Your “礼崩乐坏” point hits: the restraints are weakening, even if the formal rules still exist. The real signal is not speeches, it is behavior, who gets recognized, what gets insured, and what institutions start treating as normal.
While the collapse into a Warring States age is accurate, we now nave 8 billion people and a planetary disaster that is a far greater threat than common political chaos. In that sense we have left history behind.
Thank you for writing this. I like to say that there is very little that Chinese history HASN’T seen, hence our abundance of sayings and lessons. Instructional indeed.
"Yet for great powers like China....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."
They already have in various ways, with sympathetic ears in the Eastern hemisphere, Africa/Asia, and to some extent South America. Yet this new vision has barely been reported and in the few times it's been mentioned, it's backhandedly dismissed and immediately fades from the news cycle. Essentially, in Western (American) media, it does not exist.
The Germans have a name for it too. Schmittian state of exception, combining Großraum and Seeordnung to assert decision over law, treating the Western Hemisphere and global trade routes as spaces to be policed rather than governed, where legality follows control of territory, flows, and access. In Carl Schmitt’s logic, land produces order but the sea produces exception, and Trump fuses both: an exclusionary civilisational space updated from the Monroe Doctrine and enforced through sanctions, asset seizures, tariff warfare, coercive threat, and decapitation. Emergency ceases to be temporary and becomes the operating principle of rule. The contrast is moral as well as rhetorical. In Ronald Reagan’s address, the shining beacon was civic renewal. In Trump’s gaze, the beacon is darker: the Reichstag fire, invoked not to save the constitution, but to replace it.
This is a powerful frame. “礼崩乐坏” captures something many Western analyses keep circling without naming: the persistence of form after the loss of function.
What struck me is how closely this maps to a broader pattern we’re seeing elsewhere, rules, law, and institutions still exist, but no longer operate as the primary coordinating layer. Outcomes now harden first; justification follows as ritual residue.
In that sense, this doesn’t feel like a return to realism so much as a transition into a post-ritual order, where legitimacy is no longer produced by shared norms but by alignment capacity and survival strength. Different vocabulary, same phase shift.
The open question, as you note, isn’t who wins the Warring States moment but who, if anyone, can generate a new form of “ritual and music” that actually binds behavior again.
China is a beacon of justice and maturity. It must win this battle for the hearts and minds if humanity is to survive. I live in the western panopticon of fakery and my heart is now in the East. Long live China, Russia and all men (and women) of good will.
US hasn't been sincere about international rules for the better part of a century. What happened with Trump is that even the thinnest pretense is abandoned
Your “礼崩乐坏” point hits: the restraints are weakening, even if the formal rules still exist. The real signal is not speeches, it is behavior, who gets recognized, what gets insured, and what institutions start treating as normal.
While the collapse into a Warring States age is accurate, we now nave 8 billion people and a planetary disaster that is a far greater threat than common political chaos. In that sense we have left history behind.
A very precise analysis, echoing this longer Noema piece by @huihuang1 https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-new-warring-states/
Thank you for writing this. I like to say that there is very little that Chinese history HASN’T seen, hence our abundance of sayings and lessons. Instructional indeed.
"Yet for great powers like China....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."
They already have in various ways, with sympathetic ears in the Eastern hemisphere, Africa/Asia, and to some extent South America. Yet this new vision has barely been reported and in the few times it's been mentioned, it's backhandedly dismissed and immediately fades from the news cycle. Essentially, in Western (American) media, it does not exist.
The Germans have a name for it too. Schmittian state of exception, combining Großraum and Seeordnung to assert decision over law, treating the Western Hemisphere and global trade routes as spaces to be policed rather than governed, where legality follows control of territory, flows, and access. In Carl Schmitt’s logic, land produces order but the sea produces exception, and Trump fuses both: an exclusionary civilisational space updated from the Monroe Doctrine and enforced through sanctions, asset seizures, tariff warfare, coercive threat, and decapitation. Emergency ceases to be temporary and becomes the operating principle of rule. The contrast is moral as well as rhetorical. In Ronald Reagan’s address, the shining beacon was civic renewal. In Trump’s gaze, the beacon is darker: the Reichstag fire, invoked not to save the constitution, but to replace it.
This is a powerful frame. “礼崩乐坏” captures something many Western analyses keep circling without naming: the persistence of form after the loss of function.
What struck me is how closely this maps to a broader pattern we’re seeing elsewhere, rules, law, and institutions still exist, but no longer operate as the primary coordinating layer. Outcomes now harden first; justification follows as ritual residue.
In that sense, this doesn’t feel like a return to realism so much as a transition into a post-ritual order, where legitimacy is no longer produced by shared norms but by alignment capacity and survival strength. Different vocabulary, same phase shift.
The open question, as you note, isn’t who wins the Warring States moment but who, if anyone, can generate a new form of “ritual and music” that actually binds behavior again.
China is a beacon of justice and maturity. It must win this battle for the hearts and minds if humanity is to survive. I live in the western panopticon of fakery and my heart is now in the East. Long live China, Russia and all men (and women) of good will.
US hasn't been sincere about international rules for the better part of a century. What happened with Trump is that even the thinnest pretense is abandoned