“Free, Partly Free, or Not Free”
Since 1973, one three-word verdict has shaped how the world talks about China’s political system — and about nearly every other country’s. Freedom House, a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog founded in 1941, publishes the annual Freedom in the World survey, rating political rights and civil liberties in about 190 to 210 countries and territories across editions. Its 2026 edition marked the 20th consecutive year of global-freedom decline, and its Hong Kong scoring — 59/100 in 2019 falling to 41/100 in 2026 — is currently cited on this site.
The organization
Freedom House describes its mission as supporting democratic change, monitoring freedom, and advocating for democracy and human rights, working through analysis, advocacy, and direct action: training and support to human-rights defenders, civil-society organizations, and journalists, including exchanges, grants, and technical assistance. Its board blends business and labor leaders, former senior officials, scholars, and journalists, and it presents itself as nonpartisan. It was founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and others, amid WWII-era concerns about threats to peace and democracy; the two were its first honorary co-chairpersons.
The surveys
- Freedom in the World (annual since 1973) — country-level ratings of political rights and civil liberties, coded by analysts under the organization’s published methodology; open access, with country reports and downloadable data.
- Freedom on the Net — the annual internet-freedom assessment.
- Nations in Transit — the annual assessment of post-communist states.
- An earlier Freedom of the Press survey was later folded into other products.
For this site’s purposes, Freedom in the World and Freedom on the Net are the standard comparative-framing references for China’s political-rights and civil-liberties environment.
The criticism it carries
Watchdog summaries attribute a majority of Freedom House’s funding to U.S. federal grants — one third-party watchdog cites roughly $35 million of roughly $40 million in 2018 revenue as federal grants, naming USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. That figure needs confirmation from audited financials and is presented here as attributed, not as an established fact — and it is not adopted here as a finding about rating bias. Freedom House’s funding is a routinely raised criticism; it is recorded as such.
On method: the Freedom in the World ratings are analyst-coded judgments, not directly observed quantities. China-related assessments are contested by the PRC government and other critics; no adjudication is offered here. China is assessed without the kind of in-country fieldwork available in open societies — a limitation of the method.
A note on names: Freedom House Detroit (an unrelated asylum-seeker shelter) and other same-name entities are explicitly not this organization.
Using Freedom House in research
Use the FIW and FoTN ratings as comparative framing with the methodology caveat stated alongside the numbers. The full Freedom in the World dataset record sits in the Dataset Directory;
this institution page is its publisher context. Do not infer reliability from the organization’s prominence alone — apply the same
source discipline as elsewhere.