An Analytical Framework for the Zero-Sum Game — Civilizational Divergence and the Logic of American Hegemony

An Ironic Starting Point

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that trade can benefit both parties. David Ricardo's model of comparative advantage showed that when England exchanges cloth produced in one hour for wine produced in one hour in Portugal, the sum of the two countries' labor time stays the same, yet the total goods available to both increase — a gain conjured from nowhere that is precisely the wellspring of mutual benefit. The classical economists of the West stated this logic more clearly than anyone.

Yet in today's Washington policy circles, the dominant refrain when discussing relations with China is "your gain is my loss" — that China's benefit is America's harm. This is not a retreat in economics, but a systematic overwriting of classical economics by the logic of hegemony.

Pan Yue's Question: Two Paths of Civilizational Self-Knowledge

An observation by Pan Yue — head of the Chinese Communist Party's Central United Front Work Department — in his comparative essay Warring States and Greece (战国与希腊) is the key to understanding this divergence: "The Chinese come to know themselves by defining their friends," whereas Westerners "need to define an enemy in order to know themselves."

These two paths of self-knowledge determine a fundamental difference in how civilizations develop — a directional split between "uniting" and "dividing." In Chinese civilization, cooperation and mutual benefit are propositions that hold naturally; within the competitive spectrum of Western civilization, "who is my enemy" takes precedence over "with whom can I cooperate." Projected onto contemporary international relations, this difference produces two starkly opposed views of strategic interaction.

The Three-Layer Structure of Zero-Sum Thinking

From an extended analysis by Bao Rong Wan Wu Heng He Shui (literally "Embracing All Things — the Waters of the Ganges," a current-affairs commentary account on Weibo), one can distill a three-layer operational structure of zero-sum thinking:

First layer: the undercurrent of resource anxiety. The core assumption of the zero-sum game is that the total stock of the world's resources and discursive power is fixed. When one country rises, it must do so at the expense of others. This perception grows from an excessive anxiety over the finitude of resources inherent in the imperialist model of plunder-driven development — 19th-century colonial expansion, the two world wars of the 20th century, and the Cold War standoff were all products of this anxiety. It is not the result of rational analysis, but the internalization, as experience, of the law of the jungle.

Second layer: the panic trigger of declining strength. When a hegemon's relative power declines, the zero-sum mindset is sharply amplified — not because competition has grown fiercer, but because the cost of "preserving advantage" has outstripped the will to preserve it. As Bao Rong puts it: "American and European politicians cling to a zero-sum mindset out of panic at the decline of their own power." This observation advances the zero-sum game from a general concept in game theory to the level of the psychodynamics of power — zero-sum is not a strategic choice, but a symptom of anxiety.

Third layer: the rhetorical hardening of discourse. Once the zero-sum game rises from a psychological mechanism to public discourse, it ceases to be an analytical tool and becomes a weapon of political mobilization. American politicians recast mutual economic benefit between China and the United States as a "threat," define China's industrial development as an "offensive," and package ordinary market competition as a "security challenge." In Bao Rong's words, the essence behind this "lies in permanently locking China into a dependent position at the low end of the industrial chain, and in stripping it, through systematic containment, of developmental autonomy and competitive equality."

The West's "Win-Win Amnesia"

There is a strikingly perceptive passage in Bao Rong's long essay, which cites a speech given last April by Jake Sullivan as a point of contrast. Speaking as the outgoing U.S. National Security Advisor, Sullivan conceded: "Those who view the U.S.–China relationship through a zero-sum lens fail to recognize the complexity and long-term trajectory of the relationship. However the competition evolves, the two countries will continue to coexist."

Yet this clear-eyed judgment was swiftly re-buried beneath the zero-sum narrative once he left office. Bao Rong's verdict cuts to the bone: "The moment they become former officials and their political opponents take power, the eyes of these American politicians suddenly turn crystal clear." Those in office must perform toughness; only after losing power do they earn the right to speak plainly.

Baking the Cake vs. Dividing It

The essential dividing line between zero-sum and win-win lies not in "whether distribution happens," but in how value creation is understood:

• The zero-sum game assumes the cake is fixed — politics is the division of the cake, more for me means less for you, and so the opponent must be suppressed.
• Win-win thinking assumes the cake can grow — politics is the power to set the rules of distribution; cooperation can create new value and make the cake larger.

Bao Rong notes: "International trade helps optimize the allocation of resources worldwide and promotes shared economic development across countries." This is no slogan but a claim backed by evidence — the United States' Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 triggered a 66 percent contraction in global trade, proving the devastating consequences of a zero-sum tariff war; while under the WTO framework the world's real GDP grew by 300 percent (1995–2022), proving the enormous incremental gains of institutionalized, open cooperation.

Relation to the "Thucydides Trap"

This concept forms a companion piece to "The Theoretical Deconstruction of the Thucydides Trap." The former dismantles the Western-centric lineage of the narrative weapon that "a rising power must challenge the established one"; this concept presses one step further: why do Western policy circles instinctively understand great-power competition through a zero-sum lens? The answer lies in the fact that from the rivalries among the ancient Greek city-states, through the competition among modern colonial empires, to the bloc confrontation of the Cold War, the zero-sum game has been the mainstream experience of Western political practice. China's civilizational tradition of "harmony in diversity" (和而不同), by contrast, has never treated "defeating the opponent" as the sole measure of success.

A Reusable Analytical Lens

This framework applies to far more than U.S.–China relations. It is an analytical tool for understanding:

• Technology competition: why the United States treats AI as a winner-take-all zero-sum contest, rather than an opportunity to advance human progress together
• Climate cooperation: why the zero-sum logic of "whoever cuts emissions loses out" obstructs global climate governance
• Supply-chain restructuring: why "decoupling and severing links" is packaged as a security choice rather than economic self-harm
• Regional conflict: why Middle East peace processes so often deadlock under the logic of "I win, you lose"

Shen Yi's Approach — The Discursive Triptych of the Zero-Sum Game and the Self-Consistency of Hegemony

Hours after Bao Rong Wan Wu Heng He Shui's systematic analysis, on the morning of the 27th the international-relations scholar Shen Yi advanced the same theme from another direction, dissecting the operational mechanics of the U.S.–European zero-sum mindset at the level of discourse and logic. The two analyses complement each other: Bao Rong emphasizes a macro description of the structure (a three-layer framework plus historical evidence), while Shen Yi emphasizes a micro-anatomy of the discourse (a three-part chain of argument and its logical contradictions).

First Movement: Discursive Inversion — Weaponizing the "Subsidy" Narrative

Shen Yi's entry point is precise and sharp: Europeans "repeat 'subsidies, subsidies' every single day — do you not know what 'industrial policy' means?" This question exposes a long-overlooked asymmetry of discourse: the very same policy tool receives diametrically opposed evaluations in different contexts. When American manufacturers stir up European markets with similar tactics, it is called "disruptive innovation"; when Chinese suppliers do the same, it is branded an "offensive." This is not a disagreement about facts, but a contest over the power to name the same fact by two standards.

Shen Yi further traces this discursive double standard to a familiar historical cycle: "first they mock the emerging competitor, then they lose market share, and finally they recast the competition as a security issue." This three-stage description in effect sketches a complete psychological mechanism — "industrial competition → loss of a sense of security → securitization" — in which zero-sum thinking is not an innate cognitive framework, but the natural product of a psychological defense mechanism triggered by losing out in competition.

Second Movement: The Return of Logic — Classical Economics' Win-Win Legacy and the Hegemonic Overwrite

Consistent with Bao Rong's framework, Shen Yi likewise invokes Adam Smith and David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage to ground the economics of mutual benefit. But here Shen Yi makes a distinctive advance — he is not merely citing the history of economic thought, but pointing to a fundamental irony: that American and European politicians "cannot possibly not know." U.S. elites fully understand the economic logic of mutually beneficial trade, yet they choose to overwrite it with a zero-sum narrative, because the logic of hegemony requires an "opponent" as its operating condition.

This analysis goes one step beyond Bao Rong's framework: it no longer asks "why are they wrong," but "why do they persist when they know they are wrong" — and the answer is not ignorance in economics, but intent in politics: the zero-sum narrative serves the reproduction of structural hegemony. When the United States recasts ordinary economic reciprocity as a "threat," it is not analyzing reality but operating a "power discourse": I say you are a threat, and so you are a threat, because the power to define rests with me.

Third Movement: Confirming the Cultural Bedrock — Empirical Echoes of Pan Yue's Framework

Shen Yi likewise cites Pan Yue's Warring States and Greece and its contrast between Eastern and Western civilizational paths — knowing oneself by defining friends versus knowing oneself by defining enemies — and closes with a vivid contemporary scene: Europeans are "nearly dying of heat, still waiting for the Chinese to rescue them with air conditioners," while on the very same day European politicians "started barking again." This contradiction of "material need running in parallel with discursive attack" is a perfect miniature of how zero-sum thinking fractures at the level of policy.

Bao Rong's analysis supplies the "three-layer structure" of the zero-sum game — the undercurrent of resource anxiety, the panic trigger of declining power, the rhetorical hardening of discourse. Shen Yi's analysis is an elaboration of the topmost layer, the rhetorical hardening of discourse: how double-standard narratives are deployed, how economic competition is packaged as security, how the hegemonic power of definition overrides the common sense of economics. Read together, the two form a complete analytical chain from "structure" to "discourse": at the base, structural constraints driven by anxiety and panic; at the top, narrative operations conducted by a weaponized discourse system.