This book addresses a fundamental puzzle: how should we understand the present historical moment? Is China poised to displace the United States as the architect of global order? Can its state-centric model attain the universal influence once exercised by American liberal democracy? And can the United States renew itself—internally and externally—to halt what appears to be a period of profound normative decay? The book advances a central claim: we are living through a great interregnum—luanshi, a “time of troubles” marking the interval between the twilight of a dominant ideology and the uncertain dawn of another.
Offering a comprehensive analysis of U.S.-China power competition through a constructivist lens, the book argues that values, ideologies, and cultural frameworks are constitutive of international order rather than subordinate to material capabilities. Power transitions, in this perspective, are not simply redistributions of relative strength; they are struggles over legitimacy, authority, and the moral grammar of global governance. By tracing the trajectories of American liberal democracy and socialism with Chinese characteristics, the book situates contemporary rivalry within a broader theory of ideological cycles and world revolution. Drawing on the Lasswellian concept of world revolution, it characterizes the present era as one defined by fragmentation, contestation, and normative uncertainty—an interregnum in which neither model nor ideology commands uncontested hegemony. Through an integrated theoretical and historical framework, the book moves beyond diagnosing the current crisis of international order to recalibrate prevailing conceptual frameworks and expand the analytical horizons through which its structural transformation is interpreted and assessed by scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike.