What Is Sanyuan Jiuyun? The Ninth Period, Begun in 2024, Is the Last Twenty Years of a Great Cycle

For several years now, the same atmosphere has been spreading across the world. It is not a particular recession or a particular war. It runs deeper than that, a feeling that the very ground beneath us is quietly disappearing. What we are watching is the end of the five hundred years of Western dominance that began with the Age of Discovery, and every one of us is living through the most violent upheaval in half a millennium.

The US-China summit held this month was the decisive moment at which Washington lost to Beijing on every front, in security, diplomacy, the economy, and technology alike, and the center of gravity moved quietly but unmistakably from West to East, never to return.

How was China able to defeat the United States? I believe the answer lies in an ancient Chinese wisdom, the theory of cycles.

Within feng shui, which China has cultivated over millennia, there is a doctrine called Sanyuan Jiuyun, the Three Eras and Nine Periods. It began with long observation of seven heavenly bodies, the five planets visible to the naked eye in ancient China, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, and Mercury, together with the sun and the moon. The ancient Chinese discovered that these seven line up once every sixty years, and from this they concluded that fortune turns in a sixty-year cycle.

They went further. Three sixty-year cycles were gathered into a great cycle of 180 years, in which the first sixty years were called the Upper Era, the next sixty the Middle Era, and the last sixty the Lower Era, each with a character of its own. The Upper Era was a time of building and creation, the Middle Era one of stability and maturity, and the Lower Era one of destruction and disorder, and within the passage from one to the next, they held, the seeds of what comes after lie hidden.

On this foundation of the Three Eras, a different strand of ancient Chinese wisdom was laid. It was a very old teaching that the tilt of the Big Dipper shifts in a twenty-year cycle, and that each shift changes the fortune of the earth. By fitting nine of these twenty-year periods into the 180 years of the Three Eras, the ancients arrived at nine turns of earthly fortune running through the three eras, and these are the Nine Periods. Sanyuan Jiuyun, in other words, is a theory of cycles born where two ancient Chinese traditions crossed.

The first decisive difference between China and the United States is the density of their history. It is rarely pointed out, but China is a singular case in the history of civilization, having been destroyed and reborn again and again. Ordinarily, a civilization that collapses never returns. China, however, has passed through one violent destruction and rebirth after another and still stands at the top. The United States, by contrast, is a young country without that kind of endurance. Its whole rise from founding to hegemony took place within the last five hundred years, the age of the West, and it has no lived experience of how to conduct itself outside that history.

That is what decided the outcome. China, with the historical law that every civilization eventually falls imprinted on it almost at the level of its genes, again and again, simply waited, watching closely for the moment when America would quietly and steadily come apart.

Sanyuan Jiuyun is not fortune-telling, and it has been put to political use since ancient times. Its effect was already demonstrated in the second and third centuries, during the Three Kingdoms, when the Wei of Cao Cao (155–220), the Wu of Sun Quan (182–252), and the Han of Liu Bei (161–223) struggled for supremacy. Zhuge Liang (181–234), the strategist who served Liu Bei, timed his tactics, his attacks, and his defenses according to Sanyuan Jiuyun, and this became the driving force that lifted Han, thought to be the weakest of the three, into prominence.

China has also long cultivated the art of reading history. Sanyuan Jiuyun is only one of many schools of thought that still influence the country’s leadership, several of which develop practical theories of cycles, and it is reasonable to assume that, with the help of Chinese-made AI, these have been built into political planning itself. The same cycles also give a clear number marking President Xi Jinping’s own time limit. Xi (born 1953), who began as a man of ideas, seems to be fully aware of that deadline and to be accelerating his pursuit of the ideal of a Greater China. China, now a great power, is led by a man who understands his own deadline and has made the large-scale decision to move hegemony from West to East. That way of thinking is entirely absent in President Trump.

Sanyuan Jiuyun is still in use today. So here is where we stand, and where we are heading.

Upper Era
Period 1, 1864–1883
Period 2, 1884–1903
Period 3, 1904–1923

Middle Era
Period 4, 1924–1943
Period 5, 1944–1963
Period 6, 1964–1983

Lower Era
Period 7, 1984–2003
Period 8, 2004–2023
Period 9, 2024–2043

According to Sanyuan Jiuyun, we are now at the beginning of the Ninth Period. In other words, we are already standing in the last twenty years of one great cycle.

In Japan, the opening of the Upper Era, the start of the whole cycle, corresponds to the Meiji Restoration of 1868 in the First Period. The opening of the Middle Era corresponds, in the Fourth Period, to the start of the Showa era in 1926, the Manchurian Incident of 1931, and the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, and then, in the Fifth Period, to defeat in 1945, the beginning of the Allied occupation under GHQ, the Anpo protests of the 1960s and 1970s, and the era of high economic growth. The Lower Era opens, in the Seventh Period, with the Plaza Accord of 1985 and the bubble economy that followed, as globalization was being born, and continues with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the bursting of the bubble in 1997. Japan, having lost its international competitiveness, entered its decline, while the world moved into an American-led global age. Around the same time, Windows 95 arrived in 1995, the age of the personal computer began in earnest, and today’s digital era drew its first breath.

As the Eighth Period approached, the September 11 attacks of 2001 and the Iraq War of 2003 marked the turning point at which Western hegemony began to end, and once the Lower Era was under way, China achieved enormous economic growth through its own efforts. In the meantime, Putin became president in 2000 as the leader of post-Soviet Russia, and when Xi Jinping became president in 2013, the cast was complete.

In 2008, in the Eighth Period, the idea of a “G2,” with the United States and China as joint leaders of the world economy, was put forward, and American supremacy began to waver, a shift made decisive by Trump’s arrival in 2016. The Eighth Period went on to bring the Lehman shock, the Arab Spring, the European debt crisis, the pandemic, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, and an accelerating crisis over immigration along with the rise of the far right, and the world tumbled headlong into the Ninth Period.

Once the Ninth Period began in 2024, Trump returned, and through the war in Ukraine and the war with Iran, the voice and influence of Europe, which had led the age of the West, became a thing of the past. With the US-China summit of May 2026, a multipolar world in which no single country holds hegemony, a world of dispersed power, has finally arrived.

Europe, having lost both its hegemony and its glory, has lost its senses as well, and has now begun the outrageous step of openly speaking, on the world stage, of direct war with Russia. In mid-May 2026, Ukraine launched a large-scale drone attack on Moscow Oblast, something that would have been impossible without the involvement of Europe, the United States, and Britain. After this Western attack on Russia, the Putin government, which had held back for so long, has finally lost its patience and has begun to speak openly of military retaliation against Europe.

The three Baltic states in particular, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, are very likely already taking part in direct attacks on Russia, and an attack on Russia carried out through NATO is a plain declaration of war. Europe started World War I and World War II, and it is Europe again that has started World War III. It is the ugly end of nations whose time is over.

China’s leaders, meanwhile, guided by this ancient wisdom, watched patiently for the transfer of hegemony. Their method was simple. They read in the theory of cycles that if they calmly prepared, the West would destroy itself on its own. The calculation proved right. The second Trump administration, which had promised America First, broke its own pledge, yielded to the Israeli lobby, intervened in the war with Iran, lost it, and was then beaten by China at the US-China summit.

Sure of victory, Xi Jinping moved quickly. On May 20 he met President Putin at a China-Russia summit, and a visit to North Korea this week looks increasingly likely. In a mirror image, the United States, and Britain too, stand on the edge of civil conflict and are in no position to attend to world affairs.

In Japan, which likewise keeps ignoring the theory of cycles, constitutional revision, rearmament, nuclear armament, and the revival of conscription are moving forward beneath the surface. At the China-Russia summit on May 20, Xi Jinping and Putin jointly criticized Japan by name, saying that its accelerating rearmament seriously threatens regional peace and security. This is not mere criticism. It is a warning.

It is an admonition to look calmly at Japan’s place on the globe, and a warning not to be dragged along by Western designs into becoming a second Ukraine. Put simply, they are telling Japan that it is not the West and that it should look at the ground under its own feet. When a plan to open a NATO office in Japan came to light in 2023, fierce condemnation from China and Russia finally forced its abandonment in 2025, but had it gone ahead, Japan would already be a target. Before anything is said about constitutional revision, then, the people should be raising their voices against NATO’s entry into Japan. Otherwise, Japan will become a battlefield.

Not only in the Ninth Period (2024–2043) but on the larger scale of a tectonic shift from West to East, the first in five hundred years, we are living through it all. You who read this, and I as well, will probably be among those who carry the next First Period, when this cycle ends and a new one begins. Ancient Chinese wisdom teaches that an ending is a new beginning, and that within the ending lie the seeds of what comes next. What can we learn from the cycles, a lesson no individual can resist?

In the previous Ninth Period (1844–1863), a series of great earthquakes known as the Ansei Great Earthquakes struck, becoming a direct cause of the Meiji Restoration. In 1854 came the Ansei Tokai and Ansei Nankai earthquakes, both Nankai Trough megaquakes, as well as the Hoyo Strait earthquake in Kyushu. In 1855 the Ansei Edo earthquake struck, in today’s terms an earthquake directly beneath the capital, and in 1856 the Ansei Hachinohe-oki earthquake hit the Pacific side of Tohoku.

We must not forget that this chain of great earthquakes set off the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States in 1858, the Ansei Purge, and the Sakuradamon Incident of 1860, which led on to the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Earthquakes have their cycles too. An earthquake directly beneath the capital and a Nankai Trough megaquake could happen at any moment, and we who are already living in the Ninth Period will face a harsh age in which, quite literally, we must survive on the line between life and death.

China read the cycles and seized hegemony. America ignored them and blindly believed its hegemony would last forever. And Japan ignored them too, blindly believing that the Showa era would go on forever.

The beacon fires for the decisive battle of our age have only just been lit.