china's rise and xunist realism

yan xuetong's leadership and the rise of great powers

autumn landscape, lin fengmian

Yan Xuetong's Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers attempts to answer a straightforward question: why is China rising and the USA declining? To this end, Yan defines a general theory of international governance grounded in human nature which he calls "moral realism" and uses it to explain the present situation. As the title suggests, Yan particularly focuses on how a rising power rises, which he considers to be drastically underexplored in the literature compared to why a declining power declines. He believes the key ingredient is quality of leadership rather than dramatic change in material or cultural conditions.

Yan's thesis is rising powers expand their capability for action through energetic leadership and willingness to disrupt an existing order which disfavors them. Dominant powers, on the other hand, have a more difficult time adapting to circumstances because supremacy entails both complacency and a structural preference for preserving the status quo. Military, economic, and cultural heft are necessary preconditions for great power status, but leadership is the most crucial factor because it determines the effectiveness with and ends to which those resources are deployed. A great power ultimately rises or falls based on the strength of its leadership and its capacity for reform.

Beyond his theory of state-level power and international values, Yan does something very interesting: he rephrases, with no fundamental concessions or changes, the Xunist worldview in the contemporary language of psychology, economics, and realist international relations. It's not the case that he happened to arrive at the same conclusions by convergence. Yan is a scholar of the pre-Qin Chinese state system and quotes Master Xun over a dozen times to explain and buttress his theory. He takes Xunzi's axioms for granted, states them in his own words, and reaches the same conclusions.

Yan goes on to argue for a fusion of Western liberal and traditional Chinese values as an ideal to strive for in global governance of a bipolar world, an "advanced ideology" which "either a Chinese or American leadership of the millennial generation [may] pursue [...] by learning from the other." In his view, the core tenets of each worldview check and enhance the other, balancing equality with benevolence, democracy with righteousness, and freedom with ritual. Yan's proposed synthesis serves as a spectacular template for how we might think about a Neo-Xunism.¹

---

The main questions of Leadership are, how does a rising power narrow the capabilities gap with the dominant power? And how does a rising power eventually replace the dominant power in its role on the global stage?

Yan's answer is that a rising power rises because it has better leadership. Better leadership means a capacity for reforming a state to deal with changes in the world, which allows it to build not just hard power but global influence. Conversely, the main reason why a declining power declines is poor leadership and inability to adapt.

Narrowing a gap in capabilities depends on both parties, so if all potential rising powers are poorly led or incapable of reform, the dominant power is likely to preserve its position, absent any spectacular collapse. But when the dominant power is poorly ruled and the rising power is well-ruled, the rising power can build legitimacy, win allies, and eventually take over the existing world-system or define a new one to replace it. As Yan quotes Guanzi, "When your own state is well governed and your neighbors are badly ruled, these two conditions are the basis for you to establish a hegemon or a sage king."²

The standard realist perspective sees international relations as a law of the jungle. Morality does not exist, states seek to maximize advantage in zero-sum competition, and the only factors stopping conflict from escalating to all-out war are cost-benefit analysis and risk aversion, rather than benevolence or scruples. The history of the growth of state power in the West from the Middle Ages onward has been to release persons from all unchosen obligations except for citizenship, creating the solitary individual. Realism maps this model of the individual onto the world, taking states to to be atomic individuals who act without restraint unless they answer to an overlord.

Yan disputes the absence of morality within the state, arguing that while individual persons may have no enforced obligations to each other, governments do have positive moral obligations to their citizens. He cites Morgentheu for support on this point, arguing there existed a "classical" realism in line with Clausewitz and Thucydides which stood for things, in contrast to modern realists who cynically strip morality out of the theory to make it cleaner and more amenable to rational analysis. Yan then goes further, arguing that morality applies at the international level as well and that great powers have a degree of ethical responsibility to organize a just world-system.³

Leadership on the world stage flows from domestic conditions but cannot be decided unilaterally like a domestic agenda. A state's international authority is grounded in its comprehensive capability, or all its sources of direct power, alongside its trustworthiness and its specific values. Trust is a crucial element because a state cannot realistically rule the world by force.⁴ Taken together, these factors constitute the state's strategic credibility.

Lesser states will stand by a dominant state if they can rely on it to act benevolently, or at least predictably and fairly. They are more likely to break from it and support a rising power if the dominant is tyrannical or capricious. Global governance in the 21st century depends on consent of the governed, and that consent can be withdrawn and transferred elsewhere.⁵ Domestic leadership is political, but international leadership depends on aligning truly independent actors.

Yan describes four styles of international leadership: humane authority, hegemony, tyranny, and fatuousness.⁶ He places them in a 2x2 matrix related to strategic capability: trustworthy vs untrustworthy, and consistent vs double-standard.

Humane authority is the most self-explanatory: consistently trustworthy. The sage-king takes action on the world stage according to moral principle, protecting the weak and decent from the strong and depraved. He aids others to uphold benevolence and righteousness with no expectation of repayment or fealty.

This figure is rare in history, but not an impossible abstract ideal. Rule through benevolence is absolutely practicable by one with sufficient military and economic might to back it up. Yan cites FDR as an example, going so far as to say he "[revived] states that had been extinguished and [restored] family lines [that] had been broken" (兴灭国, 继绝世). He also brings up the first kings of the Zhou Dynasty, though I don't know how well fact can be separated from mythology here. While they operated on a national rather than global level, Washington and Lincoln represent realistic benchmarks for how closely a real leader can approach the ideal. Taizong of Tang and Ashoka after his Road to Damascus moment also serve as strong models.

Hegemony is distinguished from humane authority by being a trustworthy double-standard. The hegemon treats his allies kindly and is indifferent or brutal to anyone else. He doesn't seek to govern All Under Heaven, merely to enrich and benefit his bloc, but he is authentically aligned with his bloc rather than himself alone. "Double-standard" does not imply hypocrisy: the hegemon is quite open about the rules he applies. Aside from the Zhou-era hegemons, Cold War USA is a perfect example of the type.

Tyranny is untrustworthy, but quite consistent. Might makes right, the weak suffer what they must: the tyrant practices pure realpolitik. He has no real allies and no true protectorates, applying the law of the jungle to all. The Qin Dynasty, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan are obvious instances of this type. Tyranny is often mercifully short-lived on the international stage because it induces everyone to turn against the tyrant, as there is no hope whatsoever of coexisting with it.

The fourth type is fatuousness, which practices what Yan calls the coward-bully principle. The fatuous leader is both untrustworthy and inconsistent, eager to take advantage of weak or vulnerable powers but also shying from conflict with strong states. He is erratic and unpredictable, often leaving the international sphere to devolve into true anarchy rather than taking any responsibility for setting norms. Trump, based on the first year of his first term, is considered by Yan to be quintessentially fatuous.

Yan believes that if a dominant power behaves humanely, hegemonically, tyrannically, or fatuously, lesser powers are likely to behave in like manner, and thus its international style becomes a global norm. The dominant power can use reward or punishment to channel lesser states in the desired direction, but both of these mechanisms are inferior to imitation: international norms are chiefly determined by setting an example through one's own conduct.

In bipolar or multipolar systems with several competing norms, states tend to imitate their bloc, and the humane and hegemonic styles tend to outcompete tyrannical or fatuous states based on the durability of their alliances, assuming equal material and leadership capability.⁷

Yan's model of international relations is built on a set of core axioms, which he calls his "four corollaries of international change":

1. Relative comprehensive capability between states changes in line with absolute leadership capability within each state itself, which eventually realigns the international order.

2. In the anarchical international system, all states pursue their strategic interests, though they adopt different strategies to do so.

3. States are primarily motivated by self-interest, but they are also constrained by international norms.

4. Relative power is necessarily zero-sum, so dominant and rising states are inherently in conflict.

Yan fully elaborates on all of these at length in Chapter 3, but two specific points are important to clarify.

Yan states under Corollary 3 that self-interest is universal, and norms a constraint. Universal self-interest is a realist axiom and a rebuke to a dichotomy in other IR schools that some states pursue self-interest in their foreign policy while others choose to follow international norms instead. Norms as constraint, on the other hand, is his answer to offensive realists who argue that norms have no effect whatsoever and the international stage is a pure hellish state of nature.

After Corollary 4, Yan stresses at length that "conflict" does not mean "open war." He specifically critiques the Thucydides Trap idea, citing 19th century European colonial scrambles and Cold War prestige races and proxy wars as examples of venues for competition in lieu of direct warfare. China and the USA will inevitably conflict with each other, but it is entirely possible for the conflict to be economic, diplomatic, or cultural in nature. Whether it escalates to hot war will be decided by the respective countries' leaders, not forced by structural factors.

---

The deeper significance of Yan's axioms and models is their equivalence to the Xunist worldview.

In introducing his corollaries, Yan states:

As a branch of IR realism, this theory follows fundamental realist assumptions, paramount among which is that the nature of interstate relations has not changed fundamentally throughout human history. Morgenthau says, "Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws." Thus, if Guanzi, prime minster of Qi, a hegemon in the seventh century BCE, were placed in our midst today he would have no problem understanding the power struggles of our age.

This is the most fundamental axiom of all: human systems follow from human nature, and human nature is immutable over time. Without it, history is meaningless, a set of quirky stories that offer no lessons for our modern world.⁸

Xunzi says the same:

The reckless person says, "The dispositions of [the world in] ancient times and the present are different, so they require different ways for ordering chaos." The masses are misled by this, for they are foolish and have no arguments, are boorish and have no proper measure. [...] There is one measure for ancient times and the present. So long as one does not contravene the proper classes of things, then even though a long time has passed, the same order obtains (5.139).

In Corollary 2, Yan says that in an anarchic system, all states pursue their own interests. This is human nature, and it is Xunzi's own view of human nature: humans seek to satisfy their desires, but the things to satisfy them are scarce. Thus they come into conflict for them. The role of the lord is to organize society to enable human flourishing without destructive competition. But the international system has no lord.

In Corollary 3, Yan argues that while self-interest is the underlying condition, international norms can constrain behavior. This is identical to Xunzi's idea that human nature cannot be changed, but it can be overcome through self-cultivation, imposing an order on oneself through learning and ritual:

Thus, I say that human nature is the original beginning and the raw material, and deliberate effort is what makes it patterned, ordered, and exalted. If there were no human nature, then there would be nothing for deliberate effort to be applied to. If there were no deliberate effort, then human nature would not be able to beautify itself (19.359).

Yan in fact takes the distinction between human nature and self-cultivation directly from Xunzi himself, restating the difference between "inherited" (性) and "nurtured" (伪) traits. Everyone inherits their pursuit of self-interest, and because states are ruled by men, those states also act with the self-interested impulse. However, "policy makers have different social perceptions, or nurtured traits, owing to different upbringings, including education." This is Yan's explanation for why different states may pursue different strategies.

In Corollary 4, Yan states that power is zero-sum because it represents relative positioning, thus dominant and rising states must conflict. Xunzi:

When the most exalted position is held by one person alone, there will be order, but if held by two people, there will be chaos. From ancient times to the present there has not yet been a case where two people who both occupy the most exalted position and contend for greater authority can last for long (14.106).

Corollary 1, that state leadership causes a change in state capability, is the axiom closest to the surface, the point of contact for Yan's thesis and most of his model. Material conditions are necessary, but it is leadership that ultimately determines whether a state rises or falls, for several reasons.

Good leadership has the capability to reform institutions to adapt to new circumstances:

In managing affairs, he leaves nothing to regret. In handling dangers and responding to changes, he does everything appropriately. He shifts and moves with the times. He bends and straightens with the age (8.370).

He adapts completely to unexpected occurrences and changes as quickly as echo following a sound. He knows how to extend categories and connect types in order to handle cases without a precedent. In every area, he brings about the phenomena of order. Such is the sagely minister (13.23).

Good leadership, rather than well-designed institutions, is the basis of sound government:

There are chaotic lords; there are no states chaotic of themselves. There are men who create order; there are no rules creating order of themselves. [...] The rules are the beginning of order, and the gentleman is the origin of the rules. And so, with the gentleman present, even if the rules are sketchy, they are enough to be comprehensive. Without the gentleman, even if the rules are complete, one will fail to apply them in the right order and will be unable to respond to changes in affairs, and thus they can serve to create chaos (12.1).

Good leadership of a rising state set against bad leadership of a dominant state has but one outcome:

King Wen had a territory of only a hundred li, and yet the whole world became unified under him. The tyrants Jie and Zhòu abandoned it, and though they possessed the most abundant power under Heaven, they did not even get to live to old age as peasants. And so, if one makes good use of it, even a state of a hundred li is enough to stand alone. If one does not make good use of it, then even with the state of Chu’s six thousand li, one will still become a servant to one’s enemies (7.61).

Yan's model of international leadership borrows and expands upon the sage-king and hegemon distinction which shows up in Confucius, Guanzi, and Xunzi, among others. Yan says, "We have four types of international leadership: humane authority, hegemony, [tyranny, and fatuousness]. This categorization is inspired by the three types of rulers as classified by Xunzi." Xunzi usually states three classes, but in one instance he actually does describe four:

If the lord of men exalts ritual and honors the worthy, then he will become a true king. If he relies heavily on law and has concern for the people, then he will become a hegemon. If he cares only for profit and frequently engages in deception, then he will be endangered. If he is scheming, debauched, and unpredictable and dangerous, then he will perish (16.14).

Yan argues that a tyrannical great power cannot maintain preeminence for long, no matter how great its own capability, because it squanders its credibility. Likewise, a humane great power wins the allegiance of myriad lesser powers which enables it to prolong itself and establish a durable bloc. As Yan says, "[Xunzi] implies that international authority cannot be forced on other states but rather requires other states’ voluntary acceptance." Xunzi makes this point explicitly about the Qin state, which saw most of the states it extinguished rebel to overthrow it not long after the death of its first emperor:

Qin has been victorious for four generations, but full of apprehension, it constantly fears that all under Heaven will unite and combine to roll over it. This is what is called the military approach of a reigning house in decline. Qin has never possessed the guiding factor that is fundamental (15.391).

Yan believes that reward and punishment are inferior tools to example, citing Confucius on this point,⁹ and that international norms are most clearly set by lesser states imitating the greater. As Xunzi says:

The ruler is lead singer to his people; the superior is sundial to his subordinates. The people listen for the lead singer and then respond; the subordinates look to the sundial and then move (18.2).

Yan Xuetong's moral realism is Xunism. On every point, he translates Xunzi into the contemporary language of international relations, expands on his core ideas in a systematic way, and applies that framework to today's problems. Yan starts with Xunzi's unromantic view of human nature, identification of the problem of scarcity, and consequent inevitability of conflict. Yet Yan is to his realist peers just as Xunzi is to the Legalists, arguing forcefully against taking these base assumptions to mean that moral order is irrelevant or unworkable.

"People’s nature is bad. Their goodness is a matter of deliberate effort" (23.1). Tyranny and anarchy are common in history, and compared to these conditions, hegemony may be a blessing. But through concerted effort and deep caring, humane governance is achievable.

---

Yan spends the majority of Leadership elaborating his theory of international relations, but Chapter 6, which I recommend reading in full, is quite different. In it, Yan describes the domestic ideologies of China and the West, as well as the present state and future direction of international values, and proposes a tantalizing, albeit wishful, synthesis of liberalism and Chinese traditionalism as the best way forward.

From 1945 to 1991, the world order was defined by a struggle for influence and territory between Western liberalism and Soviet communism; after the collapse of the USSR, liberalism became the sole, paramount ideology governing the international system. "Liberalism" here refers not to one side in a left-right spectrum, but to the system itself: every major party candidate in the USA from Truman and Dewey to Obama and Romney was liberalist. Liberalism is the collection of shared goals and values of all sides, with DNC social democracy and pre-Trump GOP free marketism being competing visions for how best to fulfill them.

The greatest blows to liberalism's global prestige were the USA's wars of conquest following 9/11 and the shock of and sluggish recovery from the GFC. Following this, within the American bloc nations, Yan identifies Brexit and the rise of Trump as the starting point¹⁰ of a broad ideological move against the reigning consensus which he calls anti-establishmentarianism. Writing in 2017, Yan does not see anti-establishmentarianism as having yet achieved staying power as a true counter-ideology, but the reelection of Trump and the pan-Western anti-incumbent wave indicate it is now a serious force. It's unlikely this current will establish its own set of positive international values and institutions because it is avowedly parochial and inward-looking.

Likewise, Yan does not predict that China is in a position to establish its own international values because the domestic political landscape is fragmented between several competing currents with no unifying framework.

Marxism stopped being the guiding light of foreign policy, unofficially in 1978 and officially in 2004, because class struggle and exporting the revolution are fundamentally incompatible with peaceful economic cooperation. It remains a potent force on the homefront, and one of Yan's greatest fears is the Marxist faction retaking preeminence and instituting a shift toward military expansionism.

Economic pragmatism has been the ruling ideology for many decades, and the Chinese public largely sees the legitimacy of the state through the lens of its successful project of economic growth and development. While this has worked well domestically, economic pragmatism offers no motive for international responsibility or involvement beyond the economic sphere.

Liberalism, or explicitly pro-Western values, was a competing current in politics from 1978 to 1989, but now only holds sway over a minority of urban intellectuals. Yan notes that China's present support for free trade and the "rules-based international order" is driven by economic pragmatism, and very much not by liberalism.

Yan identifies traditionalism as the fourth current, "which, even though it is not the official ideology, is today gaining momentum among everyday Chinese people as well as intellectuals and politicians." For him, traditionalism doesn't mean antiquarianism or a reactionary tendency, but a hearkening-back to the values of ancient Chinese philosophy, in the same way a future revitalist American ideology might emphasize the values of the Founders but aim them toward historically progressive ends.

This one I admit I don't know how to assess. Yan quotes Party communiques praising "the fine tradition of Chinese culture" (中华文化的优秀传统) and extrapolates this to mean China is gearing up to institute 仁义之王道 any moment now, which I think is Yan talking his book. Not to be cynical, but the sources he cites for this look like pretty language ornamenting domestic economy agenda items or auto-orientalism for foreign audiences. Nevertheless, the progressive-traditionalist stance is an interesting future possibility and necessary to understand the rest of Yan's argument.

In short, neither the West nor China has a cohesive domestic values system ready for export. Earlier in the book, Yan argues that the coming order will be necessarily bipolar, rather than multipolar: no rising power except China comes anywhere near American comprehensive capability. Since international values can only be set by a great power, there is no other candidate values system beyond the American and Chinese.

Yan also argues, under the zero-sum nature of power competition and the inevitability of conflict, that a hypothesized G2 global government will never happen. This is also persuasive to me. Historical examples of great powers setting aside their strategic conflicts, such as the Metternich System or the Anglo-French Entente, were not driven by a spirit of collaboration but a greater shared enemy, respectively revolutionary liberalism and a rising Germany.

On the other hand, Yan does not see USA-China rivalry as anywhere near as threatening as the USA-USSR conflict was, specifically because both of today's powers are relatively ideologically tepid. The clash between liberalism and communism was existential because it was about which of two mutually irreconcilable values systems would rule the world. By contrast, USA-China rivalry is more about relative positioning and material advantage, so there is no deep difference in worldview that forces conflict to escalate to maximum stakes.¹¹

From this basis, Yan hopes for a hypothetical fusion between the two great powers' idealized values systems to serve as a shared ideology, enabling mutual understanding even if true co-rule is impossible and tempering the worst downsides of each:

Since American liberalism still has global influence, and China officially claims to guide its foreign policy according to Chinese traditional fine values, it is possible for either a Chinese or American leadership of the millennial generation to pursue an advanced ideology by learning from the other. Therefore, this section will discuss the possible combination of the three values of liberalism—equality, democracy, and freedom, with the three Chinese traditional values of benevolence (仁), righteousness (义), and [ritual] (礼).¹²

Western liberalism's emphasis on expansive freedom and atomized individualism has a well-known propensity toward disorder and recklessness. On the other hand, Chinese traditionalism is often criticized for leading to stagnation and risk-aversion through its reverence for harmony and conformity.¹³ Yan proposes a merger, essentially using the three core values of one as guardrail metrics on the other, injecting some unbridledness into the ancient Chinese system and some sobriety into the Western. His broader desire is to see the emergence of a fresh moral order, fearing that on the present course, the world will descend into anarchy and brutal realpolitik with no guiding light beyond the expansion of power.

Moral equality of persons is taken as axiomatic by liberalism, but this can be taken so far to presume equality of ability and circumstance; benevolence recognizes the differences between people and seeks to correct for them, providing for the good of all as is needed. Democracy gives people a voice in how they are ruled, checking an unaccountable sovereign; righteousness corrects for the excesses of majoritarianism and herd behavior. Freedom gives individuals the ability to decide their own destinies and live unshackled from unchosen obligations; ritual reminds them that they still have a moral duty to each other.

Benevolence supposes an obligation on the part of the greater to help the lesser; equality asserts that possessing greater means does not imply one is of greater worth. Righteousness insists it's the duty of the ruling class to uphold order and justice for the benefit of the people; democracy allows the people a say in how they are governed, as even a righteous lord may be paternalistic or dismissive of their specific concerns. Ritual lays out a systematic mode of interaction between people based on the roles they occupy in their personal relationships and in society; freedom serves as an escape valve, releasing people from suffocation under their obligations and permitting them to live for themselves.

This is not to say the three values Yan calls out in each worldview go unchecked within them. Liberalism has the concepts of social welfare, human rights, and civic duty, which operate along much the same lines as the three Chinese values. Likewise, the counter-currents to Chinese traditionalism come from republicanism and Marxism, which gave the common people a history, language, and felt sense for the eradication of social divisions, mass participation in civic life, and profaning of obligatory roles. But blending traditions means having multiple ways of expressing similar concepts and a shared language and intertwined cultural sense of each others' canons.

While the USA is similar to Europe and China is similar to its Asian neighbors for reasons of historical coevolution and cultural legacy, there are a great many axes on which Americans and Chinese are more similar to each other. Both modern cultures share the experiences of successful violent revolution, of ruling a vast land of incredible diversity, of settling a great frontier, and of growing up on the fringe of a prior world order to then overtake it in techno-industrial development. Fierce independence, earthy pragmatism, boundless ambition, cultural insularity, and a deep sense of historical destiny mark the ethos of both peoples. It is my earnest hope that the USA and China can find common ground on these terms.

Despite my obvious personal preferences, I find it hard to imagine the next generations of American or Chinese leaders and thinkers collectively stepping back from direct questions of economic self-sufficiency, military potential, and political expediency to push for an abstract synthesis of American and Chinese heritage values. Philosophizing your way to controlling authority is suitable for a crucible like the American Founding, the French Revolution, or the Chinese Warring States, where a small upstart class is the locus of politics and must win each other over to establish a coalition with momentum and vision. The present moment, and the increasingly fractious and chaotic future, is much more driven by the fickle moods of the public at large, who have zero appetite for such things.

On the other hand, one of my articles of faith is that the 20th century mass movement is dead, and the cult is the organizing principle that will dominate the 21st. In our corner of the internet, we see clearly how small groups of obscure individuals writing to each other from niche platforms serve as the seed of culture. These ideas are diluted as they diffuse downward, but diffuse they do. So much of the American mainstream in 2025 was incubated by anonymous personalities writing to audiences of mere thousands in 2015.

Likewise, the continued advance of information processing—devops tools, cloud platforms, coding agents—means that fewer and fewer people are required to build on the application level. That is, each person trained in modern programming, marketing, product, and growth has that much more leverage on each manhour devoted to changing the social fabric in line with their own desires, to the extent that computer systems are capable of doing this. In 2017 I wrote, "As the Church was to Christendom, and the press was to the public, programmers are now in a better position than any to construct the new reality that is to define the world after the present one, by now moribund, finally makes its exit. " At the time, Facebook was deeply liberalist and grappling with whether their algorithmic mandate was to preserve a neutral commons even if illiberal in content or to nudge public opinion to support the liberal order. Since then, we have seen how effective the takeover of Twitter was in promoting right-wing anti-establishmentarianism, and soon Tiktok will be a similarly anti-liberal channel.

For those of us who oppose this turn, don't we have a responsibility to use our skills to create our own desired consensus reality? Can't we force our own chosen ideologies into the fray? To this extent, I appreciate Yan's optimism, that niche collectives of fringe thinkers may be able to invent a new system of international values, and that somehow they may be capable of infecting their respective states with it.

---

Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers is a strong book that lays out a system of international relations which blends the American and Chinese canons. It does not stay in the realm of abstract theory: it comes down to earth to discuss historical precedent and current affairs through the lens of the author's worldview. In the final chapter, Yan even states the purpose of any theory is its predictive value, and lays out a series of predictions for the next decade, which, eight years on, have mostly borne out.

Yan's theory is also deeply Xunist, which is of great personal value to me, and I hope to the readers of this blog given how often I write about Xunzi. I do believe that Xunzi's model of humanity and society is both accurate and comprehensive, and this becomes clear when one restates and expands on his insights with modern language and modern reference points. Yan's Leadership serves as a strong example of how this can work.

I don't think I could write a better conclusion than the author did himself, summing up both his message and his hopeful vision for the future:

This book argues that political leadership plays an integral role in international politics but does not contend that global problems can be solved by a single powerful state. Mankind has not transcended the fundamental nature of international relations. World politics is still characterized by the struggle between states for power, prestige, and wealth amid global anarchy. Although globalization has shrunk the globe and established possibilities for the central management of world affairs, mankind has not yet established an international institution capable of this task. When all states are in the same leaky boat without an automatic operating system, one of them should wield the biggest dipper for the security of the boat as a whole. If the leading power does not lead, the other states cannot follow, and the world boat will lose direction. My theory advocates the leadership of humane authority to improve the world, because that type of leadership has managed international affairs better than any other throughout history. Although even this type of leadership cannot guarantee a more desirable world, I nevertheless believe it would offer the best chance of a world more peaceful than it is today.

1. Liberal-Confucian syncretism is not the endpoint of what I would call "Neo-Xunism." The most important quality of a truly 21st century ideology is that it be meta-systematic: a tool for operating from, and interfacing between, multiple irreconcilably different systems. We aren't building Linux, we are building Xen. I say "we" because, while very few people may have my particular fixation on Xunzi, building a meta-ideology that can fluidly switch between irreconcilable systems is the intellectual task of the 21st century. There is no "next" incremental synthesis of parts into a single coherent system: this was the lesson of the 20th century reaction to the failures and horrors of totalizing systems in the Long 19th. The insufficiency of the systematic monolith is broadly felt, and we are presently in a race to formalize meta-systems that can both run complex societies and nurture the soul before too much of the body politic succumbs to nihilism. atavism, or millenarianism.

2. Guanzi here refers to the Warring States text which is named after the famous Spring and Autumn statesman Guan Zhong but not authored by him.

3. What makes Yan a realist, and what distinguishes him from squishier IR schools, is that he assumes a zero-sum conflict-driven nature as a baseline and then imposes moral obligation as a corrective, rather than taking moral action for granted as a foundational driving force. This distinction between inborn and cultivated natures is very Xunist.

4. I have a broader theory here which I touched on in "Neomedievalism and Transnational Nobility." The inability of a state to rule the world by force is not an immutable fact, but dictated by tech level, particularly communications (literacy, the telegraph, the internet) and social (nationalism, bureaucracy, propaganda) technologies. It just so happens that a unitary entity can rule hundreds of millions, but not several billion, at the present tech level. A sufficiently empowered UN or a sufficiently motivated USA might be able to oversee the globe in the manner of a medieval pope, wielding auctoritas but not imperium, whereas a state has direct authority over its territory and people to a drastically greater extent than any medieval king.

The argument in "Neomedievalism" is that some social technologies are losing their effectiveness and a local maximum of coordination capacity was reached sometime in the 20th century. Social tech is subject to cultural drift and perhaps a level of civic antibody response: Charlemagne could not dream of wielding the kind of power that Augustus had. But communications tech is not subject to the same regression unless society suffers a catastrophic breakdown, which I'm very skeptical of, and new social technologies will be invented or discovered in time.

In other words, someday it will be practical to coordinate on the scale of billions or tens of billions. There is so much you could do with software, even without taking AI into account, that we just aren't doing yet. Pray that we are already multiplanetary when that day comes, otherwise the only two paths are stagnation or Butlerian Jihad.

5. This requirement for consent is partly due to inability to coordinate at global scale but also due to a relatively narrow disparity in tech level between nations. Europe collectively ruled the majority of the globe in the 19th century following the conquest of Africa and the transition from corporate-economic colonialism to direct rule. The European world order was specifically tyrannical, and they were capable of sustaining tyranny for so long due to their immense tech lead over all other contenders, aside from the USA, which largely kept to the sidelines. Subject nations grew capable of overthrowing this order by increasing their political awareness and military potential; they did not need to reach anywhere near parity, they only had to narrow the gap enough to make military subjugation infeasible. As a result of this new reality the post-WWII USA-USSR system was much more influence-based and hegemonic in character. Even if a new European-style tyranny was established through force, it would be impossible to sustain for more than a decade unless the technology gap between the great powers and the rest of the world widened again significantly.

6. Yan's English translator chose to render the unreliable/chaotic style as "anemocratic" (wind-rule). As far I can tell he coined this himself, and I find it difficult to keep straight all the weird 'ocracies people come up with for everything. Yan's original term is 昏庸, which means something like muddled mediocrity; I translate it as "fatuous" because "fatuous lord" is a common and very pleasing translation of 庸主, a rebuke of Yuan Shao's fickleness.

7. When Yan talks directly about current affairs, one of his goals is obliquely telling Zhongnanhai that, if the USA does lose its role as hegemon, China has a moral obligation to aspire toward true benevolent rule. In the same vein as Xunzi, Yan regards a hegemon as a disappointing but acceptable falling-short of the goal of the sage-king, but treats both tyranny and anarchy as intolerable disasters. Yan's 2014 article "From Keeping a Low Profile to Striving for Achievement" argued that China had reached a sufficient level of development that it should articulate and enact a positive moral vision on the international stage. Combined with his view that Trump's destruction of American strategic credibility means the beginning of the end of the US-led global order, Yan critiques dangerous domestic elements at the same time as he encourages China to take a more proactive role internationally to fill the void that will be left.

To this end, one of Yan's main points is that China must cultivate allies. The PRC has historically been extremely averse to this because of its Mao-era anti-colonialism and sympathy toward the Non-Aligned Movement. China continued to be inward-focused through the reform era, developing its economy and shying from foreign entanglements except when necessary to advance economic goals, and this has not changed much under Xi.

Yan's other practical aim is to argue against aggressive leadership and military expansionism. While Xi favors a mix of conservative-economic and proactive-reformist strategies, Yan worries about the militarists as one of several competing currents in domestic politics which must be checked lest they produce a future leader:

As the military expansion strategy carries a high risk of failure, aggressive policy makers are often immune to the instinctive human fear of war. China has not been involved in a war for nearly thirty years, since 1989. This would not imply that no aggressive leadership has been established in contemporary China because ultraleftism is shaping such a leadership. Certain Chinese military officers are advocating the adoption of a military expansion strategy to achieve China’s national rejuvenation, arguing that military expansion and invoking the aggressive wars that the Western powers historically waged is the only feasible approach to seizing international dominant power.

The underlying theme of Yan's work is to state the case that aggressive war is not the path to international dominant power. International leadership is more readily achieved, more stable, and qualitatively better when it is secured through humane authority backed by hard power that rarely needs to be exercised.

8. There are some theories that human nature has in fact changed, eg because warfare and capital punishment have selected within historical memory against propensity to extreme violence or rulebreaking. I don't find this convincing and think the relatively pacific, even squeamish, nature of many modern societies comes from long-run culture and present-moment civilization. When a society explicitly sanctions barbarism against enemy groups, or when a society completely collapses, hyperviolence reemerges in even the most "civilized" people.

Some might call this cynical, but I think it is deeply humanist: the ancients are us, and we are them. And it reminds us that civilization is not a given, but a precious resource that must be protected.

9. Yan is well-versed in American history and this is one of several places he cites the Founders alongside the Ancients to great artistic effect:

John Quincy Adams argued that "it was not for the United States to impose its own principles of government upon the rest of mankind, but, rather, to attract the rest of mankind through the example of the United States," while Thomas Paine said that "those universal principles the United States had put into practice should not be exported by fire and sword, but presented to the rest of the world through successful example."

10. It would be more correct to say this is when the anti-establishment position first got their hands on the levers of power. The Tea Party and OWS were both true anti-establishment movements (in contrast to, say, the anti-Iraq War protests, which remained within the framework of liberalism) but the former was coopted and the latter extinguished by state power. The main contrast between the two Trump regimes is the first was constrained by right-liberalist elements throughout the GOP and the state apparatus, whereas the second has by now thoroughly purged them and given itself a much freer hand to implement its anti-establishment agenda.

11. Lack of deep ideological conflict is contrary to what American jingo-liberalists and Chinese jingo-Marxists would like to be true, but at present, these are both minority positions which lack controlling authority. The tech-right is the most notable anti-China faction in politics now, itself also relatively sidelined, and holds quite different values from old-hand DC China hawks. The tech-right's preference is not for Wilsonian "democracy promotion" but technological determinism, industrial subsidies, national champions, and civil-military fusion: in short, Chinese Communism with American Characteristics.

This is not a values judgment! In fact, I think if your overriding goal is increased American hard power, it is the most plausible path to take. My point is just there's no vast ideological gulf between the two great powers to give any conflict between them life-or-death stakes.

There was no vast ideological gulf between the European powers prior to World War I, or the Chinese states prior to the Qin unification, but these guys were like, right next to each other. If China happened to be located where Canada is, then yeah, your ass is probably going to the trenches someday.

12. In my Xunzi essays I typically use the traditional 義 for 义 and 禮 for 礼 because I'm quoting Classical Chinese, but these are the same words.

13. This reputation is both earned and not. Westerners act like Chinese philosophy was invented in the pre-Qin era and never changed, but it evolved continuously for the next two thousand years. The ancients were not adhered to dogmatically, but used as a starting point to ground innovative new ideas, in much the same way Westerners used the Greeks and the Bible. On the other hand, it is absolutely the case that China had long periods of stagnancy from the death of Yongle until the end of the Qing, and part of this is because of Neoconfucianism, though much of the problem was geopolitical: namely the bipolar swings from unassailable hegemony to foreign invasion without a healthy environment of peer adversaries to pace development. Yet this is still not to say Chinese philosophy remained static: there were many people who recognized the problems and formulated new lines of thought in political theory and statecraft to answer them. It's just that they had very short tenures in government to implement their visions when they were not marginalized or excluded entirely.