Moscow and Beijing are driving closer collaboration between authoritarian states and such networks help advance repression globally, according to researchers [at the] nonprofit Action for Democracy.

Here is the full report: Authoritarian Collaboration Index - Mapping the Global Autocratic Ecosystem (pdf)

The researchers built an index to track seven types of cooperation, including on funding, diplomatic activities, propaganda and tech sharing.

It found that China and Russia “sit at the center of global authoritarian collaboration” and were jointly involved in around half of all recorded activity. The report’s authors said that such cooperation generated compound returns because, for example, “surveillance infrastructure exported to one regime becomes a template for the next.”

• China and Russia sit at the heart of this axis of autocracy and, together with Iran, were respectively involved in nearly two-thirds of global “collaboration” events for the years 2024 to 2025.

• The authoritarian ecosystem extends far beyond China and Russia, with a mid-tier of regional powers and a long tail of smaller states and parties that sustain collaboration across narrower corridors.

• Authoritarian cooperation is becoming institutional: recurring forums, media alliances, and training platforms are hardening ad hoc coordination into durable infrastructure.

• Authoritarianism is also becoming routinised — practices like reciprocal sham election monitoring and cross-border dissident deportation now operate as low-friction, self-reinforcing defaults. And shared authoritarian imperatives consistently supersede ideological and religious divides, enabling cooperation between actors whose nominal worldviews would otherwise place them in opposition.

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[China's] Belt and Road Initiative has likewise expanded beyond its origins as a development and investment vehicle to serve as a framework for media institutionalization. Beijing has promoted standing media alliances such as the Belt and Road News Network, designed to disseminate favorable content and coordinate a pro-BRI information environment through a multi-country membership model and recurring
convenings. In the same vein, the Belt and Road Journalists Network provides for people-to-people information-sharing architecture, uniting nearly 1.7 million media professionals across participating states.

Crucially, these infrastructures are not confined to media collaboration.

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As historian and democracy scholar Anne Applebaum has observed, contemporary authoritarian cooperation is often driven less by ideological convergence than by shared regime-security and elite-enrichment imperatives—namely, sustaining incumbency, protecting patronage networks, and shaping aspects of the international environment in ways that reduce external constraints.

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