The River Does Not Have Preferences
In December 2025, Xi Jinping brought Emmanuel Macron to a two-thousand-three-hundred-year-old irrigation system in Sichuan province. He was not offering a lesson in hydraulic engineering.
The Dujiangyan irrigation system was built around 256 BC by Li Bing, governor of Shu under the Qin dynasty. It is the oldest functioning irrigation infrastructure in the world — continuously operational for over two thousand three hundred years. It works by cutting a channel through a mountain to divide the Min River into an inner channel for irrigation and an outer channel for flood control. No dam. Not blockage but division. Not opposition but redirection. The river's own force is the instrument of its management. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It still irrigates the Chengdu Plain today.
In December 2025, Xi Jinping brought Emmanuel Macron — the French president who had recently imposed pension reform on his own parliament by executive decree — to Dujiangyan. Standing at the site, Xi spoke. The spirit that built this system, he said, can be extended to every aspect of human endeavour. Managing water and governing a country draw from the same wisdom: reading the force of what flows, working with it rather than against it, making sound decisions to get things done. The man standing beside him had recently gotten things done by bypassing his own legislature. Xi was not offering a lesson in hydraulic engineering. He was making a comparison.
The observation that matters most about this scene is not that China is authoritarian. Everyone knows China is authoritarian. The observation that matters is that the global capital system does not care. This is the argument that the third chapter of my book builds — and it is the argument I want to develop here, because I think it is the one that the current conversation about geopolitics consistently fails to make.
Capital is not ideological. It does not prefer democracy. It does not prefer autocracy. It routes toward efficiency — toward the conditions that allow it to accumulate most productively. Where democratic governance is efficient, it routes through democracies. Where authoritarian governance is more efficient, it routes through autocracies. The river does not have preferences. It has physics.
This is not a new observation in the abstract. What is new is the evidence we now have for how it operates in practice. The thirty years between 1945 and 1975 — what the French call les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty glorious years — were the period in which democratic governance and capital accumulation reinforced each other most effectively. The welfare state was not the enemy of capital accumulation. It was its precondition: a healthy, educated, broadly consuming population that provided the labour, the demand, and the political stability that productive capitalism required. The architects of the postwar settlement understood this. They built the banks that gave the river its productive form.
Then they removed the banks. Four times, across four decades.
In 1971, Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system and freed capital from the gold standard and fixed exchange rates. Capital could now move across borders at a scale and speed that the postwar architects had deliberately prevented. In the 1980s, Thatcher and Reagan dismantled the financial regulation that had kept capital tied to productive investment in domestic economies. In 1989 and the years following, the fall of communism produced what felt like a triumphalist confirmation: liberal democracy had won, the management of capital was a solved problem, the remaining constraints on its movement were relics of a Cold War that no longer existed. And in 2001, China entered the World Trade Organisation — the moment when the global capital system gained access to the world's largest reserve of cheap disciplined labour, housed inside a political system with no unions, no independent judiciary, no democratic accountability, and an extraordinary capacity for long-term state coordination of economic development.
Each dissolution was individually defensible. Each one made sense within the logic of the system at the moment it was made. Taken together, they produced a capital system that had been freed from every constraint that tied it to the democratic political forms that had built it. The river had been given its freedom. It found the most efficient channel available. That channel ran through Beijing.
This is what Xi was showing Macron at Dujiangyan. Not a threat. Not a boast. A demonstration. The river's own force is the instrument of its management. You do not oppose the river. You read it. You redirect it. You make sound decisions to get things done — and if the legislature is slower than the decision requires, you bypass the legislature. The man standing beside him nodded and took notes.
The standard response to this observation is that authoritarian systems are ultimately less stable than democratic ones — that the absence of accountability, the suppression of information, the concentration of decision-making in a small number of hands produces brittleness rather than strength, and that the long arc of history bends toward liberal democracy. This may be true. The history of authoritarian systems gives some support to it. But it is not the question the capital system is asking. The capital system is not asking what form of governance is most stable over a century. It is asking what form of governance is most efficient over a quarter. And on that timescale, over the past three decades, the answer has been increasingly clear.
China grew its economy at rates no democratic system has sustained. It built infrastructure at speeds no democratic planning process has matched. It coordinated industrial policy at a scale that no coalition of private actors operating within a market system has achieved. It did all of this while maintaining political stability that its own historical experience suggested was unlikely. The capital system noticed. It routed accordingly.
The architects of the postwar democratic order are now confronting what they built. The institutions they created to manage capital — the WTO, the IMF, the network of bilateral investment treaties, the global financial system — were designed to spread the benefits of liberal capitalism to developing economies and thereby, the theory went, to spread liberal democracy. The theory was not entirely wrong. But it missed the most important variable: the capital system's indifference to the political form of its host. It assumed that economic integration would produce political convergence toward democracy. What it produced instead was the demonstrated superiority of certain authoritarian models at managing capital accumulation — and the corresponding discovery, by capital itself, that democracy is not a precondition for productivity but a constraint on it.
This is the architect's paradox. The system they built — the global capital order of the late twentieth century — turned out not to need them. They built the banks and then dismantled them in the name of the river's freedom. The flood was not a betrayal of the project. It was its completion.
Standing at Dujiangyan in December 2025, with the man whose government had just demonstrated that executive bypass of democratic process is an efficient tool for getting things done, Xi Jinping was not gloating. He was describing the situation. The river's own force is the instrument of its management. The architects built the system. The river found its level. Capital flooded the global system — moving with the force and scale that the removal of the banks had unleashed, finding new channels in the manufacturing centres of Asia and the emerging economies that absorbed what the democratic states had released. The water was not absent from the world. It had simply left the communities that built the banks behind. What the architects did not anticipate — what the third chapter of my book attempts to trace in full — is what that drought does to those communities, and what those communities are now doing to the democratic institutions the architects built.
That is the subject of the next chapter.
This essay is drawn from Chapter Three of The Dream of Never: Culture, Capital, and the Refusal of Limits, a completed book examining the cultural, political, and anthropological logic of the growth imperative. Available on Amazon Kindle.
michelerovatti.com · Writing since 2012
The Dream of Never
Culture, Capital, and the Refusal of Limits
by Michele Rovatti
A sharp diagnosis of the growth imperative and the cultural logic that made it inevitable — from theology to AI.
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