Minxin Pei correctly points out that China doesn’t have allies around the world, but goes a bit overboard in identifying China’s one-party system as one of the main causes of this:

If geography conspires to deprive Beijing of durable security allies, the Chinese one-party system also seriously limits the range of candidates that can be recruited into Beijing’s orbit. Liberal democracies — mostly prosperous, influential, and powerful — are out of reach because of the domestic and international liabilities of forming an alliance with a dictatorship. China and the EU wouldn’t forge a security alliance; the rhetoric elevation of their relationship to a “strategic partnership,” is immediately made hollow by the existing EU arms embargo against China and incessant trade disputes.

There are many reasons why China and the EU wouldn’t forge a security alliance. For one thing, a common European foreign policy has been notoriously difficult to formulate, which is why the EU does not collectively wield nearly as much influence in international affairs as its wealth, population, and military power might otherwise allow. Even if some EU members saw value in a security alliance with China (which they wouldn’t), it would be virtually impossible to get the rest to agree to it. Besides, the EU has no need of a Chinese alliance. There would need to be a common threat that unites them, and no such threat exists. Russia has ceased to be a real threat to European security, the membership of the EU and NATO is almost identical, and alliances with the U.S. would preclude alliances with China. There are no shared Chinese-European security interests that a formal alliance would serve. If that changed in the future, and if it became valuable to have China as an ally, it is doubtful that China’s form of government would matter very much. Liberal democracies may or may not form alliances and patron-client relationships with authoritarian and one-party states depending on whether the latter have anything to offer the former, but the authoritarian and one-party nature of those states is not an insurmountable barrier to creating security ties. In other words, most liberal democracies have no interest in being “recruited” by China because a closer connection with China does not offer tangible benefits.

Mongolia seems a poor example to cite in support of Pei’s argument. Presumably any post-communist Mongolian government would want to keep its distance from both of its more powerful neighbors regardless of its regime type because of its past experience as a satellite or possession of neighboring states, and it would want to seek connections with other major powers to balance the influence of Russia and China. That said, Mongolia is not actually seeking any alliances with Western powers. This seems to be another case of throwing the word alliance around far too freely. Mongolia and the U.S. have been increasing their security cooperation recently, but Mongolia has been careful not to tilt too far against China:

Mongolia seems to be sensitive to Beijing’s concerns, and as a result, after the US president visited Mongolia, the Mongolian president immediately paid a visit to China. During the trip, a joint communiqué was released stating that both sides agreed not to enter into any military or political alliances directed at the other [bold mine-DL].

Neighbors with historic grievances or suspicions about major powers’ intentions are unlikely to welcome a neighboring major power’s embrace, and if they seek a security relationship with other major powers for their own protection this is based entirely on their desire to retain sovereignty and independence. To that end, they may want to demonstrate that they share the ideological sympathies of their would-be patron in order to gain support, and so they will build up a similar political system. It’s also possible that a majority in a particular country genuinely desires that political system for other reasons. Regardless, a difference in political systems isn’t usually why small states resist the embrace of former imperial masters and regional powers. It was the Polish experience of foreign domination by their neighbors that drew them into the orbit of Western powers before WWII, and it was their past experience of Russian and Soviet domination that drew them into the Western orbit once again after the Cold War ended. There were significant political differences between the interwar authoritarian government that aligned Poland with France and the post-Cold War democratic government that pushed for integration into Europe and NATO, but the constant was the desire to secure Poland against potential threats from its more powerful neighbors.

In any case, Pei’s discussion of China’s lack of any real allies should help put to rest some of the alarmism about the dangers of China becoming global hegemon at some point.