“When This Continues, Humanity Will Come to An End”. Zhongchang Tong and the Collapsological Models of Ancient China
Written by: Heng Xie
1. Introduction: The Sundown of Civilization
Is human history fundamentally constituted by a linear teleology toward infinite material progress, [1] democracy, and freedom? If the answer is in the negative, what explanatory mechanisms account for this deviation? Robert A. Nisbet once claimed that:
No one has ever seen a civilization die, and it is unimaginable, short of cosmic disaster or thermonuclear holocaust, that anyone ever will. Nor has anyone ever seen a civilization—or culture or institution—in literal process of decay and degeneration, though there is a rich profusion of these words and their synonyms in Western thought from Hesiod to Spengler. (Nisbet 2017: 3)
Yet, contra Nisbet, were a dispassionate observer transposed to the 3rd century CE, viewing the Eurasian landmass from a synoptic vantage point, they would witness a startling synchronicity: the parallel disintegration, or “twin declines”, of the “Twin Empires” (Scheidel 2009, 2019). At the western terminus, the Roman Empire descended into military anarchy precipitated by the Crisis of the Third Century. This universal polity, which had conceptually anchored itself in spatial and temporal infinity (Roma aeterna and orbis terrarum) (Ando 2013; Nicolet 1991), teetered on the brink of systemic collapse. It buckled under a convergence of endogenous shocks, political volatility, hyperinflation, and economic contraction, and exogenous stressors, most notably barbarian incursions and the demographic catastrophe of the Plague of Cyprian.
Simultaneously, at the eastern terminus of Eurasia, the Eastern Han (oc *n̥ˤar-s)[2] Empire, having endured for two centuries (de Crespigny 2016), disintegrated with a velocity that defied contemporary imagination. The delegation of military authority to regional commands, originally a stopgap measure addressing the state’s fiscal and military deficits, precipitated a loss of central control. This devolution unleashed a massive wave of internecine warfare among the elite. In the ensuing zero-sum competition, spanning approximately two decades, the empire suffered a demographic collapse of apocalyptic proportions: roughly three-quarters of the total population perished, a loss equating to nearly one-fifth[3] of the global population at the time. This demographic catastrophe was accompanied by a profound material and institutional regression. Social wealth evaporated, redistributed through mechanisms such as systematic tomb raiding, while the production of handicrafts and arts underwent a startling simplification. Most critically, the empire’s most sophisticated subsystem, its highly data-driven administrative technocracy, did not merely decline but collapsed into a state of functional primitivism. The disintegration of order extended to the normative sphere: unprecedentedly, rationalizations emerged for the violation of fundamental taboos, including justifications for cannibalism “when necessary” (Kong Rong 孔融, 151–208).
What explanatory variables account for this fragility in a civilization possessed of such colossal material capital?[4] This paper eschews a pre-established generalized theory. Instead, it isolates the mechanisms of this specific collapse by adopting the theoretical lens of Zhongchang Tong (仲長統, 180–220), the last preeminent historical theorist of Classical China.
2. The Abyss of the Third Century: The Termination of the World and Humanity
Acknowledging that the readership may lack familiarity with the intricacies of ancient East Asian history, a periodized sketch of the Eastern Han Dynasty’s collapse is warranted here:
Phase I: The Disintegration of Imperial Authority and the Eve of Warlord Contention (184–189). This era commenced with the outbreak of the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 CE. Although the uprising was suppressed, the Han court’s strategy of devolving military and administrative authority to regional inspectors inadvertently spawned semi-autonomous warlord factions. Concurrently, the central government was paralyzed by intense factional strife between the eunuchs and the consort kin. In 189 ad, the frontier general Dong Zhuo (139-192) occupied the capital, Luoyang, and deposed the emperor, thoroughly shattering the final vestiges of the central regime’s legitimacy and pushing this political vacuum to its apex. By this juncture, the Han Dynasty had effectively lost its capacity to govern the empire.
Phase II: The Era of Great Warlord Warfare (190–200). In 190 CE, the coalition against Dong Zhuo rapidly disintegrated, evolving into a full-scale civil war. Amidst this chaos, the warlord Cao Cao secured a critical political advantage by controlling the exiled Emperor Xian, leveraging the puppet court to legitimize his military campaigns. The seminal turning point arrived at the Battle of Guandu in 200 ad, where Cao Cao decisively defeated his primary rival, Yuan Shao. This victory enabled Cao Cao to progressively annex hostile forces and broadly unify Northern China, thereby re-establishing a centralized administrative system under his hegemony.
Phase III: The North-South Standoff and the Formation of the Three Kingdoms (200–220). Cao Cao’s grand design to unify the whole Han oecumene came to an abrupt halt at the Battle of Red Cliffs (208 ad), where he was defeated by the allied forces of Sun Quan and Liu Bei. This defeat ensured that no single power could dominate China, resulting in a geopolitical stalemate. As Cao Cao consolidated his rule in the North, Liu Bei established a foothold in present-day Sichuan, while Sun Quan firmly controlled the plains of the middle and lower Yangtze River. Over the subsequent decade, the frontiers of these three nascent regimes gradually solidified. In 220 ad, Cao Pi forced Emperor Xian to abdicate, formally terminating Han rule and inaugurating the Three Kingdoms (or, technically, Three Empires) period, thus marking the conclusion of this epoch.
As demonstrated in Part II, prior to the consolidation of stable regimes, all military agents operated under a brutal strategic imperative: the rational calculus that “insufficient brutality ensures elimination.” Driven by this logic, they were compelled to adopt the behavioral profile of “roving bandits” (Olson 2000), maximizing short-term military advantage through unrestricted predation. Qualitatively, this mirrors the pathological dynamics of Late Roman civil wars, characterized by the systematic extirpation of rivals. However, in the Eastern Han context, a unique confluence of structural variables precipitated a demographic catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude:
Geographical Vulnerability: The North China Plain lacked significant natural barriers to buffer military operations.
Social Atomization: The extreme fragmentation of local communities left the populace defenseless against organized predation.
Political Hyper-Centralization: The high degree of prior power concentration meant its collapse created a total vacuum of order.
The scale of this devastation transcends the imaginative limits of Late Roman chroniclers and challenges the comprehension of contemporary Western historiography. The official census of 157 CE recorded in the Book of the Later Han (Hou Hanshu 後漢書) stands at 56.48 million. By contrast, data from the Records of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi 三国志) indicates that by the late Three Kingdoms period, the combined registered population had plummeted to 7.67 million, a registered decline of over 85%. Even accounting for significant under-registration and the phenomenon of “hidden households”, the actual demographic nadir likely hovered between 15 and 30 million (Ge 2002: 436ff). This implies a biological population loss of 50–75%, a figure that starkly refutes “negationist” interpretations which attribute the decline solely to “eroding state capacity rather than demographic change” (Scheidel 2019: 243). Beyond statistical inference, this demographic collapse is vividly corroborated by the apocalyptic testimony of contemporary witnesses:
出門無所見，白骨蔽平原。
路有飢婦人，抱子棄草間。
顧聞號泣聲，揮涕獨不還。
未知身死處，何能兩相完？
驅馬棄之去，不忍聽此言。
Venturing out the gate, nothing is to be seen,
Save for white bones covering the plain.
On the road, there is a starving woman,
Abandoning her child in the grass.
Looking back, I hear her weeping,
Wiping her tears, she does not return.
Not knowing where she herself will die,
How can she keep both of them whole?
I drive my horse and leave her there,
I cannot bear to hear these words. (Wenxuan, 23: 1087-1088)[5]
Wang Can’s verse articulates a phenomenology of total collapse: a landscape where the familiar social world has been supplanted by an eschatological void of “white bones”. The disintegration extends to the biological core of social organization: even the primordial bond between mother and child is severed by the exigencies of survival. Corroborating this literary testimony, contemporary records are saturated with accounts of “people devouring one another” (ren xiang shi 人相食). These are not isolated anomalies but indicate a systemic reversion to subsistence cannibalism, compounded by massacres of unprecedented ferocity and pathogenic outbreaks. This textual narrative is substantiated by material evidence: archaeological surveys reveal a precipitous discontinuity in settlement patterns across key regions (e.g., Wu et al. 2012). Reconstructing the trajectory of the collapse, the steepest demographic decline correlates with the aforementioned second phase (post-189 CE). It was within this critical five-to-ten-year window of unconstrained anarchy, before the crystallization of new regional hegemonies, that the mortality rate peaked. Demographic stabilization was only achieved with the re-establishment of coercive order under the tri-partite equilibrium of the Three Kingdoms.
In summation, for the overwhelming majority, the structural “losers” of this zero-sum game, the collapse was not an abstract transition of power but a reality of absolute terror, hatred and hopelessness. This existential nadir is frequently obscured when the period is viewed solely through the lens of the “Great Tradition” or the “1% perspective of history” (Kemp 2025). Paradoxically, even for the “winners,” the psychological landscape shifted fundamentally. In stark contrast to the vitalist self-assertion, akin to a Dionysian celebration of self-realizing subjectivity that characterized the Warring States period and the early imperial expansion, the late Han elite succumbed to a desperate carpe diem. This was not a celebration of life, but a hedonism rooted in existential numbness:
生年不滿百，常懷千歲憂。
晝短苦夜長，何不秉燭游？
為樂當及時，何能待來茲？
Life spans not a hundred years,
Yet we harbor a millennium of cares.
The day is short, the night is long,
Why not wander with a candle in hand?
Seek pleasure in the moment,
How can [we] wait for the morrow? (Wenxuan, 29: 1349)
Generally dated to the interstitial period between the reign of Emperor Huan (孝桓皇帝, r. 146–168) and the Jian’an era (196–220), this corpus resonates profoundly with the Jian’an lyricism of Cao Cao曹操, Cao Pi曹丕, and Wang Can王粲. It articulates a radical presentism conditioned by ontological transience: an acute consciousness, centered on “life is short” and “everything must go”. In this cognitive framework, immediate sensory gratification serves as the sole epistemological anchor against the encroaching void of the future. The psychological mechanism driving this shift is elucidated by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman’s (2010) “Shattered Assumptions Theory”. This model posits that psychosocial stability relies on three axiomatic beliefs: The fundamental benevolence of the world; The meaningfulness and justice of the cosmic order; The intrinsic worth of the self. Under the trauma of systemic collapse, these foundational axioms were systematically dismantled. Traditional normative systems, specifically the ritual complex of ancestor worship and institutional Confucianism, had reached a point of logical exhaustion and led itself ad absurdum.
This normative vacuum explains the emergence of “Pure Conversation” (qingtan 清談) among the post-collapse Wei-Jin elite. This practice represented a paradoxical synthesis: the fusion of extreme hedonism with rigorous metaphysical speculation, culminating in a refined nihilism of fuga mundi. Conversely, the subaltern populace, reduced to mere fungible resources within the warlord economy, accelerated a trend initiated in the early Eastern Han: seeking soteriological refuge in nascent religious movements such as Buddhism and Daoism (Zürcher 2007).
3. The Genealogy of Decline: The Historical Trajectory of Empire Formation
Beyond the empirical description of the “what” and the “how,” the ultimate historiographical inquiry rests on the “why.” This etiological question necessitates a fundamental positioning of the collapse: was it merely a transient aberration, a “momentary glitch”, or the logical determination of a longue durée development (Engels 2020: 89)? As is well documented, in Late Antiquity, this dichotomy manifested as a dialectical tension between two opposing philosophies of history: renovatio imperii (e.g., Rutilius Namatianus) and mundus senescit (e.g., Augustine). The former paradigm interpreted systemic stressors as temporary fluctuations to be endured on the trajectory toward a restored Golden Age. The latter, conversely, posited a linear mechanics of irreversibility: it asserted that the engine of decline, engaged since the fall of Carthage, was a teleological process destined to culminate in the termination of both the Roman polity and the entire ecumene itself.
This historiographical bifurcation finds its precise analogue in Classical China. In stark contrast to the vast majority of Late Han intellectuals (such as Chen Lin 陳琳, Kong Rong 孔融, and Xun Yu 荀彧), whose analytical horizon was restricted to the immediate political vicissitudes of the dynastic crisis, Zhongchang Tong (仲長統, 180–220) stands as a singular anomaly. He was among the few contemporaries who situated the cataclysmic disintegration of the Eastern Han not as an isolated event, but as the terminus of a longue durée trajectory of structural degeneration that had been set in motion during the Spring and Autumn period. In his magnum opus, the Changyan 昌言 (Frank Speech), of which, regrettably, the textual transmission is highly fragmentary, with scarcely ten percent of the original corpus surviving, he articulated this thesis with chilling clarity:
昔春秋之時，周氏之亂世也。逮乎戰國，則又甚矣。秦政乘并兼之埶，放虎狼之心，屠裂天下，吞食生人，暴虐不已，以招楚漢用兵之苦，甚於戰國之時也。漢二百年而遭王莽之亂，計其殘夷滅亡之數，又復倍乎秦、項矣。以及今日，名都空而不居，百里絕而無民者，不可勝數。此則又甚於亡新之時也。悲夫！不及五百年，大難三起，中閒之亂，尚不數焉。變而彌猜，下而加酷，推此以往，可及於盡矣。嗟乎！不知來世聖人救此之道，將何用也？又不知天若窮此之數，欲何至邪？
In the past, the Spring and Autumn period marked the chaotic age of the Zhou house. By the time of the Warring States, the situation had deteriorated further. Ying Zheng (i.e., the First Emperor), capitalizing on its annexing power and unleashing a heart of tigers and wolves, slaughtered and tore the world apart, devouring the living. Its tyranny knew no bounds, inviting the suffering of the Chu-Han contention, which was even worse than the Warring States period. After two centuries of the Han, the chaos of Wang Mang struck. Calculating the numbers of the slaughtered and destroyed, it again doubled that of the Qin and Xiang Yu era. As for today, famous metropolises stand empty and uninhabited; for hundreds of li, there are no people: Instances of this are too numerous to count. This is, in turn, worse than the collapse of the New Dynasty (Wang Mang). Alas! In less than five hundred years, three great calamities have arisen, and the lesser disorders in between are not even counted. As changes occur, suspicion/distrust deepens; as the [order] descends, cruelty intensifies. Extrapolating from this, [the humanity] may well come to an end. Alas! How can a sage of future generations save the world from such [a predicament]? And if Heaven intends to bring this [calamity] to its ultimate end, where will it stop? (Hou hanshu, 49: 1649-1650)
Thus, the disintegration of the Eastern Han Empire was not a contingent accident, but the deterministic terminus of a protracted linear chain of regression: Spring and Autumn → Warring States → Qin → Wang Mang → “Today”. The rhetorical question at the conclusion signals a definitive abandonment of hope. The path dependence driving this institutional decay is so profound, and the structural lock-in so complete, that an alternative historical trajectory becomes strictly inconceivable. Sima Qian had previously located the “unprecedented catastrophe” in the collapse of the Qin (Shiji, 27:1606), while Ban Gu shifted this horizon of destruction to the Wang Mang interregnum (Hou hanshu, 40b: 1360). Finally, Zhongchang Tong re-situates this absolute nadir in the immediate “present”: a state where temporal progression is negatively correlated with social order. Every advance in time is accompanied by a continuous erosion of social trust and an escalation in the magnitude of brutality, pointing inevitably toward the termination of the human community itself. Certainly, this teleology of decline was not sui generis to Zhongchang Tong. It stands as the culmination of a genealogical tradition tracing back to Liu Xiang (77–6 BCE), who depicted history as a continuous devolution from the Spring and Autumn period, a worldview whose primal archetype can be traced to the historical anxiety of Confucius himself.
However, Zhongchang Tong’s distinct theoretical “innovation” lies in his pioneering conceptualization of the genesis and disintegration of the imperial structure as a strictly cyclical process. In this specific dimension, he exhibits a striking theoretical convergence with the historical sociology of Ibn Khaldun, most notably the thesis that the consolidation of political power endogenously generates the precise conditions for its own forfeiture. Yet, in stark contrast to the Maghrebi polymath, Zhongchang Tong’s contribution remains virtually unknown (let alone acknowledged) within the canon of Western historiography:
豪傑之當天命者，未始有天下之分者也。無天下之分，故戰爭者競起焉。于斯之時，[…] 擁甲兵與我角才智，程勇力與我競雌雄，不知去就，疑誤天下，蓋不可數也。角知者皆窮，角力者皆負，形不堪復伉，埶不足復校，乃始羈首係頸，就我之銜紲耳。[…] 彼之蔚蔚，皆匈詈腹詛，幸我之不成，而以奮其前志，詎肯用此為終死之分邪？及繼體之時，民心定矣。普天之下，賴我而得生育，由我而得富貴，安居樂業，長養子孫，天下晏然，皆歸心於我矣。[…]當此之時，雖下愚之才居之，猶能使恩同天地，威侔鬼神。[…] 彼後嗣之愚主，見天下莫敢與之違，自謂若天地之不可亡也，乃奔其私嗜，騁其邪欲，君臣宣淫，上下同惡。[…] 使餓狼守庖廚，飢虎牧牢豚，遂至熬天下之脂膏，斲生人之骨髓。怨毒無聊，禍亂並起，中國擾攘，四夷侵叛，土崩瓦解，一朝而去。昔之為我哺乳之子孫者，今盡是我飲血之寇讎也。至於運徙勢去，猶不覺悟者，豈非富貴生不仁，沈溺致愚疾邪？存亡以之迭代，政亂從此周復，天道常然之大數也。
Those heroes who receive the Mandate of Heaven initially possess no share of the empire. It is precisely because there is no established division of the realm that wars and rivalries erupt. At this juncture, […] [rivals] possessing armor and weaponry vie with me in wit and wisdom, measuring their courage and strength against mine to determine supremacy. Instances of their confusion and miscalculation are too numerous to count. Only when those who competed in wisdom are exhausted and those who competed in strength are defeated, when they can no longer resist and their situations no longer allow for contest, do they finally bow their heads, submit to the yoke, and accept my bridle. [...] Yet, in their teeming multitudes, they all curse me in their chests and bellies, hoping for my failure to fulfill their former ambitions. How could they be willing to accept this servitude as their lot until death?
By the time of the successors, however, the hearts of the people have settled. All under Heaven rely on “me” for birth and sustenance, obtaining wealth and honor through “me”, living in peace and raising their descendants. The realm is tranquil, and all hearts turn to “me”. […] At this time, even if a man of the lowest intelligence occupies the throne, his grace can still seem as vast as Heaven and Earth, and his authority as formidable as ghosts and spirits.
[...] [However,] those foolish heirs, seeing that none in the empire dare to oppose them, assume themselves to be as imperishable as Heaven and Earth. Thus, they unleash their private lusts and give free rein to their depraved desires. Ruler and minister alike flaunt their licentiousness; superiors and inferiors share in wickedness. [...] This is akin to setting hungry wolves to guard the kitchen or starving tigers to tend the swine. It results in the rendering of the empire’s fat and the hacking out of the living people’s marrow. Resentment and misery leave no recourse; disasters and chaos rise together. The Central Lands are thrown into turmoil, and the barbarians on four sides invade and rebel. The empire crumbles like earth and dissolves like tiles, gone in a single morning. Those who were formerly my children and grandchildren, whom I suckled and reared, are now all my enemies and bandits, drinking my blood.
As for the fact that they remain unawakened even when the fortune shifts and the power dissipates, is this not because wealth and honor breed callousness, and deep indulgence results in the malady of folly? Survival and ruin alternate through this mechanism; order and chaos cycle in this manner. Such is the constant Great Destiny of the Way of Heaven. (Hou hanshu, 49: 1646-1647)
Given the length of the original text, a summary in tabular form is provided below:
In summary, the total consolidation of power structurally necessitates the systemic degradation of administrative capacity and the intensification of predatory extraction. This dynamic inexorably precipitates a collapse into unconstrained anarchy. Subsequently, this zero-sum mechanism yields a solitary victor, thereby reinitiating the cyclical process ab initio. This model bears no resemblance to the traditional Mencian paradigm of the “Cycle of Order and Chaos”, which predicates stability on the periodic emergence of moral agency (the Sage). By contrast, in Zhongchang Tong’s calculus, the fundamental mechanism of order-maintenance, whether in times of stability or upheaval, is invariably naked violence. Therefore, whether implicitly or explicitly, the very formulation of this historical conception signals civilization’s descent into a post-historical condition. It marks the dissolution of all intermediate social structures—regional identity, aristocratic rank, class solidarity, and ideological cohesion. What remains is an amorphous, atomized substrate, characterized by a “zoological” conflict between the solitary imperial throne and the unbridled ambition of all to seize it.
Returning to the specific trajectory of Zhongchang Tong’s historical declinism, the causal linkage between this longue durée degeneration and the cyclical mechanics of absolute power requires precise elucidation. Contemporary historiography has unequivocally documented the structural transformations characterizing Early China since the mid-Spring and Autumn period. While significant scholarly attention has been directed toward the systemic isomorphism between these developments and the process of Early Modern state formation in Europe (c. 16th century), these phenomena are virtually never framed through the lens of decline. Conversely, the prevailing narrative characterizes this epoch as one of rationalization, technological innovation, and military sophistication—in short, a trajectory of linear progress. However, subjected to a rigorous systems analysis, this “progress” reveals itself not as the maturation of the civilizational organism, but as a pathological hypertrophy akin to carcinogenesis. The mechanism is stark: the exponential growth of local complexity (specifically within the state apparatus) was purchased at the cost of the radical simplification, flattening, and homogenization of the broader social substrate. In effect, the state maximized its internal order by extracting the social environment, leading to the systemic disintegration of society itself.[6]
This cancer-like dynamic manifests most acutely in the theory and praxis of Legalist statecraft. The objective was nothing less than total social engineering, implemented through a suite of mechanisms designed to render the population transparent and manageable:
Administrative Penetration: The establishment of a bureaucratic apparatus capable of bypassing intermediate social structures to access the individual directly.
Coercive Monopolies: The rigorous enforcement of a state monopoly on physical violence and the semi-militarization of the social fabric.
Cognitive Standardization: The unification of weights, measures, scripts, and logistical networks to reduce transaction costs for the state.
Data-driven Governance: The implementation of a universal performance evaluation system, functionally a proto-social credit architecture, enforced by a mandatory network of mutual surveillance and liability, designed to accelerate social atomization.
Concrete measures included, but were not limited to: The establishment of a bureaucratic apparatus penetrating directly to the individual level to achieve a high degree of administrative and fiscal centralization; the promotion of a semi-militarization of society; the coercive monopoly on physical violence; the standardization of weights, measures, scripts, and road systems; and the implementation of a society-wide performance evaluation system (a form of proto-social credit system) alongside a mandatory mutual surveillance network designed to accelerate social atomization. This regime of highly “modernist” legibility extended to the granular level of the village and household. It enabled the imperial registry to function as a biometric database, tracking not merely the private property of every nuclear family but recording individual somatic characteristics—body shape, height, complexion, and facial features—with forensic precision. The state’s gaze penetrated the micro-physics of daily life, regulating even the most private spheres, such as the prohibition of spontaneous commensality (banquets) exceeding three participants. As I have argued elsewhere (2025b), the apex of this logic appeared in the biopolitical management of forced laborers: specifically, the integration of their reproductive output (fertility rates) into the metrics of bureaucratic performance evaluation.
Consequently, the organic complexity of the “feudal jungle”, characterized by a hierarchical complementarity that fostered a rich ecology of intermediate associations —was systematically razed. In its place emerged a flattened “Agro-Military Managerial State” (or, anachronistically, an Agro-Military Gulag). In this ideal-type governance model, the state sought to eliminate all mediating structures, demanding that every individual maintain a singular, unmediated vertical allegiance solely to the sovereign power. Dialectically, this transformation produced a massive bifurcation in complexity:
State Hypertrophy: On one hand, this proto-totalitarian centralization facilitated the extraction and concentration of material surplus. The “State” emerged as a solitary island of hyper-complexity, achieving a degree of organizational density unrivaled in global history until the advent of the Napoleonic nation-state. The quantitative manifestations of this capacity are staggering: from the logistical singularity of the Battle of Changping (allegedly mobilizing a million combatants), through the First Emperor’s coordination of 720,000 convict laborers for megalithic construction, to the protracted imperial expansionism of Emperor Wu, which sustained a thirty-year campaign against the Xiongnu involving cavalry deployments peaking at 180,000 people.
Societal Simplification: On the other hand, this colossal engine of statecraft generated a corresponding social vacuum: the most atomized “social desert” in human history prior to the 20th century. Nearly one-third of the global population was reconfigured into nuclear households of fewer than five members. This atomization was not merely structural but normative, cemented by the statutory obligation of mutual denunciation among kin, effectively dissolving the private sphere into the domain of public policing.
Historically located, the genesis of this trajectory in the Spring and Autumn period remained an essentially elite phenomenon: the opportunistic subversion of the Western Zhou normative order by the aristocracy. The traditional military ethos—ideally codified in The Methods of the Sima (Sima fa 司馬法)—functioned as a restrictive normative framework. It imposed strict deontological constraints on belligerents, approximating a classical Just War theory:
Jus ad bellum: Norms governing the initiation of hostilities, strictly limiting legitimacy to punitive expeditions and humanitarian interventions.
Jus in bello: Protocols of battlefield conduct, including prohibitions against targeting non-combatants (hors de combat) and civilians.
Post-conflict Ethics: Mandates for leniency and ritual respect toward the vanquished.
However, as the operational logic of the Warring States era shifted from aristocratic duels to mass-mobilized “Total War,” the vector of transgression evolved. It moved from the tactical deception of the Spring and Autumn period to strategic annihilation—the doctrine of “attacking the human”. The Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) quantifies this shift with chilling precision: the state of Qin alone registered a total of 1.8 million beheadings in its foreign campaigns during the mid-to-late Warring States period (364–234 BCE). Yet, in a grim comparative analysis, even this industrialized slaughter appears as a paragon of civilizational order when juxtaposed against the absolute short-termism exhibited by the military adventurers of the Late Eastern Han. Following the decay of state capacity, the rational calculus of violence shifted from “conquest” to “predation,” illustrated by three paradigmatic cases:
Dong Zhuo’s Incineration of Luoyang: Confronted by the military pressure of the Guandong Coalition, Dong Zhuo decreed the forcible relocation of the capital, driving the imperial court and millions of inhabitants from Luoyang and its environs to Chang’an. To deny resources to the enemy, he implemented a scorched earth policy, reducing Luoyang to ashes. This coercive mass migration resulted in catastrophic demographic loss due to famine and violence along the route, effectively rendering the capital region a terra nullius.
Cao Cao’s Massacre in Xuzhou: Ostensibly operating under the banner of avenging his father, Cao Cao launched repeated military campaigns against Tao Qian in Xuzhou. These operations were characterized by the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians rather than strategic occupation. According to historical records, hundreds of thousands of commoners were butchered, with their corpses piling up to the extent of damming the flow of the Si River. Beyond rendering the region a temporary depopulated zone, this also paralyzed agricultural productivity for decades.
The Socioeconomic Collapse of Huainan under Yuan Shu: Despite controlling the historically fertile Huainan region, the Yuan Shu regime, in order to sustain his imperial ambitions and personal extravagance, enforced a system of ultra-intensive extractive taxation. His rule ultimately precipitated a catastrophic famine, failing even to maintain basic military logistical supplies. This predatory governance thoroughly destroyed the regional social order, leading to the horrifying spectacle where “the Jianghuai region was utterly desolated, whereas the people devoured one another.” (江淮間空盡，人民相食)
This structural dissolution represents a genuine regression to the “roving bandit” state (Olson 2000) that predates the civilization-building. In this anomic condition, the broad populace was stripped of political agency and reduced to the status of disposable biomass. A historical analogue is found in the predatory expeditions against the “Four Quarters” undertaken by the Shang kings, contemporaries of the Mycenaean wanax. In these campaigns, a small coterie of military aristocrats, leveraging an asymmetric technological superiority, specifically the chariot complex and bronze metallurgy, systematically “hunted” the human populations of hostile tribies alongside wild fauna. The fate of these captives illustrates the absolute objectification of the human subject: they were utilized as ritual sacrifices to ancestral deities, consumed as subsistence protein (akin to Aztec practices), or processed as raw material for the manufacture of bone implements.
4. The Moloch Mechanism: Coordination Failure and the Self-Destructive Expansion of “Evil”
Concordia parvae res crescunt, discordia maximae dilabuntur. (Sallust)
However, the paramount inquiry remains etiological: Why did the sociopolitical order ultimately converge upon this catastrophic state? Although he did not map the specific interaction mechanisms of his era with granular precision, in elucidating the transformation of the Han social ethos, Zhongchang Tong formulated the following diagnosis:
日不如古，彌以遠甚，豈不然邪？漢興以來，相與同為編戶齊民，而以財力相君長者，世無數焉。而清絜之士，徒自苦於茨棘之閒，無所益損於風俗也。豪人之室，連棟數百，膏田滿野，奴婢千羣，徒附萬計。[…] 苟能運智詐者，則得之焉；苟能得之者，人不以為罪焉。源發而橫流，路開而四通矣。求士之舍榮樂而居窮苦，弃放逸而赴束縛，夫誰肯為之者邪！[…] 是使姦人擅無窮之福利，而善士挂不赦之罪辜。苟目能辯色，耳能辯聲，口能辯味，體能辯寒溫者，將皆以脩絜為諱惡，設智巧以避之焉，況肯有安而樂之者邪？
Every day passed is worse than antiquity, and the disparity grows ever wider, is this not the case? Since the rise of the Han, although all men are ostensibly equal as “registered commoners”, those possessing wealth and power act as lords and masters over the rest. Instances of this are too numerous to count. Meanwhile, men of purity and integrity merely suffer in vain amidst thorns and brambles, contributing nothing to the improvement of customs.
The households of the magnates boast hundreds of connected beams, fertile fields covering the wilderness, thousands of slaves, and tens of thousands of dependents. […] If one can employ cunning and fraud, one obtains [wealth]; and provided one obtains it, society does not judge it as a sin. The source springs forth and the flood spreads; the road is open and leads everywhere. To ask a scholar-gentry to abandon glory and pleasure to dwell in poverty and hardship, to forsake license to accept restraint, who, indeed, would be willing to do so?
[...] This causes the wicked to monopolize infinite benefits, while the virtuous are ensnared in unpardonable crimes. As long as eyes can distinguish color, ears can distinguish sound, mouths can distinguish taste, and bodies can distinguish warmth from cold, all will shun integrity as something loathsome and employ cunning to avoid it. Under such conditions, how could anyone possibly find peace and joy in virtue? (Hou hanshu, 49: 1648-1649)
In analytical terms, this passage describes a society that functions as a “adverse” selection mechanism. It systematically favors “the wicked”, defined here functionally as agents who utilize fraudulent means to predate upon others for material gain, while simultaneously extinguishing those who refuse to adopt these predatory strategies. The underlying logic can be formally reconstructed in the following manner:
Premise 1: (Most) human beings are inherently self-interested.
Premise 2: Betrayal and deceit yield comparative advantages and material payoffs for relevant agents.
Conclusion: Therefore, the majority of human beings inevitably tend toward betrayal and deceit.
In the intellectual trajectory of Zhongchang Tong, inheriting the critical trope of “the fated adversity of the virtuous” from early Eastern Han skeptics like Wang Chong 王充 , the traditional moral cosmology, encapsulated in the maxim “The Way of Heaven has no favorites, yet always sides with the good people” (天道無親，常與善人), is definitively dismantled. Indeed, the problem of theodicy regarding divine justice, a central subject of debate from the Warring States through the early imperial era (Perkins 2024), is rendered obsolete; in Zhongchang Tong’s framework, it is no longer even posed. Consequently, centering on the etiology of two core phenomena, “Why did traditional normativity disintegrate?”, or “Why has morality decayed?”, the historiographical models of decline regarding the empire-formation period can be systematized into the following three typologies:
The Confucian Model[7] (The Moralist Approach): Morality has decayed due to the failure of the (ruling) elite stratum to adhere to the traditional norms (the ritual complex) of the Zhou Dynasty. Consequently, provided that tradition is systematically restored, the ideal sociopolitical order will re-emerge.
The Han Fei Model[8] (The Malthusian Approach): Morality has decayed because the material foundation supporting systems of spontaneous cooperation no longer exists (i.e., natural resources constitute a necessary but insufficient condition for morality). In the “modern” era characterized by overpopulation and resource scarcity, the sole viable option for establishing order is coercive rule administered through a standardized system of rewards and punishments.
The Zhongchang Tong - Guanzi Model (The Evolutionary Fitness Approach): Morality has decayed because (under specific conditions) deceit and betrayal confer comparative benefits and adaptive advantages upon the respective agents. Consequently, as long as these structural conditions persist, society is destined for continuous degeneration.
Strikingly, each of these historiographical stances finds a distinct theoretical analogue within the contemporary Western intellectual landscape:
The Confucian Stance: Maps onto a form of retrospective utopianism or naïve conservatism, predicated on the restoration of a lost “Golden Age”.
The Han Fei Model: Isstructurally isomorphic with Peter Turchin’s (2003, 2005) Structural-Demographic Theory and other Neo-Malthusian variants, emphasizing resource constraints.
The Zhongchang Tong - Guanzi Model: Anticipates the logic of Multi-Level Selection (MLS) and Evolutionary Game Theory, focusing on the selection pressures of competitive environments.
Evaluated against the empirical reality of Early China, the first model stands revealed as a theoretical fiction devoid of explanatory utility: the attempt to coercively reimpose this normative order through radical social engineering, epitomized by the Wang Mang interregnum, did not arrest decline. Instead, it functioned as a catalyst, accelerating the autolytic disintegration of the whole civilizational structure. Conversely, the second model, while empirically grounded—has been demonstrated to possess only partial explanatory validity. It constitutes a necessary but insufficient condition for decline, necessitating integration with non-environmentally driven factors.
Regarding the third model, however, the intellectual lineage runs deep. As early as the Warring States period, political realism already boasted a sophisticated discourse on the dynamics of “cooperation and defection”, particularly within the ruler-minister dyad and inter-state relations. This discourse represented a form of proto-game theory, whose theoretical elevation was precluded only by the historical absence of appropriate mathematical formalization. A textbook illustration of this logic is found in the Guanzi, which offers a highly rational argumentation explaining why non-violence, despite representing the optimal solution for the collective, constitutes a suicidal behavioral pattern for any individual agent operating within an anarchic inter-state arena lacking a high-level coordinator:
人君唯毋聽兼愛之說，則視天下之民如其民，視國如吾國，如是則無並兼攘奪之心，無覆軍敗將之事。然則射御勇力之士不厚祿，覆軍殺將之臣不貴爵，如是則射御勇力之士出在外矣。我能毋攻人，可也，不能令人毋攻我。彼求地而予之，非吾所欲也。不予而與戰，必不勝也。彼以教士，我以敺眾；彼以良將，我以無能，其敗必覆軍殺將。
If a ruler heeds the doctrine of “universal love”, he will view the people of the world as his own subjects and other states as his own state. In such a case, he will harbor no intent to annex or plunder, nor will he engage in the overturning of armies or the killing of generals.
However, consequently, warriors of archery, chariotry, and strength will not be generously stipended, and ministers capable of defeating armies and killing generals will not be honored with noble rank. If this is so, then those warriors of archery and strength will depart for foreign lands.
I may be able to refrain from attacking others, but that is all; [but] I cannot command others not to attack me. If they demand territory and I yield it, this is [certainly] not what I want. If I refuse and do battle, I will surely not prevail, [since] they employ trained warriors, while I drive a mob; they utilize capable generals, while I employ the incompetent. Defeat, entailing the destruction of my army and the death of my generals, is inevitable. (Guanzi, 21: 1316)
While the Book of Lord Shang (Shangjun Shu) posits a congruent realization, it radicalizes the logic by explicitly advocating absolute opportunism via advocating the preemptive defection. From this theoretical vantage, after nearly four centuries of (theoretical) dormancy for political realism during the early imperial era, Zhongchang Tong resurrected the structuralist insight long recognized by Shang Yang and Han Fei. He unveiled the plain truth that the proliferation of zero-sum behavioral patterns, “disadvantaging others to benefit self”, is not an index of individual moral failure, but the deterministic result of specific structural dynamics. The mechanism is rooted in a conclusion already implicit in the classical realist canon: regardless of the strategy adopted by “others,” for “me” (wo 我, oc *ŋˤajʔ), the employment of deceit (zha 詐, oc * [ts]ˤrak-s) invariably constitutes the dominant strategy within the payoff matrix of the individual.
To elucidate the mechanics of the “multipolar trap”, a phenomenon famously termed “Moloch” by Scott Alexander (2014), we must retrogress eight centuries prior to Zhongchang Tong, to the Spring and Autumn period (Pines 2002, 2026). This era constituted a paradigm of radical polycentrism. Sovereignty was fragmented, with decision-making authority and the allocation of economic-military resources dispersed among hundreds of aristocratic polities across the North China Plain. Crucially, the system lacked a central enforcer: the original supreme coordinator, the Zhou King (Son of Heaven), had been structurally marginalized to a purely ceremonial figurehead, devoid of the capacity for coercive arbitration. Reconstructing the strategic calculus of this anarchic arena, consider the following scenario set on the eve of the pivotal Battle of Chengpu (632 BCE):
Dramatis Personae
• Duke Wen of Jin: The Anxious Leader.
• Jiu Fan: The Utilitarist-Opportunist.
• Yong Ji: The Idealist-Conservative.
Act I: The Tent of the Jin Army
Duke Wen of Jin: “What is to be done? The Chu army vastly outnumbers us; the disparity in strength is too great. Tell me, is there any method that can secure a victory?”
Jiu Fan: “My Lord, this is no time to stand on the ceremony of gentlemanly demeanor. I have heard that for those skilled in warfare, there is but one rule on the battlefield: deceive your enemy to the utmost extent. As long as it secures victory, simply lie to them.”
Duke Wen: “To use artifice... is, after all, rather ignoble.” (He turns to the other side) “Yong Ji, Jiu Fan suggests we discard the rules and employ deceptive tactics. What say you?”
Yong Ji: “My Lord, have you heard the saying, ‘Drain the pond to catch the fish’? Naturally, this will secure the fish, and indeed, you will catch every last one, big and small. But where will there be fish to catch next year? You could also ‘burn the forest to hunt’; certainly, you will capture the beasts, but where will the beasts hide next year?...
Deception is akin to a borrowed benefit. You may use it today to survive an emergency, but the trick will not work hereafter, and no one will ever trust us again. This is not a strategy for perpetuity.”
Duke Wen: “What you say is very true... but I must first survive the present pass. If I do not employ deception, how can I vanquish the enemy before me? And if I do not vanquish the enemy before me, how can I guarantee the long-term stability of the state? Alas! What choice do I have?”
(Ultimately, Duke Wen adopts Jiu Fan’s stratagem. In the Battle of Chengpu, he lures the enemy in with a feigned retreat and decisively defeats the Chu army. Jin is victorious.)
Act II: The Post-War Victory Banquet
Duke Wen: “In rewarding the merits of this great victory, the primary honor shall go to Yong Ji.”
Advisors: “My Lord, are you not mistaken? The victory at Chengpu relied entirely on the stratagems of Jiu Fan! You employed Jiu Fan’s plan, yet you award the highest honor to Yong Ji. Is this not inappropriate?”
Duke Wen: “There is no mistake. What Yong Ji taught me was the principle of securing the state’s peace for a hundred generations. What Jiu Fan taught me was merely the means to solve a momentary emergency. How could I, because of a temporary exigency, deem the ‘momentary expedient’ more noble than the ‘enduring future’?”
Epilogue: Confucius’ Commentary
One hundred years later, (it is said that) Confucius heard of this event and offered the following assessment:
“Knowing to employ artifice in times of peril was sufficient for him to repel a formidable enemy; knowing to honor the virtuous upon his return was sufficient for him to repay benevolence. Although Duke Wen failed to adhere to a single principle from beginning to end, this alone was sufficient to establish him as Hegemon over All Under Heaven.”
This narrative reconstruction here is not completely my own fabrication, but a dialogic adaptation of an anecdote concerning Duke Wen of Jin, widely circulated in late Warring States texts such as the Lüshi Chunqiu and the Han Feizi. It serves as a didactic archetype highlighting the fatal tension between short-term existential survival and long-term systemic stability. Regardless of its specific historiographical veracity, the dialogue accurately models the universal strategic condition of the Spring and Autumn period. Agents operating within this system faced a binary strategic fork: either adhering to traditional Zhou protocols (e.g., formal declarations of war, prohibition of surprise attacks, benevolent treatment of captives), or abanding the normative constraints to utilize every available instrument to maximize relative advantage. In the evolutionary tension between these strategies, opportunists invariably secured superior short-term payoffs. The historiographical record, particularly the Zuozhuan, evidences a clear mechanism of differential fitness: agents adhering to the first strategy, epitomized by the “maladaptive” nobility of Duke Xiang of Song, suffered continuous attrition and elimination. Conversely, those adopting the second strategy proliferated through the cumulative accretion of gains. Theoretically, a dominant polity could attempt to enforce interstate coordination through “altruistic punishment”, a role historically assumed by the “Five Hegemons”. However, this structural solution precipitates the “Second-Order Free-Rider Problem” (Bowles & Gintis 2011: 148ff). The Hegemon bears the full cost of providing the public good of order (i.e., policing defectors), while the benefits are diffused non-exclusively among alliance members who contribute nothing to this enforcement cost. Consequently, the enforcer incurs a relative evolutionary disadvantage. This dynamic explains why the Hegemonic system inevitably collapsed, either through hegemonic overstretch, i.e. the exhaustion of the Hegemon’s endogenous capabilities (as seen in Jin and Chu), or through degeneration into an extractive structure of Great Power chauvinism. With the closure of the Spring and Autumn period, the final attempts at interstate coordination were definitively abandoned.
To deploy the heuristic formulation of Scott Alexander (2014), viewed from the God’s-eye view, the theoretical optimal outcome is universal peace. Yet, viewed intra-systemically, since no single polity possesses the coercive capacity to enforce this equilibrium unilaterally, all states are structurally conditioned to invest incessantly in fraud and offensive capabilities merely to secure existential continuity. By the advent of the Warring States period, this logic precipitated a “race to the bottom”: territorial states competitively engaged in the dissipation of social cohesion to maximize the short-term extraction of human and military resources. As argued elsewhere, the long-term viability of this mechanism was questioned by contemporary observers. A multitude of authors during the empire-formation period recognized, albeit in proto-theoretical terms, that as the cooperator pool available for exploitation diminishes, the probability of defector-defector encounter increases, resulting in diminishing marginal returns. Yet, this epistemic realization remained powerless to arrest the systemic momentum. The selective pressures of the era ultimately favored the State of Qin: the player characterized by the absolute minimization of normative scruples and the maximization of extractive efficiency.
However, a critical structural differentiation exists between the Warring States realists and the reality of the Late Han. In Zhongchang Tong’s era, the unit of competition had shifted from the macro-institutional framework of the “Seven Warring States” to a granular level consisting of tens of millions of radically atomized individuals. Whether exemplified by the archetypal ruthlessness of Cao Cao, who slaughtered the household of Lü Boshe to forestall potential betrayal, or by the obscure tragedy of Guan Qiuyang, who, operating under the extreme scarcity of flight, reportedly cannibalized his companion for caloric sustenance; the behavioral pattern of “preemptive betrayal” had solidified as the default heuristic for social interaction in the absence of coercive constraints.
Crucially, this behavioral shift was not predicated on an intrinsic moral devolution of the Han populace vis-à-vis their Western Zhou ancestors. Rather, it was the deterministic output of the aforementioned impersonal mechanism: the immediate payoff matrix, where failure to escalate brutality results in immediate elimination. Here, the analysis resonates profoundly with Oswald Spengler’s decription of the “post-historical” state of late civilization, a condition characterized by the total privatization of historical agency:
There remains only private history, private destinies, private ambition, from the miserability of the fellaheen to the savage feuds of the Caesars for the private possession of the world. The wars of the age of world peace are private wars, more terrible than all state wars, because they are formless. (Spengler 2014: 696-7)
5. Conclusion: Subsystem Carcinogenesis and the Endogenous Collapse of Civilization
From a macroscopic historical vantage, the cataclysm of the third century served merely as the penultimate stage in a protracted trajectory toward the systemic dissolution of the Western Jin a century later. This final collapse was precipitated by the synergistic convergence of endogenous and exogenous ethno-political stressors, specifically, the insurrection of sedentarized non-Han populations within the frontier and the simultaneous incurrsion of nomadic confederations from without. In contemporary historiography, the ontological continuity of a “civilization” is operationally defined through two correlated dimensions (McNeill 2010):
The “Stone Model”, emphasizing the continuity of the civilization’s material constitution, such as demographics, architecture, and economic systems.
The “Vortex Model”, underscoring the continuity of the civilization’s “basic pattern,” i.e., collective identity, culture, lifestyle, and ethos.
Synthesizing these diagnostic metrics, it is analytically robust to posit that Classical China (or Early China) reached its definitive historical terminus in the early 4th century. While its demographic substrate (the biological carriers) persisted, this population was functionally reduced to the status of Aristotelian Matter. This raw substrate was subsequently reconfigured by a novel, exogenous Form: a hybrid civilizational order defined by the influx of Gandharan-Buddhist aesthetics, soteriological metaphysics, and the martial ethos of the steppe aristocracy.
While the specific trajectories of this decline are voluminous， exhaustive details of which would exceed the scope of two hundred doctoral dissertations, they are ultimately predicated upon a singular, fundamental impersonal mechanism. In the lexicon of Evolutionary Game Theory, this mechanism is frequently designated as a “Social Dilemma” (Archetti & Scheuring 2012), a “Multipolar Trap,” or a variant of the “Tragedy of the Commons.” It encompasses, but is not limited to, the following heuristic formulations:
“Being compelled to lower one’s (moral) baseline for the sake of survival”;
“Everyone detests the outcome, yet no one can halt the process”;
“Individual rationality leading to collective destruction”;
“Sacrificing long-term existence for short-term gain.”
In the final analysis, this phenomenon represents a structural pathology identified in Western political thought as early as the age of Rousseau and Hume, which describes a mechanism predicated on the structural decoupling of local optima from global optima. Under these conditions, specific agents enhance their individual fitness in the short term by externalizing costs onto the systemic substrate. While locally rational, this strategy inevitably degrades the aggregate fitness landscape, precipitating the long-term ruin of the collective. In the context of Classical Chinese civilization, this encompasses, but is not limited to, politics (political realism and the “state”), economics (efficiency-oriented economy), military affairs (quasi-total war), and contemporary agents (short-termism). Or, to articulate it more concisely: it constitutes a betrayal of the transgenerational civilizational community by those “winners” who, driven by short-term material interests, unscrupulously extract resources from their contemporaries and descendants.
The cancer cell serves as a textbook paradigm for this pattern[9]. In the process of (Darwinian) selection within our bodies, cancer cells acquire a fitness advantage far superior to that of normal somatic cells, through consuming glucose at a rate tens of times faster and uncontrolledly self-proliferating. Simultaneously, within the cancer population itself, predatory cancer cells that maximize self-proliferation also possess a fitness advantage over those that are relatively more “sustainable” for the host (which is why symbiotic relationships found in low-virulence viruses and parasites are the products of group-level selection). Inevitably, this trajectory of strictly local optimization precipitates a systemic collapse. By exhausting the physiological substrate of the host, the cancer engineers its own extinction.
Does a similar phenomenon not manifest in every corner of our own “modern” society? A textbook illustration is the rise of predatory elites. Spanning from the slave-holding Latifundia of the late Roman Republic that decimated the independent smallholder, through the Legalist quasi-totalitarianism of early China’s Warring States period that engaged in the frenzied extraction of human resources, to the financial capitalism of today’s globalized “one world”, the saga of the “1% elite” pursuing shortsighted, cancerous expansion at the expense of the societal whole has never ceased. History, therefore, serves not merely as a mirror but as a repository of robust structural isomorphisms; while it offers no guarantee that agents within the system will “learn” to override their immediate payoff matrices, it invariably reflects the deterministic outcome of these recurring patterns.
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Endnotes
[1] Incidentally, the notion of infinite material progress fundamentally violates basic physical laws; see Herrmann-Pillath (2015); Chen (2015).
[2] All reconstructions of Old Chinese come from Baxter & Sagart (2014).
[3] Therefore, it is reasonable to posit that the two demographically comparable catastrophes marking the ends of the Western and Eastern Han dynasties, rather than the Black Death (Benedictow 2004), constitute the single events in recorded history that eliminated the highest proportion of the global population. However, in terms of regional proportions, their mortality rates did not necessarily exceed those of the Maya collapse or the Late Bronze Age collapse (see Kemp 2025: chap. 8, table 3).
[4] For instance, the gold reserves concentrated in Chang’an during the late Western Han Dynasty, estimated at 170 tons (or 700,000 jin), surpassed those of the Byzantine Empire at its zenith.
[5] Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Classical Chinese are my own.
[6] See, e,g., Scott (2020), Xie (2025a).
[7] For the Confucian declinist historical model, see Leung (2019); Rogacz (2022).
[8] To the best of the author’s knowledge, Han Fei stands as potentially one of the earliest “Malthusian” thinkers in human history to explicitly articulate the use of environmental constraints and natural resource scarcity in explaining the dynamics of historical development, see Schleichert & Roetz (2021), 222; Sabattini & Schwermann (2021), 24; Schwartz (1985), 333-4; Flanagan & Hu (2011), 299ff; Zinn (1995). Consequently, the thought of Han Fei possesses strikingly “modern” characteristics, see Bai (2011).
[9] For more on the evolutionary dynamics of cancer, see Aktipis (2020).