There are so many subplots in Story of Yanxi Palace that I'm not being a plot-spoiler when I note that one of the emperor's consorts commits suicide because she lost face. Wei Ying Luo, the heroine of the tale, is horrified by this. New to the Forbidden City, she tells her supervisor in the embroidery department that she wouldn't kill herself even if a million people spat on her. The supervisor replies that without maintaining face there is no surviving the Forbidden City.
That is still how a great many people think, and nowhere is this truer than with governments, whether democratically elected or imposed. Face is everything for governments. They will do anything to save face.
Would anything include nuclear war? It could.
That is why I hesitate to say there will be no war between China and the United States. If you remove the face factor, if those countries were run by people who thought like Wei Ying Luo, then I'd state with confidence there would be no war because so many things mitigate against it. But humanity does not have that much advantage at this time. So I think it's fair to say we are now in a very dangerous period.
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