018, these elites mistrusted China and the United States in equal measure. In that year, 52 percent had little to no confidence that China would “do the right thing” in world affairs, while 51 percent said the same thing about the United States. But in 2019 and 2020, that pox on both houses has consistently and markedly evolved in China’s disfavor. By 2020, 63 percent of the Southeast Asian respondents mistrusted China, compared with 31 percent who mistrusted America. If that shift seems odd in light of the destabilizing idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump, it should be noted that the 2020 survey was conducted late in the final year of his presidency and the questions were about what China and the United States could be expected to do in the future. China’s hope for loyal neighbors received a further blow in the answers to a question about whether ASEAN, were it forced to align itself with one of the two big rivals, should side with China or with the United States. Although 39 percent of the respondents opted for China, 62 percent chose the United States.

Opinions are malleable. The popularities of China and the United States will fluctuate in tandem with future events. Although the survey research cited above has portrayed China as untrustworthy, expansionists in Beijing could take comfort in the data on Southeast Asian perceptions of relative power as a matter of fact, trustworthiness aside. Asked in 2020 which country or regional organization (such as ASEAN or the European Union) was the most influential economic power in Southeast Asia, 76 percent said China. Merely 7 percent named America. China won as well, though by a less overwhelming margin, when the same question was asked regarding political and strategic influence. That China is most consequential in those regards garnered 49 percent agreement, compared with 30 percent who thought the United States fitted that description. In effect, the survey inadvertently endorsed China’s cultivation of acquiescent fatalism in Southeast Asia—destiny over opportunity, realpolitik over moralpolitik—to the marginal advantage of Beijing.

China is not significantly or consistently more or less popular in mainland Southeast Asia than it is in the maritime part of the region. Mistrust of China, for example, is highest in mainland Vietnam and in the maritime Philippines, albeit for different reasons. The Vietnamese remember their history of resistance to domination by China and resent its current bullying in the South China Sea. The latter behavior also angers Filipinos, whose own post-colonial history has tended, with exceptions, to involve accommodation with the United States. But the existence of a structural straitjacket that a Sinocentric understanding of “common destiny” would imply is more evident in the countries located closer to China that are accordingly less able to ignore their huge, overbearing, and censorial neighbor.

China is not willfully spreading autocracy in Southeast Asia. China’s relations with its neighbors are motivated by interest not ideology. With the stark exception of Vietnam, however, one can envision an authoritarian symbiosis of sorts developing between despotic China and potential satellite despotisms along its southern land border. Myanmar could become a test case in this context. If the junta crushes the opposition, if ASEAN does little more than slap the wrist of its murderous member, and if Western outrage drives the Tatmadaw into China’s arms, the growth of a Chinese sphere of influence based on authoritarian connivance could someday even split ASEAN roughly into its northwestern-subcontinental and southeastern-archipelagic parts.

Nevertheless, at least for now, the bravery of the martyred Ma Kyal Sin and her co-protestors in Myanmar, and of their counterparts in Thailand protesting against their own military regime, evokes, at least for now, a less despotic and subordinated future for Southeast Asia. Authoritarian instability is not an oxymoron. China’s own domestic stability and prosperity are not guaranteed. Its soft power deficit is real, and its overreaching under Xi Jinping could continue to vindicate Southeast Asian distrust. In the months and years to come, major outside actors—the United States, Japan, and India among others—could work with autonomy-seeking Southeast Asian states to slow the Chinese juggernaut in Southeast Asia.

A fresh wave of democratization in Southeast Asia is not on the horizon. But the destiny of even the already undemocratic mainland portion of Southeast Asia is not—not yet at least—made in Beijing.