To see Mount Tai

Some eight centuries ago, Changchun, the venerable Taoist monk, was faced with an impossible task. Genghis Khan, master of the greatest war host the world had ever seen, wished to live forever.

More dangerously, the Khan thought the monk could deliver eternity to him. When the two met in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, Changchun spoke plainly. There was no elixir, no philosopher’s stone, no alchemy of immortality.

‘To find eternity,’ Changchun said, ‘You must first abandon desire.’

The Khan was not pleased. He had expected divine wisdom, not pithy platitudes. And yet, the Scourge of God could not bring himself to strike the monk down. Changchun had not prevaricated even when faced with his wrath. For his truthfulness, the Khan appointed him master of all learned-of-faith in his empire. (As fate would have it, both died within the year.)

Let us, for a moment, take on the guise of Changchun. We are faced with the impossible task of advising the Khan-of-our-age. He is less warlord and more wordsmith. His campaigns have faltered, and then failed. His support is fraying at the ends. Hounded by the past and mocked by the present, Khan cannot, perhaps for the first time, pierce the uncertainty of the future.

How may we approach this impossible task?

We might begin, as Changchun-of-old did, by stating the obvious: what is, does not work. For all of Khan’s efforts, he has been unable to overcome the entrenched power of the Other.

Before he let loose the first volley at the Other, Khan assumed three things. First, that his party could remain in a constant state of mobilisation. Second, that the Other’s perception of cost would be largely the same as his own.

These assumptions were wrong. With time, morale depleted, the quality of leadership worsened, and the state’s tactics kneecapped his party’s ability to organise and mobilise. Contrary to Khan’s expectations, the Other’s perception of cost-of-opposition stayed the same, but its perception of cost-of-acceptance rose. Most importantly, the perception of cost increased sharply at the individual level.

The third assumption was that the Other would not escalate to a point where flipping the narrative would become impossible. This, too, was incorrect. When the perception of individual costs rose dramatically, the Other shifted its focus from redefining the narrative to neutralising tangible expressions of the narrative. It suppressed protests, jailed leaders, and clamped down on public criticism.

The problem with such an approach, of course, is that it’s somewhat like kicking a pebble down the road. (In time, the pebble guillotined Louis XVI, shot the Tsar, toppled the Shah, and exiled Kai-shek.)

And so, here we are: two-and-a-half years into the mess, with nothing to show for it other than a battered party afflicted with a siege mentality, a government grappling for legitimacy, and the Other bogged down in a meaningless, unproductive contest of willpower.

Let us imagine we are able to say this and more to the Khan. A frown mars his face, but he listens attentively. He is not a man who likes being reminded of his failures. When he asks what he must do, we take another page out of Changchun’s book: we shift the focus of the conversation.

Khan’s strategy failed, but it does not mean it didn’t win him anything. The problem is that it hinged on him being able to materialise sufficient pressure before winning or losing became a function of attrition. That did not happen. (Such a thing was always unlikely – a fight between man and institution is unequal to begin with.)

It would have been better to split the strategy into two phases. First, he had to show that opposing him would carry immense costs. This, he achieved. Second, he had to give the Other a way out, a path to avoiding the immense personal and institutional costs it perceives. He ignored this element, and in so doing, forced the Other to resign itself to fighting.

Having failed to break his opponents, Khan had two real routes left: enter talks with the Other, or initiate dialogue with the other political parties. The main hurdle to either is the same: both the Other and the ruling parties believe that if Khan ever returns to power, he will focus all his anger on them. In simpler words, it is fear that is putting a stopper to Khan’s ability to move forward.

For the Other, the fear is twofold. On an individual level, it fears Khan might remove the Men in the High Castle in favour of loyalists. On an institutional level, it fears that Khan will replace autonomy and unity with intrigue and factionalism, compromising its effectiveness, its very raison d’etre. In the Other’s eyes, this cost can never be outweighed.

For the parties, the fear is less abstract. In their minds, a resurgent Khan is a vengeful Khan. They imagine jail cells, the erosion of their party structures, and the ruthless suppression of dissent. The precedent has been set, and they fear he will only build on the methods used against him.

And then there is Khan himself. Dialogue would mean compromising with those he has spent the better part of three years denouncing as corrupt and illegitimate. If there is one thing Khan cannot afford, it is for dialogue to be seen as capitulation.

This is the web of fear that underpins the current political stalemate. But like all webs, it can be untangled.

First, Khan must reframe the problem. Dialogue with the parties, as distasteful as it may seem, reaffirms the principle of civilian supremacy, if symbolically, while negotiations with the Other reinforce its primacy in politics. That, more than anything else, is what Khan has galvanised his base against. Through this lens, dialogue with the parties is not capitulation, it is putting his money where his mouth is.

Second, Khan must recognise that the status quo is already working in his favour in one critical way: it has forced his opponents to turtle in survival mode. The ruling parties, in their desperate bid to maintain their relationship with the Other, have cannibalised significant portions of their own support bases. More critically, they have walled themselves off from the very future of their party’s base. In other words, dialogue is not the same as penning one’s terms of surrender, it is the only path to mutual benefit.

Third, Khan must recognise that in the absence of trained cadres capable of sustained mobilisation, distributed nodes of organisation, localised autonomy, and multiple layers of redundant leadership, his party will always be vulnerable to decapitation strikes. To bring about this internal change, he requires time and freedom of action. Today, he has neither. Tomorrow, he may have both.

At its core, dialogue must hinge on a shared understanding: that the cost of continued conflict outweighs the cost of coexistence. For Khan, this means relinquishing the possibility of vengeance. There must be some things he is willing to give up so that he may still claim the remainder. For his opponents, it means conceding that a resurgent Khan need not be the end of their politics as a whole. Electoral support waxes and wanes, but running from momentary failure only makes it more permanent.

All this to say, Khan has much to gain from engaging in dialogue, and his opponents have everything to lose from not.

To find eternity, Changchun said, one must first abandon desire. Perhaps to claim the future, Khan must abandon vengeance.

The writer is a student of law at King’s College London. He can be reached at: salar.rashid@kcl.ac.uk