On the Chinese Internet, We’re Living in 1644

As U.S. global power shifts, Zócalo is taking a look at what is emerging in its stead. “What Is the New World Order?” is a series of editorial essays and a public program, presented in collaboration with JLF Los Angeles, that draws on history, literature, and politics to help us understand the world’s next turn.

Imagine the following scenario:

A magnificent empire has prospered for 250 years. Over the past century, it has established an imposing world order stretching across oceans and continents. In recent decades, it has pacified this vast realm, protecting smaller states against aggressors while extending its own hegemony in the process. Yet its unbroken string of victories brings not only arrogance but also an unprecedented fiscal burden. As the global financial order changes, this burden snowballs. The empire plunges into a profound fiscal crisis.

Administrative reform begins, seeking to reduce government and military expenditures through personnel cuts. Meanwhile, a handful of tycoons monopolize political decision-making. They enrich themselves through the reform programs while further squeezing ordinary people, whose livelihoods grow increasingly precarious. Against this backdrop, previously dismissed bureaucrats lead an angry populace in revolt. Soldiers who have gone without pay for months defect en masse. The empire suddenly collapses from within.

Amid the ensuing chaos, another polity reaps the benefits—a seemingly inconsequential one. Its people belong to an ancient nation, but had begun building a new state of their own only half a century earlier. They have endured extraordinary difficulties in their struggle for reunification. In recent years, they have played along while biding their time and gathering strength. Finally, with the empire’s collapse, they go on the offensive, conquering the entirety of the empire’s territory, and establishing an entirely new order.

For many observers of current affairs, this scenario might seem to describe 2026 and the coming decades: The collapsing empire is the United States, and the rising one is China. For many history enthusiasts, however, it describes the years 1618 to 1644: The 250-year-old empire is Ming China; the Manchus, a people speaking a completely different language on its northeastern frontier, seize the Ming order and build a new empire that lasts for nearly three centuries.

For one particular group, however, it is about both, seriously. Their ideas, seemingly idiosyncratic at first glance, may provide an unexpectedly rich conceptual toolkit for thinking about the present.

Upcoming Experience

Beginning in the late 2010s, anonymous internet users on China’s counterparts to Reddit and Quora began to develop this theory, which linked 1644 and the present. We do not know who these writers are. They may be scholars, trolls, or both. They may be well-versed in history and politics or simply engaging in online rambling. Across various online forums, their theory rapidly attracted a large following—or at least a large audience drawn by curiosity and spectacle—and came to be known as Ruguan-ism. Ruguan means, literally, the “doctrine of entering the pass,” alluding to the Manchus’ 1644 crossing of the Shanhai Pass that connects Manchuria to China.

A central key claim of Ruguanism is that the American empire is doomed to fail, while China is poised to rise. As a result, some commentators, including in U.S. media, have called Ruguanism a “combative” form of “Chinese nationalism.” Such dismissals miss what this doctrine is really about. Scholar Chenchen Zhang calls Ruguanism “a form of vernacular geopolitical theorizing”; I would argue that it is a political theory of imperial systems—their decline, collapse, and transition. It draws insights from the history of dynastic China and transforms them into an analytical framework for understanding global politics.

The starting point of Ruguanism is the assumption that dynastic China and the American empire are comparable political formations—that they belong to the same category. To Ruguanists, hegemonic empires such as Britain and the United States and the dynasties of premodern China are subject to the same kind of historical-theoretical analysis. Among other things, they imposed a world order through both military force and a particular set of ideologies.

Further, according to Ruguanism, empires are destined to collapse, but their collapse merely gives way to the rise of new, though not necessarily better, imperial orders. Most Ruguanists are also immersed in a cultural universe that valorizes Han Chinese culture—the dominant culture of the Ming, to put it simply—while dismissing the Manchus, who founded the Qing dynasty, as barbarians. Out of this cultural context, these proponents do not regard the Manchus’ replacement of the Ming as a form of historical progress, but merely as one coercive order displacing another. In applying this model to predict the fall of the United States and the rise of China, Ruguanists have effectively developed a crude form of realism, rejecting the Chinese government’s official positions about the upward nature of history.

Most importantly, Ruguanism emphasizes that an empire’s pursuit of hegemony ultimately undermines itself. Many Ruguanists believe that both the Ming decision to aid Korea against the Japanese invasion in 1592 and the U.S. decision to defend Kuwait against Iraqi aggression in 1991 represented just acts. They likewise regard the Confucianism championed by the Ming and the liberalism espoused by the United States as comparable ideologies with progressive aspirations. Yet the fundamental nature of empire is to impose a global order upon other polities unilaterally. The empire either compels those peoples to accept that order by force or, with the backing of military power and soft power, persuades them to embrace it from within. Once an empire embarks upon such a pursuit, it sets itself on a path toward its own destruction.

It is easy to dismiss Ruguanism. It is more interesting to think about how it can help us understand both history and the present. It teaches us that empires, by their nature, overspend their resources, stretch their ideology, and undermine their own foundations.

Ruguanism also reminds us that many non-scholars and non-experts are engaging in fascinating forms of political theorization in their own ways. Their theorizing is anonymous and unsystematic, articulated in languages of their own, such as online varieties of Chinese. Their arguments are unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, yet they are tested in the online marketplace according to whether they make sense to their peers. Within their own discursive spaces—rather limited by both state censorship and academic disdain—these thinkers have been sharpening their own analytical tools, based on their understanding of dynastic China, and then applying these tools to understand global politics. Their work often intermingles highly creative insights with deeply conservative prejudices.

At the very least, the incisiveness of their arguments may help us identify what scholars have overlooked amid the increasingly specialized and fragmented production of academic knowledge. In my view, one task for humanists in this new era should be to engage with these thinking processes and see where it takes their work.

Regardless of how we understand Ruguanism, it gives us yet another reason to read the history of China in 1644—and to read it seriously. Afterward, the politics of the global present begins to look more interesting.

Shoufu Yin is an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia.

Primary editor: Sarah Rothbard | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown

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