Seeds of Fire 2026

其小無內兮，其大無垠

 

We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We’ll tell you Kojak always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house… We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear! We deal in illusion, man! None of it’s true! But you people… do whatever the tube tells you… This is mass madness, you maniacs!

— Howard Beale, Network, 1976

 

We first quoted this passage from one of Howard Beale’s monologues in Other People’s Thoughts, XXXI. On the eve of 2026, and half a century after Network was released, we recall that film’s dark message, one that is extended by the historian and futurist Nils Gilman in the essay reproduced below as a chapter in our Contra Trump series (see also Gilman in America — History Can’t Judge & It Certainly Won’t Absolve).

In 2026, China Heritage celebrates four decades since John Minford and I published Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience. It is a year of multiple other commemorations and, in marking some of them in China Heritage Annual 2026, we too ‘brace for impact’. Over the last century of Chinese history those impacts include:

• 1906: the clash between the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (革命黨人) and Liang Qichao, a pro-monarchy reformer (保皇派), over the political future of China;
• 1916: the debate over East-West values, ideas, philosophy and worldview, one that continues in a different guise to this day;
• 1926: the looming explosion in Chinese politics that led both to the Nanking Decade and the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War, one that continues to this day;
• 1936: the invasion of the Japanese Imperial Army and the Long March;
• 1946: the formal end of the War in the Pacific and the Chinese War of Resistance and a new phase in the Chinese Civil War;
• 1956: the Hundred Flowers Movement that resulted in the purge of Chinese intellectual life, orchestrated by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping the following year. The start of the two-decade-long High Mao Era of engineered mass murder and cultural devastation;
• 1966: the formal launch of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and Mao’s last attempt to remake China;
• 1976: the death of Mao Zedong, the arrest of his faction and the formal end of the Cultural Revolution;
• 1986: the crushing by Beijing of attempts by Communist Party reformers to commemorate the Hundred Flowers Movement and repression of student protests, something that adumbrated 1989 and the political authoritarianism of the following three decades;
• 1996: large-scale PLA exercises in the Taiwan Strait aimed at intimidating the unfolding democracy of the Republic of China and significant moves to enhance a new Sino-Russia relationship;
• 2006: completion of the Three Gorges Dam, opposition to which had led to the crushing of China’s nascent environmental movement in 1989;
• 2016: the consolidation of Xi Jinping’s role as the core leader of China’s party-state-army and internal moves to extend his tenure indefinitely. This year marked the formal inauguration of the Xi Jinping era.

As we repeatedly observe in Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, China is still contending with an unfinished twentieth century — be it in terms of political contestation, social evolution, intellectual and cultural freedom, sustainable economic development or geopolitical strife. As China Heritage comments on the multifaceted changes in the Chinese world, Seeds of Fire 2026 will continue our idiosyncratic effort to chronicle and comment on parallel developments in the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America.

China Heritage was launched in 2016, ten years ago, and, on 1 January 2017, we inaugurated this journal with A Monkey King’s Journey to the East, a meditation on Donald J. Trump and Mao Zedong. We also returned to the theme of China and America in Spectres & Souls, China Heritage Annual 2021, the subtitle of which was ‘Vignettes, moments and meditations on China and America, 1861-2021’. And, from its launch in 2024, Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium has been ‘in dialogue’ with Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, a project that has tracked the Xi Jinping era from its prehistory.

In Chinese, I refer to both of these ‘empires’ as 無奈江山 wúnài jiāngshān, realms in which the weary and the wary ask ‘Hope, then? Hope forlorn’ (for more on this, see 無可奈何 — So It Goes). The use of 無奈 wúnài — an expression that can be translated as ‘it is what it is’ — is also a reference to a remark made by Nadezhda Mandelstam in her memoirs about the Stalin era:

I shall not live to see the future, but I am haunted by the fear that it may be only a slightly modified version of the past.

Mandelstam’s sober reflection parallels concerns articulated by some Chinese thinkers and writers even before the Xi Jinping’s rise. See:

• Yawning Heights: Chan Koon-chung’s Harmonious China

As well as:

• Turn, Turn, Turn — The Tyranny of Chinese History
• The Lugubrious Merry-go-Round of Chinese Politics

In the following essay Nils Gilman suggests that ‘The present “dystopian imaginary” is no longer about warnings. It’s about acclimatization. We aren’t watching these movies to avoid the crash, but to learn how to brace for impact.’

As international analysts, commentators, podcasters and maître de Sino-Hasbara breathlessly make comparisons between the US and China, many in the People’s Republic are themselves bracing for impacts of their own. It is a concatenation that includes economic ructions, the ongoing civil war, a quelled but not entirely quiescent population and, of particular importance, the succession crisis that was initiated by Xi Jinping’s quest for ‘terminal tenure’ (see Even Now, It Still Pays to Look Back). However, when it comes to systemic stability, reality based politics, economic sanity, scientific and secular rationality, international overreach, foreign encumbrances and relative civility, the Chinese world would certainly appear to have the edge over meshuggah America.

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The Chinese rubric of this chapter in Seeds of Fire 2026 — 其小無內兮，其大無垠 — comes from ‘Far-off Journey’ 遠遊 in The Songs of the South 楚辭. David Hawkes translates this line as:

Small, it has no content; great, it has no bounds.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
16 December 2025

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The Speculative Architecture of Collapse

Three filmic visions of the American endgame

Nils Gilman

15 December 2025

If the American Dream promised a linear progression toward universal prosperity, the American Nightmare (or “carnage” as Trump described it in his first inaugural address) is a recursive loop of stupidity, violence, and exhaustion.

We are currently witnessing the crystallization of a new political dystopian imaginary. It’s no longer speculative; it’s diagnostic. We can map the precise contours of our collective despair by looking at three recent films: Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021), Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025).

Taken together, these films form a triptych of of present systemic failure. They collectively suggest that the American political apparatus isn’t just struggling; it’s structurally incapable of processing reality. Whether the threat is exogenous (a comet/climate change) or endogenous (polarization/fascism), the system no longer functions as a problem-solving mechanism. It functions only as a machine for generating noise, violence, and spectacle.

We have moved beyond the fear that the government is evil. We are now terrified that it’s senile, suicidal, and dragging us all down with it.

Don’t Look Up: The Paralysis of the Spectacle
McKay’s film is the first act of the collapse: Denial.

Its dystopia is bureaucratic and cognitive. The horror of Don’t Look Up isn’t the comet; it’s the meeting rooms. It captures a specific, maddening sensation of the 2020s: the realization that the “adults in the room” are just as dopamine-addled and market-obsessed as the teenagers on TikTok.

The collective political message is bleak: competence is dead. The institutions designed to save us by thinking long term and big picture — science, media, and our political institutions — have been hollowed out by short-termism. The central message of the film is that even faced with total annihilation, the American system won’t stop optimizing for quarterly engagement metrics. It’s a portrait of a society so captivated by its own image that it would rather die than look away from the screen. It’s Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” brought to a paralytic apotheosis.

Civil War: The Nullification of Politics
Garland’s film is the second act: Rupture.

If Don’t Look Up is about the noisy spectacle drowning own the real, Civil War is about the silence that follows. Garland strips away the “why” of the conflict to focus entirely on the “how.” Critics who complained about the lack of clear political ideology in the film missed the point. The ambiguity is the point.

The dystopia here is one of pure consequence. Ideology has metastasized into ballistics. The “Western Forces” and the “Florida Alliance” aren’t debating policy; they’re exchanging fire. The film reveals a terrifying truth about polarization: eventually, the political labels shed their meaning, and all that remains is the kinetic energy of violence. It’s the end state of a culture that stopped talking to itself decades ago. The system hasn’t just failed to manage the crisis; the system has dissolved, leaving behind only a geography of kill zones.

One Battle After Another: The Fugitive State
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another serves as the third act: Exhaustion.

Adapting the paranoid, stoned melancholy of Pynchon’s Vineland to the hyper-surveilled 2020s, Anderson gives us an all-too-on-the-nose vision of America not as an explosion, but as a prison. The film’s antagonist, Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), represents the state not as a savior or a collapsed entity, but as a zombie: a relentless, history-erasing force that simply persists.

The film’s title is the diagnosis. There is no final victory, no “End of History.” There’s only one battle after another, Hegel’s “bad infinity” brought to the field of insurgency. Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) aren’t fighting to win; they are fighting simply to be allowed to exist in the margins.

The political message here is the most insidious of the three: resistance is recursive. The revolutionaries of the past (Bob’s generation) failed, selling or burning out, and now their children inherit the wreckage. The film depicts an America where the “war” is a permanent background radiation — a mix of militarized police, detention centers, and a terrifying banality of evil. It suggests that the American apparatus won’t neglect us (like in Don’t Look Up) or explode (like in Civil War); instead, it will hunt us, dull us, and force us to run forever.

The Great Phase Shift: 1975 vs. 2025

To appreciate the nature of the current political rot as represented in these three films, it’s instructive to compare them to the dystopian cinema of the last great American interregnum: the 1970s.
Films like Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and Taxi Driver (1976) were also born of profound pessimism. They depicted a crumbling New York, a corrupt media, and a post-Vietnam malaise. But there are several critical differences between the dystopian vision that these films proposed half a century ago and the one we find ourselves in today.

In the 70s, the “System” was corrupt, but it was solid. In Network, the network heads are evil, but they’re clearly in charge. In Dog Day Afternoon, the police are aggressive, but they’re a coherent force. The protagonist (Al Pacino) is an alienated individual crashing against a stone wall. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) wanted to clean up the streets. His dystopia was local, urban, and personal. But in each of these films, there was a sense that one could do something collectively about it:

By contrast, our contemporary filmic protagonists face ontological threats that as such seem impossible to overcome. In Don’t Look Up, the sky is literally falling, and no one cares; in Civil War, the nation is committing suicide, for reasons unclear; and in One Battle After Another, history itself is being erased, and the white supremacists are smug in their complete victory, with only an occasional need to mop up minor messes.

Come, come thou bleak December wind

The 1970s films had a gritty vitality. They were screams of rage. The 2020s films are screams of panic. They don’t validate our hope. They don’t present a call to action. They merely mirror our paralysis. Don’t Look Up tells you that you’re too distracted to survive. Civil War tells you that your anger will eventually eat you alive. One Battle After Another tells you that the past you haven’t reckoned with will eventually return to kill your future. We are no longer striving to beat back the oncoming dystopian future; we instead merely managing the dystopian present.

The present “dystopian imaginary” is no longer about warnings. It’s about acclimatization. We aren’t watching these movies to avoid the crash, but to learn how to brace for impact.

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Source:

• Nils Gilman, The Speculative Architecture of Collapse — Three filmic visions of the American endgame, Small Precautions, 15 December 2025

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