From the Zhou Court to Washington

How “礼崩乐坏” explains a world where rules remain on paper but legitimacy and restraint have quietly expired

Today, the U.S. military launched airstrikes on Venezuela, hitting multiple political and military facilities. Trump then announced with great fanfare that he had "arrested" Venezuelan President Maduro. In Trump's political narrative, this decapitation operation has already been spun into a short-term win, proof that the previous Democratic administration was weak and indecisive on Venezuela. The significance runs far deeper: a sovereign nation, facing no UN sanctions, has just watched its head of state seized in a military operation by another country. What we are witnessing is Trump tearing off the last veil of civility from the post-Cold War liberal international order, laying bare the might-makes-right realist logic as the explicit rule of global contention. I want to borrow a word from Chinese history- we have entered a moment of li beng yue huai礼崩乐坏—"the collapse of ritual and music."

This li beng yue huai礼崩乐坏 describes what happened during China's Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, when the established order broke down completely. The Zhou emperor still nominally ruled, presiding over an elaborate system of rituals that conferred legitimacy and maintained the rules of the game. But as regional powers grew stronger, they stopped playing by those rules. They conquered neighbors by force, tore up treaties on a whim, and the entire framework of authority and moral norms—the "ritual and music"—disintegrated. China descended into more than two centuries of chaos marked by might-makes-right rule.

We're seeing the same pattern now, except this time America is the one tearing down the system. After the Cold War, the U.S.-led liberal order served much like those Zhou rituals—an unequal framework, certainly, but it struggled to function under the U.S. military's presence. Now, with the overt military seizure of another nation's leader, America has effectively abandoned its own rulebook. The old order is losing its grip, but no new consensus has emerged to replace it. That's the essence of li beng yue huai.

We are entering what might be called a New Warring States era. America, which once claimed to be the guardian of the rules, has stopped upholding them. Instead, it's embraced pure opportunism: rules constrain others, but American power grants exemption. Europe sees what's happening but can't quite accept it—still hoping, against all evidence, that American leadership will somehow restore order. Meanwhile, Europe's own bureaucratic inertia makes rapid adaptation nearly impossible. For smaller nations that have relied on international law to protect their sovereignty, the message is clear: the law can no longer guarantee even the most basic security—not for heads of state, not for the government.

Some Chinese commentators believe this represents a brutal return of the sovereignty concept. The international order established after World War II was fundamentally a "domestication" of the traditional sovereign power to "use violence arbitrarily." Trump's action is equivalent to a unilateral declaration that this "domestication" has failed. Sovereignty is once again asserting its most primitive, most core power—the power to deploy lethal violence and escape punishment. The world is being forced to relive the Hobbesian allegory: in a jungle without Leviathan's constraint, survival will become the dominant theme governing relations between states.

For China, this “Warring States-ization” of world politics isn’t new. The first trade war made it viscerally clear: no one else grants you security or legitimacy. Those come only from your own strength and resilience. That’s why China has pushed so hard in technology and industry—building the capacity to weather international crises on its own terms.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms begins: "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide." We're in a cycle of division now. In this emerging Warring States world, nations must first learn to survive in a system without enforceable rules. Yet for great powers like China, the ultimate test is not simply to "win" a competition, but whether, based on their own power, they can give birth to a new vision of "ritual and music"—one more inclusive and stable that this disordered world might accept.