唐章怀太子墓壁画《礼宾图》
Separation of Power & Wealth
As China enters what is very likely to be the defining century of its history, an increasing number of observers—friendly, hostile, or simply curious—are asking the same question: what has made China successful?
Some will point to luck: historical timing, global shifts, or the exhaustion of older powers. Others will emphasize hard work, discipline, or cultural endurance.
All of these factors matter. But none of them, on their own, can explain the coherence, resilience, and continuity of Chinese civilization over more than two millennia. What matters most, I would argue, are institutions, and more fundamentally, the principles that underwrite those institutions.
This six-part series brings together six themes that have long structured Chinese thought and institutions—here referred to as the “Four Separations and Two Unities”:
Separation of Power and Wealth (P&W)
Separation of Ownership and Use (O&U)
Separation of Birth and Moral Worth (B&M)
Separation of Power and Dao (P&D)
Unity of Heaven and Human
Unity of This World and the Afterworld
Some of these themes have been discussed extensively by Chinese historians and modern thinkers; others are less explicitly named, even if they are deeply embedded in practice. What is rarely done is to place them side by side, as a coherent civilizational pattern.
Each of these topics deserves a book-length treatment. What I offer here instead are six separate essays, each focused on one theme, aiming not at exhaustiveness but at clarity: to make visible the underlying logic that has shaped China into what it is.
We begin with the most concrete—and perhaps the most misunderstood—of the six: the separation of power and wealth.
The Separation of Power and Wealth (P&W)
One of the most fundamental principles underlying Chinese political and social institutions is the separation of political power from private wealth.
This principle is so deeply ingrained that it often goes unnoticed—especially by observers from societies where the opposite arrangement is taken for granted.
In the Chinese tradition, wealth held by private individuals—whether merchants, landowners, or later industrialists—is treated as an accidental fact about a person. It is permitted, and at times even encouraged, but only within strict conceptual boundaries. Wealth is tolerated—and justified—only insofar as it serves a higher purpose: the stability of society and the well-being of the people.
Crucially, wealth is never allowed to transform itself into political power.
The most essential form of power—the authority to govern, legislate, judge, and administer—is treated as a separate system, guarded against encroachment by money. Access to this system is not purchased; it is earned, in principle, through moral merit and meritocratic achievement.
This separation is not a modern invention, nor a policy choice of a particular regime. It is a structural feature of Chinese governance going back at least two thousand years.
Wealth Is Not a Title to Rule
In imperial China, a wealthy merchant did not thereby gain political authority. His money did not buy him law-making power, judicial influence, or access to state offices. He could live comfortably, sponsor projects, even gain local prestige—but he could not rule because he was rich.
Conversely, entry into government did not exist as a path to personal enrichment—at least not in theory, and often not in practice. The moral expectation was explicit: to govern was to serve, not to cash in.
This logic is captured succinctly in a remark made by Xi Jinping in recent years:
If you want to get rich, do not go into government.
If you want to go into government, do not hope to get rich.
This was not a personal opinion, nor a rhetorical flourish. It was a restatement—almost a sloganized version—of a principle on which Chinese political institutions have long rested.
A System, Not a Sentiment
The separation of power and wealth is not merely an ethical aspiration; it is institutionalized.
China historically constructed its governing class through examinations, bureaucratic hierarchies, and moral evaluation. While corruption has always existed—as it does in every society—the legitimacy of power was never supposed to derive from wealth.
This makes the Chinese system logically compatible, in principle, with something like Athenian participatory democracy, where political participation is detached from economic dominance. That compatibility, however, comes with an important caveat that is often overlooked.
The “citizens” who directly participated in Athenian political life were not private individuals in the modern sense. They were heads of households, property-holding members of the polis. Participation did not extend to slaves, dependents, or those without property; nor did it extend to daughters of households as independent political actors. Political agency was tied to social responsibility and economic self-sufficiency, not to individual identity as such.
Understood in this way, participatory democracy and the separation of power and wealth are not in tension. What the Chinese system rejects is not participation per se, but a system in which private wealth—especially liquid and financial wealth—becomes the decisive pathway to political authority.
What it is fundamentally incompatible with is American-style representative democracy, in which donor money determines who can run, who can win, and ultimately who governs.
In such systems, wealth does not merely influence power—it is power. More wealth means more influence, more access, and a higher probability of political success. Lawmakers are selected, filtered, and sustained by a donor class, and this is not an institutional accident or a corruption of an otherwise neutral design.
The equation between wealth and power is built into the system from the start. A cornerstone of the American constitutional order is the sanctification of naturally occurring inequalities—differences in wealth-making ability, intelligence, talent, luck, and opportunity. The primary role of law and government is not to correct these inequalities, but to protect them from interference.
In this sense, the equal sign between wealth and power is not an unintended consequence; it is there by design. It reflects a foundational choice made at the moment of political founding. From that perspective, the collapse of the boundary between money and authority is not a deviation from principle—it is the logical fulfillment of it.
From a Chinese institutional perspective, this is not democracy corrupted; it is democracy misdesigned.
Finance as the Fault Line
One recurrent threat to the separation of power and wealth arises when the wealthy cease to be content with commerce and production and instead seek entry into banking and finance. Once private wealth begins to intermediate credit, issue quasi-money, or control the circulation of capital itself, the separation collapses almost automatically. Finance is the shortest and most direct bridge between money and power.
For this reason, Chinese political tradition—imperial and modern alike—has been consistently hostile to the fusion of private wealth and financial authority. Merchants may trade, produce, and accumulate; what they must not do is control the arteries through which the state and society are financed.
A recent illustration is the case of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. When his business empire moved decisively beyond commerce into banking, consumer credit, and financial infrastructure, the response from the Chinese state was swift and unambiguous. The project was halted, the expansion blocked, and the individual himself removed from public view for a prolonged period.
This episode is often portrayed abroad as arbitrary or authoritarian. Within the logic of Chinese institutions, however, it was entirely orthodox. Any dynasty in imperial times would have reacted in much the same way. The issue was not wealth as such, but the attempt to convert wealth into financial power, and thereby into leverage over law, policy, and governance itself.
Seen in this light, the crackdown was not an exception to the separation of power and wealth, but its affirmation.
Two Identical Charts, Two Different Societies
In an earlier essay of mine, “Two Identical Charts, Yet Two Different Societies,” I used a simple illustration: two charts showing roughly similar levels of wealth inequality in China and in the United States.
The charts look alike. The societies they describe do not.
In China, you may be a billionaire—but your billions, in principle, mean nothing when it comes to governing power. You cannot buy legislation, judicial authority, or executive office simply by writing checks.
In the United States, the opposite holds. Wealth converts smoothly and efficiently into political power. With sufficient financial backing, one can leapfrog into Congress, into the executive branch, even into the White House itself. Donor networks function as gatekeepers of political possibility.
The difference is not moral temperament. It is institutional logic.
Why This Matters
The separation of power and wealth explains a great deal about Chinese history: its relative resistance to oligarchic capture, its recurring emphasis on bureaucratic discipline, and its long-standing suspicion of merchant domination of politics.
In one of my recent posts, “China, Inc.”, I compared the structure of China’s political and social order to that of a modern corporation: the nation as a whole functioning as a corporate entity, the people as its ultimate beneficiaries, the Politburo as a board of trustees, and the president as a chief executive officer. The separation principle discussed in this essay is one of the key reasons why this analogy proves so compelling. Just as a well-run corporation strictly separates ownership, management, and fiduciary responsibility from private gain, China’s political tradition insists on insulating governing authority from the direct influence of private wealth.
It also explains a persistent source of misunderstanding between China and the modern West. What appears to some as “authoritarian control” is, in many cases, an inherited insistence that money must never rule.
This first separation sets the tone for all that follows. The remaining separations—and the two unities—build on the same civilizational instinct: that certain domains of human life must remain structurally distinct, even as they are held together by a larger moral and cosmological order.
In the next piece, we will turn to a more abstract—but no less consequential—theme: the separation of ownership and use (O&U).
Yego’s Chronicles 