In 44 BC, on the Ides of March, Caesar fell beneath the knives of the Roman Senate, stabbed twenty-three times according to Suetonius. The assassins led by Brutus believed they were saving the Republic, convinced that removing one man would restore the old order. The result was the exact opposite: Rome plunged into a new round of civil war, and within two decades Octavian became emperor while the Republic survived in name only. Later generations often treat that single blow as the turning point of Rome's fate: a powerful ruling elite personally eliminated the most capable man among them.
In the eighth month of 1643, Sun Chuanting swore an oath before the Guan Yu Temple in Xi'an. He did not want to march out beyond the pass. This general, who had once ambushed and captured the rebel leader Gao Yingxiang in the Ziwu Valley and presented him at court, and who had driven Li Zicheng down to fleeing into the Shangluo Mountains with only eighteen riders at the southern plain of Tongguan, understood better than anyone at court that the army he had just rebuilt through military farming, grain stockpiling, and weapons manufacturing in Shaanxi was nowhere near ready for a decisive battle beyond the pass. Meanwhile, Li Zicheng's peasant army had grown to hundreds of thousands, holding Xiangyang and overrunning counties and prefectures with rising momentum. Holding the natural fortress of Tongguan, trading time for provisions and training for combat power, was almost the only rational choice. He was not incapable of fighting — he was too capable, so capable that a corrupt system could neither do without him nor tolerate him fighting in his own way.
Yet Chongzhen's orders to attack came one after another, demanding no delay whatsoever. The court would not provide adequate pay, the Ministry of War would not provide troops, supervising eunuchs interfered at his side, and the court officials either knew nothing of military affairs or were too terrified by the emperor's record of imprisoning and executing ministers to speak on his behalf. The more Sun Chuanting proved he could train soldiers, set ambushes, and coordinate strategy, the more the court treated him as a chip that had to be pushed onto the gambling table immediately. The more he insisted on holding position and waiting for the right moment, the more Chongzhen saw it as disobedience and disloyalty. He had already been imprisoned for three years for refusing to align with Yang Sichang, and after his return, knowing full well his army was not yet ready, he had no room left to say no.
Sun Chuanting stamped his foot and sighed: "What can be done! I know well that I shall go and not return." He was not defeated by Li Zicheng — he was forced out of Tongguan by a corrupt structure that could no longer accommodate a capable man fighting in a capable way. He led a hundred thousand exhausted troops beyond the pass, was defeated by Li Zicheng near Ruzhou, and his remnants retreated to Tongguan. Li Zicheng pursued, breached the pass, and entered. Sun Chuanting did not flee. He spurred his horse, brandished his blade, and charged into the enemy ranks, shouting and glaring as he fought, dying in battle at the age of fifty-one. Five months later, Chongzhen hanged himself on Coal Hill. It was not Sun Chuanting's death that directly caused the fall of the Ming dynasty, but rather the dynasty's system had reached a point where it could no longer accommodate a pillar like Sun Chuanting to exist, fight, and survive in a reasonable manner. The Ming History commented with a single sentence: "With Chuanting dead, the Ming is doomed."
On November 12, 2026, the NVIDIA board of directors ended Jensen Huang's 33-year leadership with an announcement marked "effective immediately." There was no farewell party, no transition period, not even a board seat left for him. Four days earlier, Jensen Huang had publicly acknowledged an extramarital affair; four days later, he was uprooted from the company he founded. An internal employee poll showed over 97% wanted him to stay, with more than 1,600 internal messages demanding the board "bring back our captain." The market reacted just as violently: the stock plunged as much as 14% on the day of his resignation, and short sellers booked paper profits of roughly $3.8 billion. On the surface, this was a case of personal conduct bringing a man down. In reality, Jensen Huang's downfall stemmed from that internal speech last year.
Jensen Huang's true offense was never in that apology letter. His real problem was this: in a system that had already decided to destroy its own greatest asset, he still tried to be a Sun Chuanting who could actually fight. NVIDIA's China revenue once accounted for nearly a quarter of its total. During the years when U.S. chip export controls against China escalated round after round, what Jensen Huang did was exactly what a pillar of the empire would do: design compliant chips, roll out the H20 and H200, lobby Washington, maintain the last commercial channel to the Chinese market, and try to preserve a narrow crack between the national security hawks' noose and the world's largest semiconductor market. In 2025, he even said that China would win the AI race. In Washington's ears, that was not clarity — it was disloyalty.
That speech was not a formal earnings call but a conversation at a closed-door dinner. On November 5, 2025, at the Grand Hyatt Taipei, only twelve guests were invited, with recording and phone use strictly prohibited throughout. Multiple media outlets, based on the recollections of several attendees who heard him directly, reconstructed almost sentence by sentence the full remarks Jensen Huang made at the time, omitting sensitive content: "If you ask me who will win the generative AI race in the next five to ten years — China will win. It's that simple. They have a million people working on this 24 hours a day. A million! Not a hundred thousand, a million. Washington thinks they are stopping China. Actually, they are not stopping China — they are accelerating China. By 2027, China will have more AI compute than the rest of the world combined. Mark my words. So if you want to keep sanctioning, go ahead. Just understand: you are personally handing them the trophy."
And so the system's "supervising eunuch" mechanism kicked in. Reports from The Information noted that several articles disclosing the board's decision on Jensen Huang's fate were co-written by Washington journalists who ordinarily do not cover NVIDIA, leading outsiders to speculate whether the White House had leaked information to the media to apply pressure. At the same time, his extramarital affair allegation, tinged with suspicions of Chinese espionage, appeared precisely at the most sensitive moment in China-U.S. relations, becoming a perfect lever — one powerful enough to destroy a CEO's public credibility and also to pin the label of being soft on China on him, making any voice defending him appear suspect.
Jensen Huang was not driven out by a scandal. He was driven out by a system that no longer tolerates functional existence. The more he proved he could find a way between controls and markets, the more he proved he was uncontrollable. The more valuable he was, the more he had to be eliminated. This follows the same logic as Chongzhen forcing Sun Chuanting out of Tongguan with one battle order after another: the system no longer asks who can win — it only asks who is still obedient. Jensen Huang's experience is not an isolated case. It is the manifestation on one person of a systemic pattern. Expand this pattern, and you see self-destruction of one's own great wall happening simultaneously on several core fronts in the United States.
The self-cannibalization of chip controls. The most paradoxical consequence of export controls against China is that they first destroyed American companies' presence in the Chinese market. NVIDIA's market share for high-end AI training chips in China plunged from near-monopoly at 95% to zero; H20 chip shipments to China went from $4.6 billion a year earlier to zero, and the company recorded about $5.5 billion in costs from canceled orders. Washington's goal was to choke China, but the actual effect was to uproot American semiconductor companies from the world's largest single market while forcing China to accelerate the construction of an alternative ecosystem. ASML faced the same situation: the U.S. pressured the Netherlands to restrict exports to China, and ASML expected its China revenue share to drop from 33% to 20%, while the U.S. Congress was pushing to extend restrictions to all DUV lithography machines. An empire in fear cutting off the nutrient channels of its own most powerful enterprises — that is not strategy, it is self-mutilation.
The illusion of manufacturing reshoring. The Trump administration promoted manufacturing reshoring through reciprocal tariffs, and the White House claimed trillions of dollars in investment commitments. But investigations made it clear that these commitments were severely inflated: Apple and Meta's $600 billion investment was deemed unrealistic, as Apple's global capital expenditure in 2024 was only $10 billion; the UAE's ten-year commitment was doubled in the White House's accounting; and many so-called new investments were merely regular business spending repackaged. Meanwhile, the real data: since 2023, more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the United States, and the ISM manufacturing index contracted for 26 consecutive months through December 2025. The empire replaced substantive industrial capacity with performative numbers, then declared it was revitalizing.
The systemic failure of governance capacity. A December 2025 Pew Research Center survey showed that only 17% of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time or almost always, near a seven-decade low. In 2025, the federal government experienced the longest shutdown in history at 43 days, and the House of Representatives cast only 362 votes for the entire year, the second lowest in a quarter century. In Gallup polling, congressional disapproval reached 86%. A system that cannot even pass a budget on time and repeatedly shuts down basic governance functions is meanwhile mass-expelling its most capable entrepreneurs and tying the hands of its most competitive industries. This is structurally no different from the late Ming court still engaging in factional strife, still executing Yuan Chonghuan, and still forcing Sun Chuanting beyond the pass while Qing forces knocked at the frontier.
The true moment of an empire's death is not the day Chongzhen hanged himself, but the moment it personally pushed the last man who could still fight out to his death — because that moment confirms: this system is no longer an order capable of sustaining itself, but a machine that only clears away its own supporting structures. Jensen Huang's resignation is not the personal tragedy of a CEO. It is a signal: when an empire begins to regard the very ability to get things done in the real world as a threat, when the standard of loyalty shifts from capability to purity of ideological obedience, when the system would rather choose a successor who cannot fight but obeys than tolerate a commander who can fight but is not fully controllable, then it has already entered the state on the eve of Sun Chuanting's march beyond the pass. When an empire begins systematically expelling those who still try to keep it running, it no longer needs to be defeated by external forces — it is completing the task itself. The decline of empires follows the same script: destroying one's own great wall. With Renxun gone, NVIDIA is doomed.
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