Confrontation is not the type of interaction you expect in a small, seminar-style master’s class at the London School of Economics. Polite debate, perhaps, but not confrontation.

Yet when I was in a LSE classroom just a few years ago, just such a pattern developed. The professor would point out the negatives of China’s approach to the developing world, highlighting issues like rising debt burdens and corruption in places like Sri Lanka and Zambia. A handful of Chinese nationals in the class would respond aggressively, accusing the professor and other students in agreement of spreading anti-Chinese propaganda or, even worse, being racist against Chinese people. 

My professor is not an anti-China ideologue; he is certainly not a racist. He is a careful long-time scholar of China’s relationship with countries across the developing world. My Chinese classmates were not uncritical thinkers, either; but years of centralized Chinese education — coupled with state propaganda — had severely limited their ability to think critically, particularly on issues involving the Chinese government. China’s crackdowns in Xinjiang were necessary to prevent terrorism there, they asserted. China’s actions around Taiwan were necessary because the Taipei government is comprised of runaway secessionists. China’s expansionism on the Indian border and South China Sea was necessary because of foreign, U.S.-led encroachment.

The pliant populations these systems produce do help keep leaders like Xi in power, but these systems’ limitations on thought stifle innovation, creativity, and all those good things.

Autocracy had destroyed their willingness to challenge preconceived notions about China by limiting their intellectual breadth — but made them more likely to accept the continued rule of the autocratic Chinese Communist Party. Chinese President Xi Jinping is likely happy enough with that trade-off. 

Something similar is true of many autocrats around the world, as well as the people their educational systems forge. The pliant populations these systems produce do help keep leaders like Xi in power, but these systems’ limitations on thought stifle innovation, creativity and all those good things. This is the bargain autocrats make: They keep themselves in power by undermining their peoples’ possibilities.

Russia’s centralized education system has served Vladimir Putin well enough from his perspective. Surveys suggest that majorities of Russians believe that his disastrous war in Ukraine is progressing well, and that “every real man should serve in the army.” Russian former classmates of mine — young people educated at the LSE, one of the U.K.’s top universities — continue to lament the West’s “imperialism” and attack Ukrainian “Nazism” on Instagram. Chinese students across the West have even threatened students and academics alike for criticism of the Chinese government, while Beijing continues to enforce its educational preferences abroad by intimidating Chinese students who sympathize with that criticism.

Even Singapore, a relatively soft autocracy, has struggled to allow the freedom of thought necessary to produce world-leading innovation. An attempted collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore to provide top-class liberal arts opportunities sputtered in 2021 because the Singaporean government wanted liberal arts without liberalism — without dissent and open discussion. 

The Singaporean government might be highly effective, and Singapore a highly successful country, but even top officials there were worried about the impact liberal education could have on their control of society. That fact alone testifies to the insecurity of autocrats everywhere. If even Singapore cannot tolerate a Western-style liberal arts program, imagine the fear of such education in Beijing or Moscow. 

That fear stems from autocratic governments’ belief that the goal of education is not to create innovative and creative thinkers, but the loyal citizens and necessary workers unlikely to challenge authority. Such education has proven effective in keeping Xi, Putin, and the Singaporean ruling party in power; but it limits people’s ability to speak openly and test new ideas, whether in the liberal arts or the sciences.

Ironically, it is only when autocracy’s adherents come to open states that they can experience free debate and express dissent in the classroom…

Those limits undermine domestic progress, keeping autocracies at least somewhat reliant on democratic countries’ innovations in health, business and the arts. Russia is failing to diversify its economy away from oil and gas, even though Moscow will need to do so eventually, because the country cannot rely on the skills of its people. China does far better than Russia in terms of such talent development and innovation. But the country is nonetheless missing out on the potential innovative power it will need as the West works to prevent Beijing from stealing or buying necessary technology for the development of key goods like semiconductors. 

Ironically, it is only when autocracy’s adherents come to open states that they can experience free debate and express dissent in the classroom — often by standing up for their autocracy against Western criticism.

But that taste of freedom is rarely enough to motivate change across the closed societies to which these elites return. It is hardly enough to create innovators and change-makers. And it is certainly not enough to transform Russia from the gas station it is today into a more mature economy, or to prepare China for the self-reliant future Xi wants.

The world’s most powerful autocracies continue to grow not because of these education systems, but in spite of them.

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