Tacitus Trap
Political theory named after Tacitus / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tacitus Trap is a political theory named after Roman historian Tacitus, which describes a situation where an unpopular government is hated no matter what it does and whether it is right or wrong. The theory was brought up in a 2007 book by Professor Pan Zhichang from the School of Journalism and Communication at Nanjing University. In the book, he quoted Tacitus' remark on Galba, an unpopular emperor of Rome, to explain the recurrent declines of the Chinese dynasties throughout the history: "When a government is unpopular, either good policies or bad policies tell against the government itself."[1] Since China’s paramount leader and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping's use of the term in 2014, it has become increasingly popular in journalism and academia in China.[2] State-run media in China, such as People's Daily online, summarised that since the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Party general secretary Xi Jinping has described three traps that China might fall into, that is, Tacitus Trap, Thucydides Trap and middle-income trap.[3][4]