
Indo-Pacific populations have woven democratic norms — including transparent, accountable and inclusive governance under the rule of law — into the region’s cultural fabric. Japan established its first representative government in the late 19th century, nearly a century before its modern constitution, supplanting the intervening military rule, proclaimed that “sovereign power resides with the people.” South Korean civil society, including university students, academics and a burgeoning middle class, sustained a campaign for freedom that eventually restored direct presidential elections in 1987. Taiwan’s population, similarly, demanded more open political participation to propel a gradual shift from authoritarianism to democracy that took root in 1996, requiring the island’s leaders to answer to the people. Indonesia used constitutional amendments to dismantle an authoritarian regime and, in 1998, formalized a system of self-rule that values the peaceful transfer of power. Indian democracy is as ancient as the Greek system that gave democracy its name — from the words for people (demos) and rule (kratos). Indeed, the earliest forms of democracy were “so common in all regions of the globe that we should see it as a naturally occurring condition in human societies,” New York University professor David Stasavage wrote in his 2020 book, “The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today.”
Citizens across the Indo-Pacific support representative democracy, where voters choose leaders who decide what becomes law. At least 74% of respondents in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea rated such systems as “good” or “very good” ways to govern in a 2023 survey by the United States-based Pew Research Center. Notably, majorities in most of those countries call free opposition parties “very important,” according to previous Pew reports. The distinction separates legitimate democracies from one-party, autocratic regimes such as North Korea’s, which claim to be democratic based on staged elections. Young people in Malaysia, the Maldives, Mongolia and Timor-Leste also consider democracy the best form of government, according to International Republican Institute pollsters.
Throughout the region, people value the right to free speech. About 8 in 10 adults in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan told Pew surveyors in 2023 that people who disagree with their government’s actions should be able to say so publicly. The findings are particularly meaningful in Hong Kong, where the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has “gutted Hong Kong’s civil liberties by imposing two draconian national security laws, crushing the city’s pro-democracy movement by detaining and prosecuting elected representatives, eliminating civil society groups and independent labor unions, and shuttering pro-democracy media, among other measures,” Human Rights Watch, an international nonprofit, reported in June 2024.

The region’s enthusiasm for democracy is rooted firmly in pragmatism. Comparing income levels in the PRC with South Korea and Taiwan offers one example. All three experienced major economic gains over the past half century. Notably, Beijing’s economy at times has seen double-digit annual increases, although expanding state control has slowed growth since Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. However, the CCP has delivered limited prosperity to Chinese people, say researchers for the Atlantic Council, a U.S.-based think tank. “The authoritarian system has worked exactly as intended, delivering huge wealth for a small set of predatory elites while failing to generate prosperity for society at large,” policy experts Brad Lips, Kris Mauren and Dan Negrea wrote in their Atlantic Council essay, “The Continuing Debate About Freedom and Prosperity.”
The PRC’s gross national income (GNI) equaled about $13,400 per person in 2023 and the World Bank ranked it an “upper-middle income” country. In Taiwan and South Korea, GNI per capita was more than double the PRC’s. Fifty years ago, however, all three recorded similarly low per-person incomes. All three also were autocracies, although Seoul and Taipei functioned as military dictatorships and offered economic freedoms unavailable to Chinese citizens. “The two … that had free markets at the beginning of this period and maintained it, and also chose democracy in the early 1990s, grew [incomes] much faster than the PRC,” wrote Lips, Mauren and Negrea. “By the early 1990s, South Korea and Taiwan had escaped the ‘middle-income trap’: they had crossed the World Bank’s threshold between middle-income and high-income countries.
“Can the innovation and entrepreneurship needed for economic growth blossom in an authoritarian regime?” they added. “There are very few examples of countries with both advanced economies and authoritarian regimes for extended periods of time. … There is no guarantee that a system without effective checks and balances will continue to produce good leaders. Democracy, despite all its imperfections, has proven itself the form of government that is best at producing good leaders and removing bad leaders, and thereby leading to durable prosperity.”
PRESSURING ACCEPTED NORMS
Threats to democracy throughout the Indo-Pacific include military and economic coercion, information manipulation, election interference, and corruption. Nations that rely on the South China Sea for food and economic security are familiar with the PRC’s illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive tactics. Under Xi, the nation has escalated antagonism in the sea as part of its concerted attempt to rewrite international law. In other words, the PRC attempts to replace the rule of law — a democratic norm to ensure the law applies fairly to everyone — with a system of “rule by law,” which allows leaders to arbitrarily create and apply laws.
The PRC has long claimed most of the South China Sea, disregarding the rights of surrounding nations; the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which grants those rights; and the 2016 ruling of an international tribunal that invalidated the PRC’s vast claims.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
As its coast guard repeatedly obstructs Philippine fishing crews and military operations in Manila’s exclusive economic zone, Xi seeks to unilaterally change internationally accepted norms that have helped maintain decades of peace and stability in the region. The PRC’s coercion also is on display in and around the Taiwan Strait, another globally important waterway where Xi threatens to undermine the status quo with military drills, incursions into Taiwan-controlled waters and aircraft increasingly crossing the median line. The boundary once served as a mechanism to de-escalate tensions between the democratically governed island and Beijing, which claims Taiwan and threatens to annex it by force. Elsewhere, the CCP’s coast guard and maritime militia have harassed Indonesian, Malaysian and Vietnamese vessels and obstructed oil and gas operations. The aggression has backfired, argue analysts who say the tactics create anti-PRC sentiments. Even the region’s one-party states “still support a free and open Indo-Pacific rather than the international order China’s revisionist autocracy wishes to create — a hierarchical world in which expansionism is celebrated and great powers are free to suborn the independence of their neighbours,” wrote Michael Green and Daniel Twining of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia.
The PRC’s economic coercion stretches beyond the South China Sea. Australia, Canada, India, Japan and South Korea have faced financial pressure after standing up to Beijing. Among dozens of examples, the PRC:
Instituted tariffs on multiple Australian products because Canberra requested an international investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
Blocked exports of crucial rare-earth minerals and canceled tourism to Japan after the arrest of a Chinese fishing boat captain in Japanese-controlled waters.
Boycotted South Korean car manufacturers and restricted other products when Seoul said it would install a missile defense system to guard against North Korean threats.
“Such economic coercion subverts democracy and national sovereignty by trying to compel elected leaders to pay greater fealty to Chinese interests than to the interests of their own citizens,” Green and Twining wrote.
TECH THREATS
The CCP, in concert with Russia, aims broad influence campaigns toward global audiences, spreading false narratives on topics from excessive territorial claims to the quality of Taiwan’s self-defense arsenal. The authoritarian states take advantage of free and open internet platforms in other countries — as opposed to the highly censored networks available to their own populations — to sow discord in free societies, promote anti-democratic views and harass their own citizens overseas, according to human rights groups, policy analysts, internet freedom advocates and leaked CCP documents. Security agencies warn that malign actors use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to flood digital platforms with false or manipulated news, photos and other content that is difficult to separate from legitimate information.
“We need solidarity and sharing of technology to defend our democracies,” then-South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said during his nation’s 2024 Summit for Democracy. “We need to build AI and digital systems that can detect and combat those who use AI and digital technology to create fake news and spread disinformation,” he added, according to the Nikkei Asia news magazine.
Meanwhile, Beijing’s practice of international “elite capture” weakens democratic principles such as fair elections, government transparency and a free civil society. “Where governments in countries that are new to the China challenge are dazzled by the allure of trade and investment opportunities with China, it’s important always to remember that these allures really are packaged for the benefit of local ruling families and ruling elites,” John Fitzgerald, a professor at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology, said in a 2023 podcast from the International Forum for Democratic Studies, a U.S.-based research center. The PRC’s message to those leaders, Fitzgerald said: “If you want to follow the China model … you just have to do what we do. We crush civil society.”
In the Solomon Islands, the PRC has paid tens of millions of dollars into a discretionary development fund used by politicians, the Agence France-Press news agency reported. Critics suggest the “constituency development” money is a slush fund used to curry favor with key politicians. The Solomon Islands also delayed its 2023 election after signing a secretive security agreement with Beijing in 2022 that raised fears the CCP would base navy ships in the South Pacific.
The terms of such investment and “aid” arrangements — including the PRC’s notoriously opaque One Belt, One Road infrastructure development scheme — are often kept secret from voters and taxpayers, allowing elites to sidestep democratic norms such as accountability and freedom of information. The CCP’s investment has eroded the Solomon Islands’ democracy, Daniel Suidani, a prominent PRC critic reelected in 2024 to the provincial assembly in the island of Malaita, told Agence France-Press. “For the international community, I would like to say that we need your support,” he said. “We want to share the same freedom and liberty that everyone else shares.”

ANSWERING AUTOCRATS
Allies and Partners in the Indo-Pacific counter authoritarian pressure with economic aid, security assistance, and outreach to strengthen transparent and accountable governance. Australia’s support for free and fair elections, for instance, is a priority in its international development policy. Its electoral commission worked with Timor-Leste to create an independent electoral commission, assisted Tonga to institute a new electoral system, helped Nepal open its Electoral Education and Information Center, and has provided support to Papua New Guinea since 1998. Canberra also has electoral assistance programs in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka and Tonga.
Then-Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida — declaring that “Ukraine today could be Taiwan tomorrow” — called for defending democracy worldwide after Russia’s unprovoked 2022 invasion of its neighbor. Tokyo has tied overseas development assistance to supporting human rights, freedom and the rule of law and identified the commitment to democratic values as vital to national security. Since 2018, Japan has worked with the U.N. to strengthen legislatures in Fiji, Kiribati, Micronesia, Palau, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The latest four-year, $6 million phase of the project provides technical assistance, training and capacity building. “Legislatures play a critical role in ensuring that the voices of citizens are heard, that public resources are allocated fairly and transparently, and that policies are aligned with the needs of the people,” said Dawn Del Rio, of the U.N. Development Programme’s Pacific Office. “We are proud to partner with Japan on this important initiative.”
South Korea’s focus on safeguarding global democracy includes a recent commitment of $100 million to develop international digital transformations, boost technological capacity and build anti-corruption efforts. Yoon called it repayment for the multinational support South Korea received as it transitioned to democracy. The nation’s Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission has also collaborated with the U.N. and helped countries including Vietnam, Kosovo and Uzbekistan adopt corruption-prevention institutions, Nam Kyu Kim, a professor at Korea University, wrote for the East Asia Institute.
The U.S. Agency for International Development promotes fair, transparent governance in almost every nation of the Indo-Pacific, including supporting judicial reform in the Maldives, bolstering independent media in Indonesia, encouraging voter turnout in Timor-Leste, and partnering with Fiji to deliver an inclusive, peaceful and participatory democracy.

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Other pro-democracy efforts in the region include Indonesia’s Bali Democracy Forum to train civic and political leaders from Asia and the Middle East and Taiwan’s Foundation for Democracy, which supports civil society groups. Multilateral groupings, such as the Quad partnership of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S., also are united behind upholding common values and resisting coercion.
Democracy in the Indo-Pacific faces crucial challenges and key opportunities, members of the Sunnylands Initiative, a multinational group of scholars, thought leaders and civil society stakeholders from throughout the region, stated after an early 2024 gathering in Seoul. Even as freedom and human rights continue deteriorating in Hong Kong, Myanmar, North Korea and elsewhere, elections from the Blue Pacific to Northeast Asia offer openings for diverse voices, increased civic participation, and information sharing among established and emerging democratic systems. Sunnylands participants from Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Samoa, South Korea, Thailand and the U.S. joined partners across the region in pledging to cultivate democratic partnerships, promote governmental transparency, and identify technological opportunities and threats. “By focusing our efforts on the spaces that exist and remaining ever vigilant for new democratic openings, we can work to make a Free and Open Indo-Pacific a reality,” the group stated.