Braga, Peter James; (2025) Using Relations with China for Authoritarian Persistence: Omnibalancing and Policy Emulation Between China and Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This dissertation examines how three post-Soviet regimes—Belarus, Russia and Ukraine—used their relations with the People’s Republic of China between 2006 and 2016 for the purposes of authoritarian persistence. It develops a regime-type-neutral reformulation of Steven David’s ‘omnibalancing’ framework, specifying seven enabling conditions that together render regime leaders more likely to seek external alignment in order to manage existential internal threats. To operationalise the framework the study pairs longitudinal sentiment analysis of 71,000 Russian-language presidential, ministerial, and prime-ministerial utterances (from speeches, press releases, and interviews) with explaining-outcome process tracing. Sentiment analysis maps when elites in Minsk, Moscow and Kyiv expressed markedly positive or negative attitudes towards China; process tracing then reconstructs the causal chains linking those inflection points to domestic crisis, engagement with China, and omnibalancing success or failure. The findings diverge sharply across the three cases. Belarus and Ukraine faced acute challenges. In Minsk, there were shrinking Russian rents and mounting protest. In Kyiv, there was elite fragmentation and the Euromaidan uprising. More than half of the enabling conditions were present in the two cases. Both governments sought large, low-conditionality Chinese credit lines and framed them domestically as guarantees of modernisation. Yet implementation lagged behind political need: the Belarusian strategy stalled in a loan-conditionality loop and the Ukrainian effort collapsed before funds were released. Russia, by contrast, satisfied only two enabling conditions; the Bolotnaya protests never became an existential threat to the regime, and Sino-Russian co-operation therefore served long-term strategic purposes in the form of authoritarian learning of internet policies, rather than regime-saving purposes. The dissertation thus qualifies broad claims that Chinese engagement can work towards authoritarian persistence. External alignment can furnish material, ideational, and symbolic resources for regime survival. However, the effectiveness of Chinese support for the autocratic state depends on state capacity, elite cohesion, and timing. Methodologically, the project demonstrates the value of combining big-data text mining with fine-grained process tracing, providing a replicable protocol for future research on the international dimension of authoritarian rule.

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