we are sailing without ethical ballast. — Darkness at Noon

“The golden carp is not destined to remain in the pond; when storm and clouds arise, it transforms into a dragon. The dragon’s roar shakes the heavens, yet when fortune wanes, it thrashes helplessly in shallow waters — heroes are bound when luck runs out.”

These lines, originally from a wuxia manga, uncannily mirror the century-long trajectory of the Chinese Communist Party. Its rise was never a “historical inevitability,” but rather the product of intersecting external forces and contingent accidents. Today, all those strokes of fortune have run their course.

I. Japan’s Defeat and the Asian Vacuum

Without Japan’s collapse, the CCP would never have had its chance. Japan’s Pan-Asianist project sought to build an order excluding the white empires. In the Pacific War, it defeated Britain, the Netherlands, and France in Asia, proving itself as a potential guardian of the region. But by engaging the U.S. and Britain in total war, Japan was ultimately crushed by American power.

Japan’s defeat meant Asia lost its protective shield. The United States, due to geography and strategic orientation, could hold the island chain at best but would never commit to prolonged continental warfare. Thus, Northeast, East, and Southeast Asia lay exposed to the Soviet Union.

II. The Kuomintang’s Dependence and Inevitable Collapse

Chiang Kai-shek’s regime looked like the “legitimate government,” but at its core it was fragile. Its organization and military were built with Soviet support: Whampoa Academy was financed and staffed by Soviet advisers, its party structures copied the Comintern blueprint, and its very reorganization drew in numerous Communists. The KMT was essentially a semi-dependent structure.

Given this, when Moscow needed a proxy regime on the East Asian mainland, the CCP—founded outright as a Soviet front—was the more “authentic” branch. The KMT’s abandonment was not accidental, but structurally predetermined.

III. America’s Naïveté and the CCP’s Luck

The United States, by defeating Japan, believed it was “delivering democracy” to China. In reality, it destroyed Asia’s nascent autonomous order and inadvertently opened the continent to Soviet penetration.

America became a pawn in a Soviet-crafted illusion, watching the CCP rise while hoping it might “reform.” Only when the USSR, through its clients, tried to extinguish Korea did Washington realize the truth: Japan’s earlier role as a bulwark had not been incidental. The Russo-Japanese War, the Battle of Tsushima—Japan’s check on Russian expansion into Asia—had been decisive.

The CCP’s triumph was merely the product of such geopolitical gaps and miscalculations. The so-called “carp meeting the storm” meant nothing more than a small fish catching the turbulence of great winds.

IV. Winds Carrying the Fish

During the Cold War, the CCP served as the Soviet Union’s outer proxy—yet turned against Moscow at a critical moment, pivoting to the U.S.

When globalization surged, America opened its markets and capital. With this windfall, the CCP fabricated an “economic miracle.” To outsiders, it seemed to have “become a dragon.” But this was not organic strength—it was the result of one external push after another, of wars, errors, and accidents by larger powers.

V. The Illusion of Dragonhood

After the Soviet collapse, the CCP survived only by betraying its former patron. America’s further misjudgments gave it two decades of enrichment. Emboldened, it declared “the East is rising, the West is declining,” imagining itself as the next superpower.

This was its moment of “dragon’s roar in the skies.” But it ignored its colonial and proxy nature. It was never a dragon—merely a fish that stumbled into fortune.

VI. The End of Fortune

Now, the winds have died down. Globalization recedes. America no longer feigns blindness, and the West has fully revised its understanding.

The CCP has no new external patron to lean on, and no historical accident to pave its way. In the past, its blunders were cushioned by luck. Today, no matter how it thrashes, it is confined to shallow waters.

“Heroes bound when luck runs out” is not a poetic flourish—it is its real fate. It was never a dragon, only a fish lifted by storms. Now the storms are gone; the pond remains, but the fish can no longer leap.

VII. The Limits of Espionage

Some might argue the CCP’s vast surveillance apparatus and overseas networks can guarantee its permanence. But history disproves this.

The KGB penetrated every corner, yet could not save the USSR from collapse. Today’s CCP student associations and hometown networks abroad are but the same espionage logic. These organizations may instill fear, but they cannot reverse material decline. When an economy, technology, and social creativity are exhausted, espionage and control are nothing but surface skin.

As the quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln goes: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

America has already recognized the CCP’s fraud. As its external lifelines are cut, more people under its control will awaken to the deception—waiting for the moment, or creating one, to break free.

VIII. Whispers of Doom

History offers precedents. In the late Qing, Zhao Liewen predicted the dynasty’s fall within fifty years:

“The ruler’s virtue may be upright, and the nation may have enjoyed strength as its reward. Yet the founding was too easy, the slaughter too heavy; to seize all under heaven was too much a coincidence. Heaven’s way is inscrutable; good and evil cannot offset each other. Later rulers’ virtue is insufficient as a safeguard.”

“Too easy the founding, too heavy the killing—thus gaining the empire was too much a coincidence.”

Does this not also fit the CCP? The Qing was a Manchu colonial regime; the PRC is but a Soviet-founded colonial front.

This is why Beijing obsesses over the fiction of a “Chinese nation.” By subsuming the Manchus into this invented nation, the CCP claims itself as an indigenous heir, disguising its foreign birth.

There was once a blind Communist named Hu Feng. Misguided though he was, the title of one of his works was apt: “Time Began.” For him, the founding of the PRC meant time had begun.

I now turn his words back: the countdown to the PRC’s end has begun. Their own language becomes the cipher of their undoing.

As in Darkness at Noon:

“They are trapped too deeply in their past, ensnared by the net they themselves wove; by their own rules, by distorted ethics and warped logic, they are guilty. And when they leave the stage, it is strictly according to the bizarre game they themselves devised.”

Time began—