I’m obsessed with the idea of just how much our current global moment of transition resonates with the transition in ancient China from the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 BCE) to the Warring States period (475 to 221BCE).
More accurately, my obsession is with this recent essay from Noema by Shanghai-based Chinese scholar Hui Huang, from which I have gleaned pretty much all I know about ancient Chinese history.
The essay offers a useful way to thread a story through the current clatter of events – Ukraine, AI and “big tech”, the Maduro capture and “running” Venezuela, Greenland, the trust turbulence through which most public institutions and governments are awkwardly navigating, the new US National Security Strategy to name a few.
In many ways, it’s a dissertation on THE policy and political challenge of our time: how do we (governments and communities together) navigate this treacherous terrain that is disturbing so many settled patterns of governing, politics and good public leadership for a world that is safe, fair and sustainable?
Shift in global logic
The essay argues our collective moment is not “merely a moment of disruption” but rather “marks a paradigmatic shift in global logic.” It’s not that the rules of the game are changing; it’s more a case of a wholesale shift in the nature, purpose and conduct of the game itself.
To understand this moment, Huang argues, China’s history offers a useful analogy.
In the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 B.C.E.), he explains, “warfare was ritualized, legitimacy symbolically upheld by the Zhou king. But as the old order weakened, the Warring States period (approximately 475 to 221 B.C.E.) emerged. It was a time of classic anarchy marked by intense competition, innovation, and systemic transformation. Legalism, meritocracy, military standardization and bureaucratic statecraft all took shape in this crucible.”
The juxtaposition of a sense of anarchic “might is right” competition and intense experimentation and discovery leads directly to questions of capacity and capability in public leadership. How do they act, what knowledge do they need, how do they build the requisite skills for their work?
The essay argues the postwar U.S.-led international order resembles China’s Spring and Autumn period — “a fragile yet enduring balance, upheld by norms, rituals and symbolic legitimacy.” Henry Kissinger, pre-eminent in foreign policy, believed in “ambiguity, restraint and equilibrium”. Even amid Cold War tension, “the world remained rule-bound. Red lines held, backchannels worked, deterrence was mutual.”
Not any more.
Trumpism marks “not an aberration but an inflection point, a recognition that fewer actors obey the old rites, and those who still do risk irrelevance.” Today’s international system is fading not because of ideological rebellion but because its underlying conditions no longer hold. From Trump’s perspective, “tariff wars were a response to these changing conditions. Institutions like the WTO…no longer ensured reciprocity, and growing trade imbalances reflected how the liberal economic order had failed to protect national interests.”
What’s happening, the essay argues, is as profound for our time as the shift to the Warring States was to China’s ancient history. And what it involved, then and now, goes deep:
“a fundamental transformation that reshaped modes of production, social hierarchies and the very basis of legitimacy over centuries. It represented a deep pivot driven by new material and strategic realities — the spread of iron tools and weapons, mass-produced crossbows, horseback riding and large-scale irrigation — that rendered the old…rituals obsolete.”
Today’s global shift is, as it was for ancient China, “not merely about changing alliances or rhetoric, but about a deeper, structural and potentially epochal turn..” As the former Pope Francis once noted, this is what it means to be living through not an era of change but a change of era.
The world shifts on its axis
From the clash of politics, culture and technology emerged bitter contests for institutional relevance and resilience that, in China’s case, laid the foundations of governance for hundreds of years. As the world shifted on its axis (then, as it is again now), old patterns and well-accepted truths were upended. New virtues emerged to forge and then sustain pre-eminence and durable success in uncertain and volatile conditions.
For our time, the essay argues:
“China and the United States are now essentially accusing each other of being Qin: the hard, efficient, norm-breaking state that conquered six kingdoms to unify China in 221 B.C.E. And perhaps both are right. Each is gravitating toward a model that prioritizes internal control, technological dominance and narrative power over international consensus. This convergence reflects how great powers make cost-benefit choices under strategic pressure, especially when they begin to think with a Warring States mentality — focusing on their own survival in a low-trust environment.”
This sounds very much like the blunt analysis that Stephen Miller and others wrote into the US National Security Strategy released in December 2025. As the strategy points out, “the outsized influence of larger, richer and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.”
Again, it’s hard to miss the link between context and capabilities, between the nature of a changing world and the mix of skills and capacities needed for effective public leadership. In this case, they included more stringent and systemic internal control, technological dominance, narrative power and coherence (more on that later).
“To extend the analogy” the essay goes on, “today’s major powers [Europe, Islam, Russia, Japan) can be loosely compared to states from the Warring States era (Qin to the far west, Chu to the south, Qi on the eastern coast, Yan to the northeast, and the central-plains trio Han, Zhao, Wei), each with a distinct strategic profile.”
And other strategically pivotal actors, such as India, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Vietnam, resemble Yan: ”peripheral yet adaptable, and often playing outsized roles in shaping balance at critical junctures.”
The Warring States period was basically international anarchy in search of new forms of order and control. But with no overarching authority, “each state acted according to its own survival calculus, much like today’s global order.”
Then as now, the turbulence fuelled a “competition of capacity”. That links to another strand in the contemporary debate about the future of governing and public leadership – state capacity. It’s for another time but the Warring States analogy reinforces the role of government and the ability of the state to deliver.
A turbulent ecology of adaptive innovation
Hard power becomes important (soft power too but in pursuit of a much tougher-minded strategy of competitive resilience). Success depends less on “restraint and more on agility, coercive capacity and the ability to project credible power.” Of the sort you need, presumably, to “arrest” a Venezuelan dictator as his steel strong room door closes and ferret him away to a New York dungeon.
The Warring States period ushered in “a turbulent ecology of adaptive innovation.” To survive and prosper in those conditions, the ancient Chinese experience suggests these characteristics:
“Through strategic deception, institutional coherence and a superior legal-bureaucratic framework, the Qin model which outlasted the dynasty that created it and shaped Chinese governance for two millennia systematically dismantled multilateral coalitions and neutralized each counterweight in its path. Its decisive edge lay not merely in military might, but in the Legalist system that enabled rule-based governance, standardized administration, consistent rewards for performance as well as harsh punishments for rule violation.”
Huang explains how this internal coherence aligned incentives, scaled innovations and integrated logistics at a level unmatched by its rivals. The point was that in a fractured and competitive system, “such adaptability can overpower even the most coordinated balancing efforts, suggesting that long-term stability hinges not just on power distribution but on institutional innovation.”
It’s not always a very attractive model of strong, centralised and authoritarian government that emerges. But it reinforces the need for government to adjust its theory of the business to be relevant to changing conditions. It’s also an interesting thought that much of the Trump (or Miller) doctrine reflects that agenda – the ability to project power especially even if there are aspects of the Warring States winning formula – institutional innovation, rule-based governance, consistent rewards for performance – perhaps less obvious in the contemporary version.
Pax Algorithmica: How AI changes the story
Hui Huang doesn’t ignore the obvious role of AI in the comparisons between the Warring States period and its contemporary story of transition through which we’re living.
Factors like artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum computing and biotech are no longer seen as commercial or technology frontiers alone. The point is how and where can the tech be pressed into service as an instrument of power and control. The point is to secure the best possible national advantage in terms of raw economics and brute power.
AI might end up subverting many of the patterns supporting the essay’s underlying analogy between the Warring States and our own conditions. For example, “unlike physical empires, AI can cross borders invisibly. A sufficiently advanced governance system that combines language models, surveillance, predictive analytics and logistical control can dominate not through war but by embedding itself into the critical systems of other states.”
In other words, dominance may not depend on territory, “but on embedding systems and setting the standards that others must follow.” In that sense, “technology has redefined the physics of power. Distance no longer constrains influence. Data, infrastructure, finance and ideology now project power globally, at low cost and without physical presence.”
I wonder to what extent current generations of public leadership understand that dynamic or feel equipped to bend its implications to national strategic goals and outcomes? And how does the “tech as power” story sit with emerging models of AI governance and capability forging a path between the binary choices of the US and China, particularly from within the Global South, subverting the simpler power contest the essay’s analogy suggests.
Sticking with story, though, the dominant AI models need not fire a shot. Instead, they might “preempt deterrence, distort communications and shape outcomes faster than human systems can respond.” In that case, retaliation becomes irrelevant if threats are neutralized before they are understood. What follows, Huang suggests, “may not be a Pax Americana or Pax Sinica but a Pax Algorithmica. A world coordinated through a dominant AI system. States may retain flags and parliaments, but sovereignty may become symbolic.”
Implications for policy and leadership
So what does all this mean for contemporary policy making and the skills and capabilities of public leadership?
The essay throws out plenty of hints as the analysis draws its own conclusions about what the Warring States transition meant at the time and what it could mean now.
For example:
“In the Warring States period, dominance came less from charisma than from scalable capacity: ironworking that enabled mass weapon production, discipline in drilled armies and institutional reform — including standardized laws and measures, county administration and merit-based ranks. These turned resources into deployable power, enabling rapid mobilization and battlefield wins. In the future, it may come from AI, not merely as a weapon but as an integrated system of perception, decision-making and governance.”
If the measure of success becomes how well (or not) we build “an integrated system of perception, decision-making and governance”, how do we think we are going? For many, it’s precisely the rising evidence of the absence of those virtues that is ringing alarm bells about the eroding capabilities of the liberal, democratic and “rules based” order.
The essay, for all its dire portents, draws some important and much more positive conclusions for our own time.
“What we are entering,” it suggests may not be a collapse, but “a modelling epoch: a new Warring States world, chaotic and cruel, but also luminous. For those who think in systems and build in code, this is not the end of history. It is its recommencement.” This is the crisis/opportunity theme, perhaps, the necessary turbulence from which new forms of order emerge for those who can be alert to the possibilities of transition and hold their game together sufficiently to take advantage of the conditions of fluid possibility.
Somewhat counterintuitively given the essay’s dire tone, could this outcome become possible?
“In the long run, the most hopeful outcome of this Warring States era may not be a new hegemon but a new kind of order, without kings and without emperors. Power may no longer lie in conquest but in coherence. Not in dominance but in design.”
The real power will rest with those people, communities and countries that can hold their nerve and marshal their resources – including their imagination – to design “better” that can then rise from the ashes.
And above all, adaptability; this is the core of the argument perhaps:
“In the end, the world is not just becoming more fragmented. It is becoming more state-centric. Governance models, innovation capacity and strategic autonomy are no longer abstract policy goals. They have become conditions for survival. The return of the state does not signal a return to the past. It reflects a shift toward a new strategic landscape, where adaptability is the ultimate currency of power.” [Emphasis added]
The challenge for public leaders is to encourage the modern equivalent of the shi class -“wandering scholars, strategists and reformers who transcended their birth and borders to shape visions of governance, ethics and legitimacy.” These thinkers and designers fuel the process of experimentation and narrative formation, a class “not bound by noble lineage or national borders, but drawn from technologists, policy thinkers, builders and founders who shape systems across sectors and geographies.”
Yearning for what is just
As the essay concludes, it takes an unexpected turn. In amongst all of this brutality and breakdown and tempering the anarchic contests for power and domination are considerations of what is just and benevolent.
“But adaptability alone cannot be the final measure of success. Even in a Warring States world, humans still yearn for what is just. Ancient thinkers like the Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that yi, or righteousness, was not merely a social construct but an intrinsic part of human nature.”
People retain what Mencius called a heart that cannot bear the suffering of others, which he identified as the “sprout of benevolence.” This is not a sign of weakness, but the “foundation of righteous politics.” And justice is not the opposite of effectiveness. It is what allows systems to endure beyond victory. History does not only reward the strong, “but also those who can turn power into legitimacy.”
Here’s the point of tension:
”Strategic necessity may override sentiment, but it does not erase conscience. The next global order will not only need to function; it must also be fair.”
So the story weaves together quite the collection of ideas – state power, consistent rewards for good performance, the ability to project and shape national agendas of capability and strength, benevolence, justice, conscience. It’s a cauldron of contradictions (as we might expect from a period of intense and turbulent transition) from which policy makers and public leaders are expected to spin some kind of coherent and sustainable story of national progress and security.
Two questions
As I read and re-read this essay, two questions recur.
One is whether this extended comparative historical, political and philosophical analysis leaves me stranded on the shores of despair or cautiously hopeful?
Huang concludes that in an age where distance no longer restrains influence and alliances are fragile, “it is institutional design, not raw strength, that may determine the next global order.” That seems a good thing. Might might be right, but legitimacy lasts. From the murk and turmoil of transition, the real winners may not be the midnight kidnappers of recalcitrant dictators, but the designers of new institutions that can curate new pathways to fairness and common wealth.
A second question is what these ideas offer by way of of signposts for how to embed into our public leadership, including the way we train and teach them, the kinds of strengths and virtues – tough minded, coherent, experimental, mixing strength and the projection of power with the irreducible human instinct for justice and benevolence – we expect them to grow and deploy.
What will be the new lexicon of effective public leadership that offers the best chance to make this moment of transition, as it unexpectedly turned out to be for ancient China “the most luminous of times”?
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