China is often cited as a counterexample to the universality of democracy and human rights. But what distinguishes China is its disinterest in spreading its model to the rest of the world.

Western universalism was real, if rivalrous. The Soviet Union tried to spread revolution and Communism, France had its “Declaration of the Rights of Man” and the United States its self-image as “the city upon a hill.” But China engages with the world in its own interest, divorced from moral aims, with little desire to proselytize.

The Chinese vision is not universalist but mercantilist, and Beijing is interested less in remaking the world than in protecting itself from vulnerabilities of globalization, including the chaotic freedoms of the Internet. China, like Russia now, pushes back against Western aspirations and efforts to reshape the world in its own image.

There is much confusion about democracy in any case, argued Jacques Barzun, the cultural historian, in 1986. “A permanent feature of American opinion and action in foreign policy is the wish, the hope, that other nations might turn from the error of their ways and become democracies,” he wrote. But democracies differ, he said, and asked: “What is it exactly that we want others to copy?”

The essence of democracy, he said, is popular sovereignty, implying political and social equality. Easier said than done, given the tendency of governments and elites to presume they speak for the inarticulate masses.

Democracy cannot be imposed, but accrues, he suggested, dependent on “a cluster of disparate elements and conditions.” It “cannot be fashioned out of whatever people happen to be around in a given region; it cannot be promoted from outside by strangers; and it may still be impossible when attempted from inside by determined natives.”

That is a caution echoed recently by William J. Burns, head of the Carnegie Endowment and a former deputy secretary of state. The debate, he argues, is really about the meaning of individual rights in non-Western states, even those considered democracies, and the “authenticity” of inherited values.