Gold Signs, Bronze Statues: Empire-Building in the 21st Century
I. Qin Shi Huangdi
In 221 BCE, after a century of warfare, the king of Qin finished conquering the other six warring states and declared himself Shi Huangdi — First Emperor. He ruled for eleven years. In that time he built the template every subsequent Chinese dynasty would inherit.
The toolkit was concrete. He abolished the old feudal nobility and replaced them with commanderies run by centrally appointed, salaried, firable officials — the junxian system, the bones of Chinese governance for the next two thousand years. He standardized the script, so an edict drafted in the capital could be read in any former kingdom. He standardized axle widths, so carts from any province ran in the same road ruts. He standardized currency — one round coin with a square hole, replacing the knife money and spade money of the defeated states. He standardized weights and measures, which meant he could tax in grain across a continent. He extended a uniform legal code empire-wide. He connected the existing border walls of the conquered states into a continuous northern frontier. He moved 120,000 wealthy and powerful families to the capital so he could watch them, and melted the weapons of the populace into twelve giant bronze statues at Xianyang. He burned the philosophical books of the rival schools and, the histories say, buried some of their scholars alive.
The dynasty collapsed four years after his death. The template survived.
II. The Would-Be Emperor
We have our own candidate. Gold toilet, gold sneakers, gold Sharpie, gold pen on the executive order. Gold lettering ten feet high on the tower, on the hotels, on the plane, on the casinos while they lasted. TRUMP in gold on every surface that will hold paint. The resemblance is not subtle and I do not think it is accidental.
Qin did this too. He toured his empire and carved self-praising inscriptions into the sacred mountains — at Mount Tai, at Langya, at Zhifu — announcing his reign in stone. Our would-be emperor does it in gold leaf on Fifth Avenue. Same impulse, same function: I was here, this is mine, read it and know.
What is funny — not really — is how closely the toolkit tracks.
Qin standardized the script. Emperor Trump signs Executive Order 14224 making English the sole official language of the United States, the first such federal designation in the country’s history, and the Justice Department follows with guidance telling agencies to minimize non-essential multilingual services. Shutong wen. Same writing.
Qin abolished the old feudal lords and replaced them with directly appointed officials, firable at will. Our would-be emperor signs Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies and declares that the independent regulatory agencies Congress built to be insulated from him must now be supervised and controlled by him. He fires board members whom Congress said could only be removed for cause. Junxian. One center, directly appointed officials, nobody insulated.
Qin disarmed the conquered states and melted their weapons into statues at the capital. Emperor Trump fires 300,000 federal employees in a year and begins politicizing the civil service — disarming the administrative apparatus the way Qin disarmed the aristocracy. Different weapons, same move.
Qin connected the walls. Our would-be emperor builds walls, or says he does.
Qin drew the line between inside and outside — who counted as a subject of the empire and who was a barbarian beyond it. Emperor Trump does the same work with deportation flights, birthright-citizenship challenges, and a social-media-vetting regime now reaching five years back into an applicant’s posts. The line is being redrawn, in real time, with the old purpose.
Qin burned the books of the rival schools to eliminate ideological frameworks that could critique his rule. I will not press this one too far — removing DEI materials from federal contexts, suing media organizations, and pressuring universities is not fenshu kengru. But it is in the same category of move: using state power to narrow the range of acceptable thought.
The difference between Qin Shi Huangdi and Emperor Trump is that Qin was actually building something. He was welding seven kingdoms into a state that had never existed before, and the technologies of standardization were how he did it. Trump is operating inside a state that has been standardized for two and a half centuries. The currency is already one. The script is already one. The roads already line up. What he is doing is not building; it is consolidating — pulling authority from the institutions and the states and the courts and the civil service toward a single figure who means to hold it.
Qin’s statues were cast bronze, melted down from the weapons of the conquered. Emperor Trump’s gold is paint.
III. Where This Lands
Yesterday I wrote about the Democracy Now! interview with Krystal Two Bulls — Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, director of Honor the Earth, founder of the No Data Center Coalition. She described hyperscale data centers being sited on and adjacent to Native lands at a rate of more than a hundred proposed projects, concentrated in Oklahoma, the Great Plains, the Four Corners. She called the pattern data colonialism.
Here is where the two pieces connect. The consolidation of executive power and the consolidation of compute, water, and electrical load on Native lands are not separate stories. Both are centralizing moves. Both depend on a center that can override local authority — federal agencies stripped of independence on one side, tribal sovereignty stripped of leverage through NDAs and subsidiary intermediaries on the other. Emperor Trump’s project and the hyperscale corporations’ project are running on the same grid of assumptions about who gets to decide, and where.
Qin’s dynasty collapsed in four years from the strain of its own over-centralization. That is worth remembering. It is not a prophecy. It is a precedent.
IV. A Note on Method
Someone will object that the comparative move I am making here is sloppy. Comparing a Bronze Age empire to a twenty-first-century presidency is the kind of thing structuralism at its worst did — flattening every sovereign into the Sovereign, every wall into the Wall, every standardization into the Standardization, as if history were a set of variations on a small number of eternal templates.
The objection is fair, and the classical structuralists would probably have hated this essay. Lévi-Strauss was looking for deep grammars across cultures; he was not, most of the time, in the business of saying this ruler is that ruler. Foucault explicitly rejected the structuralist label and spent much of his career insisting that power takes historically specific forms that do not reduce to templates. The serious historians of China — Mark Edward Lewis, Yuri Pines — are careful to mark what is distinctive about Qin, not what is eternal about empire.
So what is the comparison worth. I think this. The Qin-to-Trump line is not a structuralist claim that the same archetype recurs. It is a rhetorical claim that the administration is using a recognizable set of centralizing moves, that those moves have a long pedigree, and that naming the pedigree helps a reader see what is being done. The comparison is a flashlight, not a theory. It illuminates; it does not explain.
V. How to Help
If any of this lands, the useful next step is not to think harder. It is to give.
Honor the Earth — honorearth.org. Two Bulls’s organization. Direct work on data-center fights, treaty rights, and energy justice on Native lands.
The No Data Center Coalition — linked from Honor the Earth’s site. They are building the map and need organizers, data, and money.
NDN Collective — ndncollective.org. Indigenous-led, broader remit, strong on land-back and infrastructure organizing.
The Lakota People’s Law Project — lakotalaw.org. Legal muscle on tribal sovereignty cases.
Give what you can. Small and monthly beats large and once. Emperor Trump’s apparatus is well-funded. The other side has to be too.
Sources
Executive Order 14224, Designating English as the Official Language of the United States, March 1, 2025. Department of Justice Guidance on EO 14224, July 14, 2025. Executive Order, Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies, February 18, 2025. Partnership for Public Service, A Government in Chaos: Trump’s First Year Back in Office, February 2026. Krystal Two Bulls, interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, April 22, 2026. Mark Edward Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Harvard, 2007). Yuri Pines, The Everlasting Empire (Princeton, 2012).