Yu Jie repeats a commonly held view about authoritarian regimes:

Harsh internal repression and unrestrained external expansion are two sides of the same coin.

The Chinese government’s treatment of dissidents and certain minorities is harsh and deplorable, but China’s “external expansion” is very far from unrestrained. Unless one counts China’s expanding commercial influence around the world, there is hardly any external expansion at all. There have certainly been expansionist regimes that governed cruelly and used atrocious methods to enforce their control, and there have been regimes that were relatively liberal at home and abusive in their overseas territories. Not every brutal authoritarian regime is expansionist and not every expansionist regime is brutal and authoritarian. Democratists try to link the two because they want to make their enthusiasm for democracy promotion relevant to policymakers concerned about security threats. Many dissidents naturally want foreign governments to take an interest in the internal political conditions of their countries, so they present the internal repression of authoritarian regimes as proof of the regime’s external aggressive intent. There is no necessary connection between the two.

Yu Jie believes that “China is a far greater threat than the former Soviet Union ever was,” but he never supports that claim except to refer to China’s brutal and repressive tactics. He complains that there are no “visionary politicians” in the West to “stand up to this threat,” but he never explains why “standing up to” China would serve the interests of any Western governments. He also doesn’t explain what “standing up to” China would entail or how it would benefit dissidents in China if Westerners in positions of authority did so.