Long Divided, Must Unite; Long United, Must Divide: The Physical Essence of Chinese Civilizational Cycles

Why do mild institutional reforms always fail? This paper proposes a physical-historical thesis: Carrier Turnover is the necessary physical condition for social change. Low-resistance pathways are etched onto carbon-based carriers. Old monopolists block new pathways with their bodies. As long as the carriers of old pathways remain unturned, those pathways cannot be extinguished. This is the common physical root underlying the failures of all mild reformers in Chinese history—Wang Mang, Wang Anshi, Zhang Juzheng, and others. The reason Chinese civilization was able to rebuild itself after every violent turnover is that it possesses a unique underlying structure: Gengdu Coupling—the sustained coupling of practical work (Geng) and knowledge-seeking (Du)—which provides an inexhaustible reserve network of backup dense nodes at the grassroots level of society. Based on the physical framework of Neutralization Destiny and exogenous lift, this paper reduces the cycles of division and unification in Chinese history to the eternal oscillation of the social power grid between the monopoly of low-resistance pathways and carrier turnover. Peace is the process by which the system slides toward a neutralized steady state and pathways become monopolized; chaotic ages are the result of the forced injection of exogenous lift that shatters old pathways. This paper further demonstrates that the physical essence of Gengdu culture is Hero Storage—the advance welding, in every county seat, every military garrison, and every grassroots organization, of low-resistance pathway networks that can be upgraded at any moment into the backbone network of a new dynasty. Founding teams are not selected; they are pre-welded networks activated as a whole after repeated scouring. The hero is not a historical accident, but the densest node output by the Gengdu energy-storage network under specific input conditions. Through cross-verification between physical deduction and known phenomena in Chinese history, this paper anchors core observations—dynastic lifespans, reform failures, civilizational reconstruction, Gengdu transmission, and educational alienation—that are scattered across different disciplines within a single physical derivation. On this foundation, this paper proposes five new guides for civilizational dynamics. The core conclusion of this paper is: Universal Harmony (Tianxia Datong) is not a moral ideal, but a physically attainable state—when energy and coordination are no longer scarce, carrier turnover will no longer need to be executed through violence.