History offers a warning about unchecked power. As Donald Trump reshapes US foreign policy, the risks of personal rule and predatory hegemony are becoming harder to ignore.

How times change. For many years one of the standard criticisms of the Chinese system of governance, both in ancient times and in the present, was and is the ‘ bad emperor problem’. When so much power is concentrated in one person, what happens if you get a leader that is mad, bad or simply corrupted by the exercise of unchallengeable power?

For over 2000 years from the Qin to the Qing dynasty, China has suffered at the hands of leaders who were often corrupt or incompetent, eventually leading to the end of dynastic system itself at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This wasn’t the end of China’s problem with megalomaniacal leaders, of course. Mao Zedong emerged from the rubble of the old order, but eventually he, too, succumbed to the intoxicating influence of unbridled power and unleashed the (not-so) Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, during which tens of millions died.

Xi Jinping has certainly centralised power and overturned precedents to continue his rule, but with the noteworthy recent exception of the senior ranks of the military, purges and disappearances are uncommon. Even........

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