The first four essays built the basic structure of power relations: where power comes from, how it operates across different layers, why it always generates remainders, where its limits lie. Now we arrive at a decisive question — when power confronts the remainders it produces, what does it do?

There are two basic answers. Power can move toward cultivation, or it can move toward severing. This is not a moral judgment — cultivation is not the "good" option and severing the "bad" one. These are descriptions of two structural orientations, each with its own internal logic and its own distinct consequences.

Understanding this distinction is understanding why some power relations tend toward stability and others toward collapse, why some power structures become more vital over time while others hollow themselves out.

1. What Cultivation Is

A cultivating power relation has one defining characteristic: it uses its asymmetric position to develop the capacities of those under it.

Notice what "developing capacities" means here. It does not mean the power-holder is being generous or kind. It does not require good intentions. Cultivation names a structural effect: in the course of this power relation operating, the subjected party's actual abilities are growing. Their capacity to handle problems is expanding. Their judgment, creativity, and autonomy are getting stronger.

The good teacher is the archetype. A good teacher holds real power over students — can evaluate, require, prescribe. That asymmetry is genuine. But a good teacher deploys that asymmetry in ways that make students more capable. The curriculum design, the mode of questioning, the standards of evaluation — all serve one goal: that students can think more rigorously at the end of the semester than at the beginning. The good mentor has the same structure with a graduate student. The good master craftsman has it with an apprentice. Good parenting has it with a child.

The paradox of cultivation: genuine success works toward the partial dissolution of the power relation itself. The teacher's student graduates and no longer needs the teacher's authority to guide her thinking. The apprentice finishes training and opens her own workshop. The child grows up and no longer needs parental protection. In each case, the original power relation shrinks or ends.

But this dissolution is not failure — it is success. A parent whose adult child still requires their authority to function has not cultivated well. A power relation that dissolves through genuine cultivation has done what it was supposed to do. The asymmetry ends because the gap has closed, not because anything went wrong.

2. What Severing Is

Severing power moves in the opposite direction.

A severing power uses its asymmetric position to lock the subjected party in place. Its goal is not to develop the other's capacities but to prevent the other from developing capacities that might close the positional gap. A severing power does not want capable, autonomous subordinates — it wants permanent dependents.

Historical examples are clear. Colonialism in its typical form deliberately blocked the development of local education, local industry, local administrative capacity in colonized territories. This was not because colonizers "forgot" to help the colonized — it was because once the colonized developed sufficient capacity, they would no longer need the colonizer. That was precisely what colonizers wanted to prevent. A political regime that restricts information access, a bureaucracy that punishes independent thinking, a management style that keeps subordinates in a permanent state of "requiring guidance" — these are all specific instances of severing power.

The logic of severing seems sensible: to maintain my positional advantage, I must maintain your dependence on me. This logic is effective in the short run. But it contains an internal contradiction that does not require external force to make itself visible.

When severing power cuts off the subjected party's development, it also cuts off what the subjected party can give to the power relation: genuine capacity, creative contribution, voluntary cooperation. The power relation gains short-term stability, but what it gains is an increasingly hollow stability — the subjected party's productivity declining, creativity atrophying, willingness to cooperate weakening. The cost is not immediate, but it accumulates.

3. The Accumulation of Remainders

In the earlier essays we saw that every power relation generates remainders — residues that cannot be fully absorbed or suppressed by the existing power structure. Remainders are not anomalies; they are the structural byproduct of how power relations operate.

Cultivation and severing handle remainders in fundamentally different ways.

A cultivating power converts remainders into resources. When the subjected party develops capacities and ideas that go beyond what the power structure anticipated, the cultivating power has ways to incorporate these — because its entire direction is toward the other's growth. The student's independent thinking is the teacher's achievement, not a threat. The subordinate's better solution is the superior's success. The citizen's independent judgment is the government's pride. The remainder becomes fuel.

A severing power must continuously suppress remainders. But suppression is not elimination. Suppressed remainders do not disappear — they accumulate. And suppression itself requires continuous resource investment: surveillance, control, punishment, narrative production (persuading the subjected party that their condition is legitimate). These resource demands increase as the remainder accumulates.

There is a structural threshold here. As severing power continues to operate, the remainder grows larger and the cost of suppressing it grows higher. Once the cost of maintaining suppression exceeds what the power relation can extract, the relation enters a state of internal instability — no external overthrow is required. The internal contradiction itself generates pressure toward dissolution.

This is a structural claim, not a moral one. The internal instability of severing power is caused by its own mode of operation, independent of whether external resistance exists. External resistance can accelerate the process, but even without visible resistance, the internal contradictions of severing power run on their own schedule.

4. Two Paths in History

These two structural orientations leave very clear traces in history.

Colonial empires are the paradigm case of severing power. British rule in India, French rule in West Africa, Belgian rule in the Congo — these colonial systems all shared a common feature: the deliberate limitation of local elites' political, educational, and economic capacities, in order to maintain the colonizer's indispensability. This strategy maintained colonial order in the short term, but the cost was remainders accumulating continuously. When these empires developed cracks in the early twentieth century — through wars, economic crises, and internal political changes — the independence movements that had been suppressed for decades emerged with enormous force. The scale of that force was partly a product of how long it had been held down.

The same structure recurs in authoritarian regimes. A political system that suppresses civil society, restricts information flow, and punishes independent judgment often discovers, after decades of operation, that when it weakens, the resulting social disorder is worse than expected. Part of the reason: the regime spent decades blocking the development of civil society capacity. When control loosens, there are no mature civic mechanisms to take over self-governance functions — not because people don't want to govern themselves, but because the capacity for self-governance was continuously prevented from developing.

Contrast this with polities oriented toward cultivation. A government that genuinely protects press freedom, maintains an independent judiciary, and supports civic association is investing resources in distributed capacity-building among citizens. This investment is not charity — it makes the entire political system more resilient. The power relation becomes less concentrated but more stable: when crises arrive, the society has capacity distributed throughout it to respond, rather than depending entirely on a central authority at the top.

5. The Tension Between Power and Right

The contrast between cultivation and severing can be expressed in another language: the structural tension between power (权力, quánlì) and right (权利, quánlì).

These two terms share the character 权 in Chinese — not by accident. Power is positional advantage in an asymmetric relation. Right is a subject's claim to its own autonomy. The two are structurally opposed: when power expands, rights are compressed; when rights assert themselves, power must give way.

A cultivating power relation, following its own internal logic, naturally generates an expansion of rights claims. When the subjected party develops genuine capacity, they begin to assert claims to their own autonomy — this is not betrayal but the natural consequence of successful cultivation. The mature student begins to question the teacher's conclusions: this is proof that the education worked. The citizen with independent judgment begins to demand greater political participation: this is proof of good political cultivation. A genuinely cultivating power, if it is honest, must be prepared for this expansion of rights claims — and should even welcome it as a mark of success.

A severing power treats the emergence of rights claims as a threat and mobilizes power to suppress them. This is short-sighted. Suppressing rights claims does not eliminate the need for autonomy — it postpones the need's expression and makes it more intense when it does emerge. A rights claim that has been suppressed for a long time tends, when it finally finds an outlet, to emerge in an uncompromising form. This is because during the suppression it learned that compromise is unreliable — that only a complete reversal is safe.

This is another trap severing power sets for itself: even if it wants to shift course at some point, the space available for negotiated accommodation has already been compressed to almost nothing by its own earlier actions.

6. A Structural Fork, Not a Moral Test

It is worth noting that cultivation and severing do not always appear in pure form. Real power relations often contain elements of both — cultivating in some dimensions, severing in others. A national government can encourage capacity development in economic domains while suppressing autonomy in the political domain. An institution can cultivate employees' professional skills while severing their organizational independence.

But mixture does not mean balance. The severing elements tend to erode the cultivating gains over time — because suppressed autonomy eventually affects even the domains where development was permitted. A society economically cultivated but politically severed eventually finds that these two domains cannot be kept separate indefinitely. Economic capacity growth generates stronger demands for political autonomy. The boundary between permitted and forbidden development cannot be held forever.

Direction matters more than purity. Whether a power relation is oriented toward cultivation depends on its dominant tendency: Are remainders being incorporated or suppressed? Is the subjected party's capacity being encouraged or limited? When rights claims emerge, are they treated as evidence of success or as threats to be neutralized?

That direction, over the long run, determines the fate of the power relation.

Academic sources: SAE Power Theory · Paper 5, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20582210; SAE Power Theory · Paper 6, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20647463 · CC BY 4.0