1. Unequal Treaties and the Century of Humiliation: Why China Will Not Just

(cw: Really really brutally heavy in the way that 19th century geopolitics often is. Spicy and overpoetic. Not for the faint of heart.)

 

Last summer, around July 2024, I was sitting in Lighthaven listening to RK give a talk on the possible near futures of the development of AGI; he was laying out the two major ways that this could go down: either scaling labs - private companies like Anthropic and DeepSeek and OpenAI and Mistral - managing to reach AGI on their own, or the strong prospect of governmental capture of these projects by great powers, most notably the United States and China. To my recollection, he claimed that this latter case was the more likely, and conveyed a plan that was floating around AI safety spaces at the time. He pointed out the vast and durable-seeming lead and competitive advantage that the US had - and to a large extent still has - in the development of AI, and defined the concept of a decisive strategic advantage: a position of strategic superiority sufficient to allow an agent to achieve complete world domination.

Naturally, the advent of AGI would quite plausibly be such an advantage - to have a million unquestioningly loyal geniuses working round the (accelerated) clock in a datacenter to adversarially advance the national interest would represent an incredible force-multiplier to any nation holding their leashes, especially a superpower and erstwhile hyperpower like the United States. And with such a “virtual closed city”, or a dozen, or a hundred, at one’s disposal, surely a destructive arms race to AGI could be averted and nightmares of AI doom be turned to dreams of paradise and China be brought to heel. The CCP could, RK claimed, be dragged to the bargaining table under the clear and present threat of total conquest, and made a frank peach of an offer: agree to forever play second fiddle to the US, accepting a technological lag of a year - or maybe a year and a half - and open your society up to the kinds of personal liberties we take almost for granted in the West - free speech and religion and association and all the rest - and be showered with freedom dividends and gifts from the ever-benevolent US-led West for their dutiful obedience; this deal, or else prompt and utter destruction.

Confusion blossomed in me as I listened to RK speak. Surely so many AI governance experts, professionals in foreign policy and international relations, and our dear RK himself could not possibly have all missed something so obvious as the lore I knew, and what that lore implied? Surely none of these luminaries would be speaking such things without an appreciation and deep understanding of relatively recent geopolitics? After all, while I had world history and international relations - especially the history of the Sinosphere, broadly construed - as one of very many lesser special interests, I was a mere amateur, however clever, and the lore that tickled my brain was not particularly deep or hidden lore. I speak, of course, of the Unequal Treaties and the Century of Humiliation that surrounded them.

Do you know, have you heard tell, of Great Britain’s thirst for tea and hunger for porcelain and silk, and its resulting lust for the silver that the Qing demanded all these foreign barbarians pay for their trade in? Of the foolishly brilliant solution British traders hit upon to solve both the glut of opium in Bengal and their own poverty in silver, and of Charles Elliot’s foolish doomed task, and of the Daoguang Emperor’s scorn? Of Lin Zexu’s apology to the sea-gods for the unavoidable pollution of their realm with boiling quicklime and seized opium, and of the fires of war and conquest that Queen Victoria then set in her arrogance? Of the bloody birthing of Hong Kong and Macau, and of the lesser known Port Arthur - the latter now Dalian - and Guanzhouwan and Qingdao-of-the-Lager? Of the bite on vicious bite - Taiwan, Korea - that Imperial Japan tore free of the long-moribund Qing as the red sun rose, and how these were but appetizers for the coming buffet of slaughter and further atrocity to glut the Chrysanthemum Throne? Of the looting of the Old Summer Palace? Of the little brother of Christ, and the ten million dead for him? Of the Fists of Righteous Harmony, and of their slaughter, and of the ruinous price the Eight Nations of the West forced on China for the service? Of Sikkim, and Tibet, and the pogroms of Russian Manchuria - Manchuria, home of the Yehe Nara, of the Haixi Manchu! - and of one Russian faction being little better than the last? Of the unequal treaties that the West - Shimonoseki means Japan counts! - to legitimize all of this, seizing for their own Chinese economic autonomy, Chinese territorial autonomy, Chinese legal autonomy? Of the Rape of Nanjing?

Perhaps you do not, but there is no shame in that honest ignorance that seeks its own destruction. There is even precious little shame in letting that ignorance lie, if you are not such a one as might connive in the marble halls of Arlington. But it is the worst arrogance to need this knowledge and what it means, and to ignore it. It is in this spirit that I raised a hand and asked of RK if I might ask a terribly unfair question. In that hall, hearing a “yes”, my question was thus this: Why should China accept this deal, and why should the US follow through if China did?

I claim that this plan is a foolish one, and was dead on arrival, and that its nonviability was predictable in advance to anyone who had the historical knowledge that any fool seeking to play the game of realpolitik should know as offhandedly as any biologist worth her salt ought know the Central Dogma. I claim that it was never a plan that China would accept, injury to its superpower’s pride that it is, even were it more fair, and overdeterminedly not a plan that anyone should trust the US to uphold if China signed, and not even a plan that the US strategically should uphold were it doubly ratified. I claim that the CCP is many bad things but stupid and blind are not among them, and that which was divided has finished longing to unite as of late 1949, and that China would surely rather flip the table and tell the US that it would rather die in a radioactive fire together than suffer that humiliation again - forever, this time around, rather than a mere century. Isn’t that what it would have to mean, to rule the Lightcone? I claim if the lore I have pointed at here is lore that has not been fully pondered or worse totally lacked, that the writers of whitepapers should snap their pens, that those speakers of foolishly clever plans should shut their mouths, that those military players of hope Go should set their pieces down, and none of them ought start again until they have read their history for half an hour of wallclock time and can clearly express their past errors.

2391/32768