What ancient Chinese wisdom can offer a divided world – and the US

And yet, for all the analysis of military budgets, trade deficits and geopolitical competition, one critical dimension remains stubbornly underappreciated in American policy circles: the deep, historical wisdom that shapes China’s approach to the world.

It is no accident that Chinese leaders, from the head of state to the foreign minister, so often turn to classical poems, historical essays and age-old proverbs to explain the country’s stance and foreign policy. These are not decorative phrases. They are windows into a civilisation that measures time in millennia, not election cycles, and draws its lessons not from recent decades, but from thousands of years of rise and fall, unity and division, war and peace.