China’s ‘Low Human Rights’ Advantage – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

What would have happened had the North not waged war against the South over slavery?

Many historians have pondered this question, but to Professor Qin Hui, a prominent Chinese economic historian, a likely outcome is that the South would have leveraged its advantage in low-cost labor to attract investment and manufacturing technologies and facilities from the North — and flooded the North with its cheap products, hollowing out the North’s economic base.

Sound familiar to today’s U.S.-China confrontation? Exactly.

That is precisely Professor Qin’s point. In his new book, Saving Mr. Democracy (originally titled Saving Mr. De, referencing “Mr. Democracy”), Professor Qin Hui lays out a sweeping, provocative argument that reframes how we should understand China’s meteoric rise and the parallel decline of global democratic vitality.

His central thesis: China’s success is not despite its authoritarianism, but because of it — a phenomenon he calls “the low human rights advantage.”

What Is the Low Human Rights Advantage?

Qin defines this advantage as a structural benefit authoritarian regimes enjoy when they are integrated into global capitalist markets while maintaining severe restrictions on civil, political, and economic rights. This is not simply about low wages or cheap labor — many developing democracies offer those. What sets China apart is its ability to suppress dissent, ignore due process, and override private rights with impunity, allowing it to rapidly mobilize resources, displace populations, and drive down costs in ways democracies cannot.

This creates what Qin describes as asymmetric competition between liberal democracies and authoritarian capitalist regimes. While democracies must negotiate with civil society, respect labor rights, and uphold the rule of law, China’s government can deploy sweeping powers to crush strikes, evict families, and silence criticism — all while reaping the benefits of global trade and foreign investment. (RELATED: Mounting Pressure on China)

In essence, China has exported cheap goods and imported global capital while externalizing the political and moral costs of its development onto the democratic world.

How the Advantage Works: Coercion as a Competitive Edge

Qin offers two emblematic examples of this “advantage”:

• China’s rural migrant labor system, in which millions of workers — legally tied to their rural hukou (household registration) — are treated as second-class citizens in the cities where they work. Denied equal access to education, healthcare, housing, and legal protection, they form a massive, disposable labor force that powers China’s factories, construction sites, and infrastructure projects at minimal cost.
• State-led land expropriation and forced demolition, where local governments and developers, backed by coercive power, can seize land for redevelopment projects with little or no compensation — often violently. This has fueled rapid urbanization and infrastructure growth, contributing to China’s impressive GDP figures — but at enormous human cost.

Qin argues that these are not incidental side effects of development. They are features — not bugs — of China’s political economy. And they represent a form of “competitive suppression”: the ability to undercut foreign competitors precisely because the regime does not allow workers, property owners, or civil society groups to push back.

A Cold War Without the Heat: The Global Democratic Crisis

Qin is clear-eyed about the implications. In his view, we are already in a “new Cold War,” though unlike the 20th-century version, it is more economic than ideological — a “cold” Cold War fought not with tanks and missiles, but with trade imbalances, supply chains, and regulatory arbitrage. (RELATED: Trumpian Geoeconomics)

During the old Cold War, the West and the Soviet bloc were largely insulated from each other economically. But today, authoritarian economies like China’s are deeply embedded in global markets. This makes the democratic world vulnerable in ways it wasn’t before. Western companies and governments are incentivized to turn a blind eye to repression in the name of profit and stability.

Worse still, this economic entanglement exerts downward pressure on democratic norms. Democracies are now tempted to erode their own labor, environmental, and privacy protections just to stay competitive. Qin calls this a “race to the bottom,” where “bad coins drive out good.” The longer democracies remain structurally exposed to these imbalances, the more fragile they become — not just economically, but politically and morally.

A Warning That Went Unheeded

What makes Qin’s argument especially compelling is that he has been sounding the alarm for decades. As early as the 1990s, he recalls, prominent Chinese economists privately celebrated this very advantage — some even described China’s system as “near-slave labor,” but insisted it was indispensable for success.

Western elites, meanwhile, largely welcomed China into the WTO in 2001, convinced that market liberalization would inevitably lead to political liberalization. (RELATED: The Dismal Science and the Trumpian Tariff Hullabaloo)

They were wrong. Instead of being “peacefully evolved” by capitalism, China adapted capitalism to fit authoritarianism. The “peaceful evolution” turned out to be one-sided, with global capital evolving to accommodate repression.

Qin recounts how, during the 2000s, he engaged with Western intellectuals about this paradox. In one dialogue, he predicted that without international labor standards or a push to globalize human rights, China’s model would ultimately erode Western democracies rather than the other way around.

This is why he used the analogy of the North-South economic confrontation before the Civil War. The Southern economy heavily relied on enslaved labor. This system generated immense wealth for Southern planters. By 1860, the South produced about 75 percent of the world’s cotton, and enslaved people were the region’s most valuable asset, worth billions in economic terms.

In contrast, the North’s economy relied on free, wage labor. Northern states favored policies such as tariffs to protect their economy, which often clashed with Southern interests. The South, reliant on exporting cotton to global markets, preferred free trade to keep costs low.

Over time, the South’s inhumane but efficient production system would attract productive resources away from and occupy the markets of the North. I, personally, heard Professor Qin explain the economic threat of the South’s slavery system to the North. At the time, experts laughed. Today, it feels uncomfortably prescient.

Democracy’s Internal Weaknesses

Qin doesn’t stop at critiquing China and the West’s naïveté. He turns a skeptical eye inward, toward the democratic world itself. He argues that democracy’s internal crises — identity politics, elite detachment, digital disinformation — have made it more vulnerable to external threats like China’s low human rights advantage.

He warns against blaming “bad leaders” or populist demagogues as the sole problem. These figures, he says, are symptoms of long-ignored structural decay, just as Gorbachev was not the cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse but the product of decades of stagnation.

He also pushes back against the idea that the internet inherently weakens democracy. In China, he notes, the early internet was a hotbed of democratic discussion — until the regime clamped down out of fear, not because citizens became “stupid.” The lesson: censorship causes civic decay, not openness.

A Chilling Parallel: Then and Now

Qin sees an unsettling historical parallel between the 1930s, when democracies floundered and totalitarian regimes gained ground, and our current moment. Just as Stalin’s Soviet Union found new life during the Great Depression thanks to Western disarray, today China’s authoritarian model has gained legitimacy in part because of democratic dysfunction in the West.

And just as the 1930s ended in global catastrophe, Qin warns that if democratic nations fail to recognize and rectify the structural imbalance created by the low human rights advantage, we may be headed not for another Cold War, but for a new Hot War.

Toward a New Democratization Wave — or a Darker Age

Ultimately, Qin’s work is both a diagnosis and a desperate plea. He does not offer a simplistic fix, but he insists that any solution must begin by recognizing what we’re truly up against. The challenge is not just China. It is the structural compatibility of authoritarianism with global capitalism and the failure of democracies to defend their own values at home and abroad.

Qin acknowledges that he may not live to see a new wave of democratization. But he hopes his work can serve as a record, a warning, and a rallying cry — to ensure that the mistakes of our era do not become the tragedies of the next.

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Shaomin Li is a Professor of International Business at Old Dominion University.

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