President Biden made news this week when he labeled President Xi Jinping of China a “dictator.”

President Joe Biden called Chinese President Xi Jinping a dictator on Tuesday when speaking about a spy balloon that the U.S. shot down in February.

“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment is he didn’t know it was there,” Biden said in remarks at a campaign event in Kentfield, Calif., according to a White House pool report. “That was the great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.”

Personally, I’m really not convinced that Xi didn’t know about the balloon in advance. Maybe he didn’t know about that specific balloon but he probably approved the program which sent it and all of its predecessors up to spy on the US. I’m not sure why Biden would believe his denial.

But Biden was undeniably right when he called Xi a dictator. Any leader who can make billionaires and movie stars disappear on command is a dictator. The same could be said for Vladimir Putin of course who has set himself up to rule for life. And Kim Jong Un of North Korea. And Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. And Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. There are actually quite a few dictators in the world today with control over a significant percentage of the world’s population.

The Washington Post published an editorial today about the ways in which these dictators cooperate to maintain power. They learn what works by watching one another and then copying what works.

On July 20, [2012] Mr. Putin signed legislation — rushed through parliament in just two weeks — to give the government a strong hand over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which he suspected were behind the protests. He had long been apprehensive about independent activism, especially by groups that were financed from abroad. Under the new law, any group that received money from overseas and engaged in “political activity” was required to register as a “foreign agent” with the Justice Ministry or face heavy fines…

Then in 2015, Russia added a new law designating any organization “undesirable” if the government deemed it a threat to national security — effectively a ban…

Azerbaijan was the first among former Soviet republics to copy Russia’s 2012 law in 2013 and 2014. Then came Tajikistan in 2014 and Kazakhstan in 2015 with legislation directly limiting foreign funding to NGOs or sharply increasing bureaucratic burdens on them. The laws were largely borrowed from Russia…

Cambodia, ruled by strongman Hun Sen for decades, in 2015 imposed a law under which NGOs can be disbanded if their activities “jeopardize peace, stability, and public order or harm the national security, culture and traditions of Cambodian society.” Uganda, which has an active community of NGOs, imposed a restrictive law in 2016; the groups have faced suspensions, freezing of accounts, denial of funding and restrictions on freedom of expression, association and assembly. In Nicaragua, the dictatorship led by former Sandinista guerrilla Daniel Ortega adopted a “foreign agent” law in 2020 and a law restricting NGOs in 2022. It has canceled the legal registration of more than 950 civil society organizations since 2018.

While the smaller dictators copy whatever Russia and China do, Russian and China are cooperating to share information about controlling public opinion.

Beijing and Moscow have been deepening their ties for the past decade and controlling the flow of information online has been a focal point of that cooperation since Xi’s first trip to Russia as leader in 2013. Over the ensuing years that cooperation expanded through a number of agreements and high-level meetings in China and Russia between top officials driven by a shared vision for a tightly controlled Internet…

Among those deliberations — which are cataloged through meeting notes, audio recordings, written exchanges, and e-mails that have been verified by RFE/RL — Russian officials are seen asking for advice and practical know-how from their Chinese counterparts on a range of topics, including how to disrupt circumvention tools like VPNs and Tor. They are also seeking ways to crack encrypted Internet traffic as well as seeking tips from China’s experience in regulating messaging platforms…

The Chinese side asked for more details on the types of information blocked in Russia and how it monitors online discussions and processes personal data. Ren also asked for specifics and methods for Russia to use the Internet to “form a positive image” inside and outside the country…

“These high-level exchanges have been going on for some time and they’ve always been focused on understanding what the other side is doing in one area, where they see the other falling short, and what they might learn from each other,” Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, told RFE/RL. “Internet censorship has been a big part of it because it relates to political stability at home and the shared view that outside forces are meddling from abroad.”

If you think of dictatorship as an industry, Xi and Putin are the industry leaders who are pushing the technology forward and cooperating on shared goals. Then there are many secondary players who are just copying whatever they see the leaders do the best they can.

In March, Freedom House put out its annual report on democracy around the globe. The news was mixed. On one hand, for the 17th year in a row they found democracy had declined but the good news was that we may be approaching a turning point where that’s no longer the case.

Global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year.Moscow’s war of aggression led to devastating human rights atrocities in Ukraine. New coups and other attempts to undermine representative government destabilized Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Peru, and Brazil. Previous years’ coups and ongoing repression continued to diminish basic liberties in Guinea and constrain those in Turkey, Myanmar, and Thailand, among others. Two countries suffered downgrades in their overall freedom status: Peru moved from Free to Partly Free, and Burkina Faso moved from Partly Free to Not Free.

The struggle for democracy may be approaching a turning point. The gap between the number of countries that registered overall improvements in political rights and civil liberties and those that registered overall declines for 2022 was the narrowest it has ever been through 17 years of global deterioration. Thirty-four countries made improvements, and the tally of countries with declines, at 35, was the smallest recorded since the negative pattern began. The gains were driven by more competitive elections as well as a rollback of pandemic-related restrictions that had disproportionately affected freedom of assembly and freedom of movement. Two countries, Colombia and Lesotho, earned upgrades in their overall freedom status, moving from Partly Free to Free.

Freedom and democracy have been struggling against the dictators. And it should go without saying that the strongest nation in the world is the one that has probably kept the dictators from advancing even more quickly because they are hesitant to seize whatever they want so long as doing so comes with a risk.