It was the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, who famously wrote that "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". He could have been describing our world today.

Democracy is under attack, authoritarianism is on the rise, dissidents are being locked up without trial, journalists are declared enemies of the state, corruption is rampant and champions of freedom are harder to find.

The international watchdog Freedom House has now recorded 13 straight years of declining global freedom. It isn't just countries like Russia and China, but now that historical beacon of democracy the United States is also in retreat.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The latter half of the 20th century was boom time for democracy, which accelerated after the end of the Cold War 30 years ago. Yet, countries that embraced democracy are now winding back those reforms.

Millions displaced or detained

Those who are facing the greatest threat are the world's most vulnerable: refugees, migrants and ethnic minorities. Freedom House, in its latest report, Freedom in the World 2019, says the scale and intensity of ethnic cleansing has increased.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or displaced in Syria and Myanmar. In Crimea, Russia's President Vladimir Putin has targeted ethnic Tatars who want to maintain their Ukrainian identity.

Crimea's indigenous population, the ethnic Tatars, has been targeted by Putin's forces. ( Reuters: Pavel Rebrov )

In China, Freedom House says up to two million ethnic Uyghur Muslims are being held in detention. Human rights groups speak of "re-education camps" where Uyghurs are allegedly tortured, politically indoctrinated and forced to learn Chinese language.

In his landmark study of brainwashing in China, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Robert Jay Lifton says the Communist Party forces "confession" of past "evil" and then re-education in the "image of the state". China, he says, pursues "absolute purity" and that "anything done to anyone in the name of this purity is ultimately moral."

Human Rights Watch has reported mass surveillance and suppression. Uyghurs claim they are being eradicated as a distinct cultural and religious group.

China's most powerful modern leader

China's rise is tipping the balance of global power and hastening what some have dubbed a "democratic recession" throughout the world.

China's leader Xi Jinping has established himself as a "leader for life" by removing presidential term limits. He has been described as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong and styles himself after the communist revolutionary.

He has cemented his rule by cracking down on internal opposition, jailing lawyers and writers and silencing critics. At the same time, Mr Xi has pursued his "China Dream" by expanding his country's economic influence through the massive, trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative, a new Silk Road of infrastructure and investment covering more than 68 countries, 65 per cent of the world's population and 40 per cent of global GDP. It has been called China's Marshall Plan.

At the same time, China is rapidly modernising its military, extending its strategic reach into the Pacific, South Asia and parts of Africa, and doubling down on its territorial claims in places like the South China Sea.

The old Deng Xiaoping era strategy of "hide and bide" — hide your strength, bide your time — has been replaced by a China aspiring to regional if not global dominance. The Economist magazine has already anointed President Xi the most powerful leader in the world.

China is shaking up the global order to the point where some analysts see an inevitable conflict with the reigning superpower, America. Harvard University defence strategist, Graham Allison, has warned of the Thucydides Trap.

It is a lesson drawn from the Peloponnesian War, when the ancient Greek historian Thucydides said the fear of the rise of Athens made war with Sparta inevitable.

Since then it has become shorthand for how a rising power threatens an existing order. Mr Allison says the "defining question of the global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides' trap".

An old Chinese saying puts it more simply: "Two tigers cannot live on one mountain."

Freedom waning in the US

In the 1990s, then-US President, Bill Clinton, lectured China's leaders that they were "on the wrong side of history". Since then, it is history that has turned on the West.

Freedom House says there are signs of waning democracy in America:

"The pillars of freedom have come under attack here in the United States. And just as we have called out foreign leaders for undermining democratic norms in their countries, we must draw attention to the same sorts of warning signs in our own country."

America — the West — is losing faith in its defining story: freedom. At the same time, China is increasingly sure of what its story is: economic liberalism paired with hard-line autocratic rule. More than a decade ago historian Azar Gat, writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, gave the China story a name: "authoritarian capitalism".

Mr Gat said it represented the greatest challenge to the global liberal order:

"As China rapidly narrows the economic gap with the developed world, the possibility looms that it will become a true authoritarian superpower."

That time is now.

China has been developing and expanding its influence in the contested South China Sea. ( Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative/Centre for Strategic and International Studies )

Political scientist and former Singapore ambassador to the United Nations, Kishore Mahbubani, in a recent book posed the question "Has the West Lost it?". He said after the end of the Cold War, the West went on autopilot.

In 2008, journalist and political commentator, Fareed Zakaria, published his book The Post-American World. It argued the United States was not vanishing, but other powers had risen to challenge it.

The West must defend democracy

No one can say we haven't seen this moment coming.

To meet the challenge of authoritarianism, the West needs to hold strong to liberalism and democracy, yet right now China can persecute millions of Uyghurs and the West can do little to stop it.

As Yeats wrote, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".

Stan Grant is the ABC's global affairs analyst.