Growing Up Under Authoritarianism: Why I Became A Defender of Liberal Democracy

I Did Not Become a Liberal by Reading Liberalism

Many people discover liberalism through books. They encounter Locke, Montesquieu, Mill, Tocqueville, Popper, or other thinkers and gradually become convinced of the importance of individual liberty, constitutional government, and the rule of law. My journey was different. I did not become a supporter of liberal democracy because I first encountered liberal theory; I became one because I experienced authoritarianism.

For those fortunate enough to grow up in free societies, liberty can resemble air: ever-present, rarely noticed, and therefore easily taken for granted. Its value often becomes clearest only when it begins to disappear. As a Chinese dissident and refugee, my understanding of democracy comes less from political philosophy than from lived experience. I have known people who lost their freedom because they expressed political opinions. I have watched censorship distort reality, propaganda reshape collective memory, and fear gradually teach people what they should not say, ask, or even think.

That is why I feel uneasy when people in democratic societies dismiss liberal democracy as merely one political system among many, or romanticise authoritarian government as somehow more efficient. Liberal democracy is deeply imperfect. But the distance between an imperfect democracy and an authoritarian state is far greater than it can appear to those who have never experienced the latter.

The Country That Shaped Me

To understand why I became a defender of liberal democracy, it is necessary to understand the political environment in which I grew up. Since 1949, China has been governed by a political system in which one party monopolises national power. Competitive national elections do not exist, independent opposition parties are not permitted, and the courts, media, education system, and security apparatus remain subordinate to political authority.

Modern Chinese history shows repeatedly what can happen when political power operates without meaningful institutional restraint: the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen crackdown, and, more recently, the expansion of sophisticated digital surveillance and political control under Xi Jinping. These episodes differ enormously in their historical circumstances, but they share a fundamental problem: power concentrated without effective checks and balances.

My own family carries part of this history. During the Cultural Revolution, members of my family were persecuted and imprisoned for political reasons. Like many Chinese families, we inherited not only stories but silences. The political campaigns ended, but their effects did not. Fear, humiliation, mistrust, and habits of silence continued shaping family life across generations. Long before I understood political theory, I understood something more immediate: politics could enter a home, divide a family, and leave wounds long after the political moment itself had passed.

Discovering the History We Were Not Supposed to Know

I first began to understand the scale of political repression as a teenager. Around the age of fourteen, I encountered photographs and testimonies from the 1989 Tiananmen movement. Until then, the event had effectively not existed in my world. It was absent from textbooks, classrooms, mainstream media, and ordinary public discussion.

What shocked me was not only discovering what had happened. It was discovering that an entire chapter of history could be removed from public memory. I realised for the first time that authoritarian power does not merely attempt to control what people are allowed to say; it also tries to determine what they are allowed to remember.

As I began searching beyond official narratives, I encountered the stories of human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, labour activists, democracy advocates, and members of China’s underground civil society. State propaganda often portrayed such people as extremists, troublemakers, or agents of foreign influence. Yet many were simply ordinary citizens who believed that abuses should be documented, vulnerable people should be defended, and official lies should not automatically become accepted reality.

Learning Fear

My political involvement eventually brought me into direct contact with the security apparatus. I still remember my first police interrogation. There were no dramatic scenes and no theatrical threats. Instead, there was calm politeness, quiet warnings, and carefully implied consequences if I continued my activities.

Only later did I understand how effective this could be. Modern authoritarianism does not always need spectacular violence. Often, it works by cultivating uncertainty and fear. After that encounter, I began evaluating every sentence before speaking, every message before sending, and every meeting before attending. Eventually, the police no longer needed to be physically present. Their presence had already been internalised.

This is one of authoritarianism’s least understood consequences. Its power does not lie only in prisons, surveillance cameras, police stations, or censorship offices. It also lies in persuading ordinary people to police themselves. When people begin censoring their own thoughts and behaviour because they are constantly anticipating punishment, power has already entered the mind.

Over the years, I also watched people around me pay the price for dissent. Some were detained, some lost their jobs, some were forced into exile, and some became political prisoners. Many had done nothing more than participate in peaceful civic life: organising discussions, documenting abuses, helping vulnerable communities, signing petitions, or publishing articles. Yet within an authoritarian system, independent civic engagement itself can become suspicious. Each time someone disappeared from public life, the same question lingered in the background: who will be next?

This experience is not uniquely Chinese. Similar mechanisms of fear, isolation, self-censorship, and repression appear throughout the histories of Soviet dissidents, Eastern European opposition movements, Latin American democracy activists, and many others who confronted authoritarian rule.

Political Trauma and the Legacy of Authoritarianism

Political repression does not end when an interrogation ends or when a political campaign officially disappears. Authoritarianism leaves psychological habits that can survive institutions themselves: caution, silence, hypervigilance, mistrust, and self-censorship. This is one reason the work of Hannah Arendt has resonated so strongly with me. One of the deepest dangers of propaganda is not simply that people begin believing a particular lie; it is that they gradually lose confidence in the possibility of truth itself.

The result is not necessarily conviction but exhaustion. When people are confronted with endless contradictions, manipulated narratives, and uncertainty about what can safely be said, some eventually stop trying to distinguish truth from falsehood at all. For someone who has lived under authoritarianism, this is not merely an abstract philosophical problem. It is part of everyday political reality.

Why Democracy Must Be Liberal

These experiences gradually led me to a simple conclusion: democracy without liberty is not enough. Elections alone cannot guarantee freedom. Liberal democracy depends on institutions capable of limiting power—a free press, independent courts, meaningful political competition, a vibrant civil society, and enforceable protections for fundamental rights and minorities.

Its strength does not lie in producing perfect governments. Its strength lies in making correction possible. A free press can expose government failures. Independent courts can restrain executive overreach. Citizens can organise, protest, investigate, campaign, and challenge political authority without automatically becoming enemies of the state.

History demonstrates why these mechanisms matter most during moments of crisis. Amartya Sen famously drew attention to the relationship between democratic accountability, a free press, and the prevention of catastrophic famine. The point is not that democratic leaders are morally superior. It is that democratic systems create channels through which information can travel upward and political failure can carry consequences.

Some of the twentieth century’s worst human-made catastrophes occurred under highly concentrated systems of power, including Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. When nobody possesses either the institutional authority or the practical freedom to tell rulers that they are wrong, disastrous policies can continue long after their consequences have become obvious.

Democracy Can Decline

Supporting liberal democracy does not require blindness to its failures. On the contrary, taking democracy seriously means recognising how fragile it can be. Developments in countries including Hungary, Israel, and the United States have repeatedly shown that democratic institutions cannot simply be assumed to survive on their own.

Democracy is not self-sustaining, and elections alone are insufficient. Courts can be weakened, media independence can erode, minorities can lose protections, political opponents can be delegitimised, and executive power can gradually expand while the formal appearance of democracy remains intact. Institutions survive because people continue defending them.

Seeing Europe Through Different Eyes

When I first arrived in Europe, what impressed me most was not prosperity. It was freedom. I saw journalists questioning politicians openly, courts overturning government decisions, activists protesting in public, civil society organisations lobbying legislators, and citizens criticising governments without assuming that political disagreement would automatically bring police consequences.

For many Europeans, these scenes are ordinary. For someone raised under authoritarianism, they are extraordinary precisely because I know that elsewhere people have been imprisoned for attempting the same things.

Living in Europe has not made me believe that liberal democracy is perfect. I have encountered discrimination, bureaucracy, institutional failures, political hypocrisy, and serious shortcomings in European democracies. But those failures do not make authoritarianism an attractive alternative. They make democratic accountability more necessary.

Liberal democracy’s greatest achievement is not consensus. It is the creation of political space in which disagreement can exist without fear—where governments can be challenged, minorities can defend themselves, activists can organise, and political power remains contestable.

Conclusion: Liberal Democracy Is Not Utopia

People sometimes ask why I remain committed to liberal democracy. My answer is simple: because I have seen the alternative. I have seen political power turn history into taboo, truth into danger, and citizens into subjects.

I do not support liberal democracy because human beings are perfect. I support it precisely because we are not. Because people make mistakes, power must be limited. Because governments make mistakes, they must be criticised. Because majorities make mistakes, minorities must be protected. Because institutions can fail, citizens must be able to challenge them. And because truth is fragile, the space to investigate, question, remember, and speak must remain free.

Liberal democracy does not promise utopia. What it offers is more modest, and more important: mechanisms for limiting power, correcting mistakes, protecting disagreement, and resisting tyranny.

I did not become a defender of liberal democracy because I first read about freedom. I became one because I learned what life looks like without it.

Author: Pie Formosa

This article was produced by a participant from the European Liberal Youth LYMEC with the financial support of the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. The opinions expressed in this article  are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Council of Europe.