Dreams in Collision

Pax Americana vs Pax Sinica

Photo by Michael Afonso on Unsplash

As tensions escalate in the South China Sea, and trade wars morph into battles over semiconductors and influence, the clash between the United States and China reveals itself as more than a power struggle—it is a confrontation between civilisational grammars, irreconcilable dreams of order, and competing myths of salvation and seduction.

Pax Americana: Empire by Hormone and Hollywood

Oestrogen—extracted from the urine of pregnant mares in 1942 at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, became the first FDA approved oestrogen Hormone Replacement Therapy—HRT—in America. Known as the drug Premarine—Pregnant Mare Urine—they sold it on fantasy. The August 15, 1965 Vogue headline, “How to live Young at Any Age—Straight Talk About Hormones from a Famous Doctor”, says it all. HRT became popularised for the post war international mass market by the 1960’s. It eventually saw its greatest success as the contraceptive pill—driving the great American cultural export, the sexual revolution.

Mass markets, Public Relations, American products and freedoms became a powerful American export and transformed the Post WWII World. This world, held safe by overwhelming American military and economic supremacy—a supremacy that protects these freedoms and sells Hollywood as the good life—became the foundation of Pax Americana. This hormonal alchemy wasn’t just medicine—but a glorious magical metaphor. Pax Americana was not built only by tanks and firepower—but by dreams and desire bottled and sold. The dollar was now king.

1945, the year after the Second World War ended, enthroned the American era. With its overwhelming economic and military might, the United States set out to rebuild a shattered world—on its own terms. At Bretton Woods, American and European architects imagined a new order: financial institutions, governance models, and trade frameworks designed not only to reconstruct Europe and Japan, but to enshrine U.S. supremacy as the guardian of global stability. Even the CFA Franc—used to tether African economies to French and Western control—was born from this vision.

This new Pax Americana rested upon three monumental pillars:

1. Command of the Commons as Protection
   The U.S. polices the international commons—seas, skies, and space—under the banner of freedom. But this ‘freedom’ is strategically selective. It requires the arbitrary imposition of unchallenged American movement across the oceans, in the skies above 15,000 feet, and the ability to deny this mobility to rivals. This doctrine provides a permanent logic of militarised advantage.

2. Economic and Military Leadership through Technological Supremacy
   At the heart of American dominance is the control of silicon—the semiconductor monopoly that powers every jet, missile, and mainframe. The U.S. secures economic leadership through Bretton Woods and post Bretton Woods, dollar supremacy, and global trade networks—it is underwritten by a technological lead that the world could not approach until the rise of China.

3. Soft Power Architecture
   The U.S. offers not just goods and guns, but dreams. Its ideology. Hollywood reinforces its ideology of freedom, free markets, and rule of law through mass media repetition, universities canonise it in curricula, and institutions like the UN, IMF, and World Bank encircle the globe with it.

These are pillars of American power. It's a simple deal: America governs the global commons, pays for the standardised infrastructure, promises that free markets keep the world rich, produces the symbolic imagination that makes people feel safe—and when its order is threatened, it unleashes armageddon-grade weaponry and disciplines the offending savage.

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The Architecture of Global Discipline

This sacred contract is cloaked in secular robes. The world is zoned into three tiers: wealthy consumer markets with technologically advanced providers of high-end services; poor zones of low-technology production supplying cheap labor; and zones of strategic resource extraction—kept cheap, kept disciplined, kept open, and rendered unable to defend themselves against American extraction.

It works. But we must also reckon with its inevitable price.

As the American economy begins to creak under the weight of its own illusions and the costs of disciplining its heretics, imperial strategists keep warning of the signs of decline, taking hold in the ageing empire. But hubris prevails. Politicians and business elites convince themselves that they are basking in the eternal liberal sunshine of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”—that nothing can stop America’s liberal hegemony.

In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organisation—WTO— with American support. China became the second largest market for American exports. Conversely, the US became the largest market for Chinese exports. Joining the WTO integrated China as a zone of cheap skilled labour, becoming another low cost zone where the US could shift its manufacturing, reducing costs of consumer goods. This cost cutting strategy did not begin with China, but it provided America with the convenient scapegoat for its self-inflicted wounds. The Chinese integrated themselves into the American economy, buying assets and holding approximately $750 billion in treasury bonds, to become the second largest US bond creditor after Japan.

Cheap consumer goods flowed and fueled gigantic corporate profits. American corporate vultures stripped the economy bare. The wealthy did this as strategy, and they bellowed in triumph.

Decline Masked as Triumph

But decline always wears the delusional mask of triumph. In 2008, the mask slipped. The financial system of the world’s most powerful nation revealed itself as little more than a globalised confidence game—its engine running on debt, derivatives, and dreams just shy of a Ponzi scheme.

President Obama bailed out the bankers—not because they deserved saving, but because they were too entangled, too powerful to fail without collapsing the US economy. And so Pax Americana protected the very architects of its unraveling, betraying those the bankers swindled. As International Relations Professor Yan Xuetong repeatedly insists, nations cannot dominate through force alone but through ethics and coherent strategic leadership. Obama’s pragmatic but unethical action merely slowed the decline and worsened the American economic malaise. In this case Professor Xuetong is proven right.

When Trump entered the White House for his first term, the empire's elites had already lost their grasp of their imperial mission's gravity. They were no longer focused upon rule—they focused upon performance. They pandered to the voting masses. Trump became their greatest performer: the spectacle of sovereignty increasingly unmoored from coherent strategy, spun in a theater of grievance, racism, genocide and spectacle. Reality television, social media, and Twitter now dominated where pragmatic, coherent strategy was required. They undermined the international perception of American leadership credibility, believing that raw power alone would suffice. For empires, this is often a fatal error.

Pax Americana performed best with technology—and committed its most brilliant but costly miscalculations. Silicon wafer–thin transistors—an American invention built on the work of the physicist and engineer William Shockley—led to a cascade that birthed the tech-stack and standards incubator—Silicon Valley. Processing power bundled into micro-scale dimensions, allowed trillions of integrated circuits to be packed into miniscule spaces. This revolution powered man’s journey to the moon, precision-guided missiles, the internet, smartphones, and the digital infrastructure of empire.

But while America slept in its own dream of silicon and spectacle, China manufactured. Watched. Waited. And learned. What America called globalisation, China read as rehearsal. It mastered the production lines, bought U.S. Treasury bonds, studied American warships, and absorbed American digital gospel. But China never forgot its own story—the dynasty interrupted, the century shamed.

What Washington failed to recognise in 1996, when Clinton sent carrier groups to show China who was boss, was that it is not only the sea who does not forget. With a spy agency—the Ministry of State Security—estimated at up to ten times the size of the CIA, China has many ways to remember.

And in the shadow of Pax Americana’s approaching twilight, something older began to stir. Not a new empire, but an old Silk Road memory—reassembled through concrete, code, and BRI—Belt and Road Initiative— corridors.

Part II begins there.

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The China That Could Not Forget

For eighteen centuries, China dominated the Asian world-system. From the Qin unification in 221 B.C. through the height of the Han, Tang, Song, and into the Ming and Qing, Chinese civilisation generated a vast, durable field of economic productivity, technological innovation, population growth, literature, legal theory, and ritualised order. Through ruptures—dynastic collapses, Mongol invasions, and famines—the continuity of wen—civilisation— never broke. The Chinese world did not view itself as rising and falling—it persisted.

From 1368 to 1841, during the Ming and early Qing dynasties, four major states—China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—shared the symbolic and institutional grammar of a common East Asian order. David Kang, in East Before the West, notes that these four states fought only two major wars between themselves in nearly five centuries. The tributary system was not simply a tool of dominance; it was a ritual order, a choreography of hierarchy and respect, in which China’s centrality was the natural bedrock and connecting glue. China did not enforce peace by threat alone—but by consensus, prestige, and protocol.

European greed, cannon and rifle fire, shattered that world in 1841. The Opium Wars marked not merely China’s military defeat but its symbolic inversion. For the first time in over a millennium, the Son of Heaven bowed, collapsing to foreign troops and gunboats. European empires did not recognise or respect the tributary order. They came not to bow, but to subjugate and carve. And with the Treaty of Nanjing, the long Chinese century gave way to the century of humiliation. A century of collapse, domination, unequal and unjust treaties, and wars to ensure the opium addiction of China continued unabated, facilitating the steady drain of their silver bullion reserves.

The European Powers ruthlessly suppressed rebellions such as the Boxer Rebellion. Chinese attempts at reform failed miserably. Lin Zexu rose up to put an end to this systematic destruction. But overwhelming European gunboat superiority defeated him and they compelled him to pay reparations.

Three generations beneath this yoke of humiliation collapsed all belief and trust in this ancient system. They simply could not overthrow these conditions. Japan, perceiving similar challenges had no choice but to radically transform the Japanese social order during the Meiji Restoration. When China’s former vassals, the Japanese, invaded as an imperial power and committed unspeakable atrocities including the Rape of Nanjing, this was perhaps the final humiliation.

Mao’s ruthless political, cultural and social engineering becomes legible beneath this century of humiliation and brutality. This is a humiliation and subjugation that China must never suffer again. The psychic scar must be excised.

When discussing Mao with Chinese it is fascinating to observe their body language. To observe the contradictory emotions he evokes in them. What is clear is that they prefer Mao to the return to the humiliating circumstances, which reduced them to helpless pawns in their own land. Without grasping this no China strategy will ever have ongoing success. The CCP is China’s bastion against the return of the weakness which unleashed upon them the century of humiliation. Bill Clinton's jingoism played right into CCP hands and they know well how to weaponise this and they have.

Much Western strategy towards China reads on the register of strategic psychological incompetence. CCP diplomats never being alone and at least always meeting in pairs, is to ensure that never again must China be unfairly negotiated with, manipulated by and outfoxed by foreign powers. To ensure this Zhou Enlai rewrote the diplomatic book as a military manual. This is the sign of raw unhealed, present and active trauma and it lives and breathes in the walls, cracks and empty spaces of the Chinese state. And we will see this manifested as Chinese strategy in next week's article.

What I have seen in Western analysts regarding China often can only be described as a structural self-serving narcissism which is diplomatically and strategically dangerous. China is another civilisation which survived by embracing the political technology of those who humiliated and crushed them. This technology is used as ever vigilant active defence.

When we say that China remembers it does so structurally. It is built deep into the psyche as imaginary structure, which is built into institutions, strategy and politics. We must understand that they cannot forget. The hope of integrating China into a Western-led order is pure fantasy. China can only lead itself. But do not mistake China’s rise as revenge, we are all not important enough to them for that—Mao reengineered China as legible to itself. The China it could not forget!

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Power Fantasies and Civilisational Dreams

Power is part of our natural world. It ebbs. Flows . Lives. And dies. It is born and transmutes. It is patterned by a civilisational grammar. Locked into our psyches, revealed in our language and bound congealed in our institutions.

The European system fears the corruption of the leader who secures power to themselves. We fear the corruption of forgotten popes, that we structurally remember within our depths. Our system of checks and balances chase papal phantoms long forgotten but surreptitiously alive hidden within our symbolic order. The spirit of trauma keeps them alive. The Western Schism and the Thirty Years War preserve the horror as shadows. The Peace of Westphalia which gave us the Westphalian Order, preserves this trauma institutionally. WWI and WWII repeat and reinforce the phantoms of our psyche, lest we forget. The phantoms slip, drifting through our unconscious and making legible their dance within our subterranean depths. Our foreclosure is not mirrored in another civilisation. This fundamental narcissism makes them untranslatable to ourselves.

As Western power wanes and Chinese power waxes, coming to terms with the Chinese who face us, in all their glory and contradictions, makes them coherent to us. They become untranslatable when we project upon them a pathology which reveals our own. The consistency of Chinese successes reveals that they have perhaps read the West correctly. We could argue that this proves that we are legible to them.

The U.S. dreams the dream of deterrence and discipline—of heretics and salvation. It dreams of a sacralised code of secular theological grammar. Meanwhile China dreams of seduction and entanglement—of protocology and diffused sovereignty bound into structure and relationality. And most of all it dreams that it is the Son of the materialised transubstantiated Heaven of the CCP.

So as China and the U.S. confront each other on the South China Sea, our psychic symbolic grammars of power pattern our seeing, constrain our strategies and seduce our sight.

Toward Pax Sinica

Yet history, like the sea, does not forget. And this tide of humiliation crashes against its reefs in the South China Sea—for China is forging a way to win, not with warships, but without fighting at all. And the U.S. speaks the only language she knows—of discipline, deterrence and salvation.

China through the new silk road builds infrastructure which generates a better quality of life and increases per capita wealth. It draws into its orbit with seductive win-win logic. It binds populations into its protocol as embedded discipline. It distributes sovereignty away from state actors and into protocol relationality. This is the new Pax Sinicus.

War is the place where life and death meet

— The Art of War, Sun Tzu

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