The Confucian-Promethean Divide

The phrase names what Edo Segal’s Two Rivers calls the deepest layer of the disagreement between the Western and Chinese AI governance frameworks: not a difference about privacy regulation, safety standards, or competitive strategy, but a difference about the prior question that all of those policy debates express. The Confucian frame holds that persons are constituted by relationships rather than prior to them; the self that the Liberal frame treats as the load-bearing unit of moral concern is, in the Confucian analysis, already a relational achievement, intelligible only through the network of obligations in which it is embedded. The Promethean frame—the philosophical lineage that runs through Descartes’s autonomous cogito, Locke’s natural rights, the American frontier mythology, and the Silicon Valley engineering culture of the capable individual building in the garage—holds the autonomous individual as ontologically prior and relationships as negotiated constructions. Every policy disagreement about AI runs through this prior split: whether AI systems should be evaluated primarily