Download 091. Chinese Consolidation

Chinese Consolidation
China also ranks among the great ancient civilizations of the world, and it even had a
river valley civilization to prove it. China’s civilization is a veritable test case for the concept of
a dynastic cycle that we have seen among other ancient peoples, and the Chinese even coined the
phrase “the Mandate of Heaven” as a quality each new dynasty must possess. The Mandate of
Heaven was a combination of symbolic attributes that expressed the fact that any given ruler of
China possessed the confidence of the people that he was the legitimate ruler. Peace, health,
prosperity, and even good weather were said to stem from the presence of a good ruler on the
imperial throne. When it rains it pours, though (causing floods), or it doesn’t rain enough
(causing famine), or central-Asian nomadic hordes pour across the border in rain or shine and
slaughter agrarian people trying to mind their own business, and then business suffers. When
these events began to happen, especially in combination, a ruling dynasty was soon recognized to
be on the way out.
We last left China in the care of the Zhou Dynasty, but in a era known as the Warring
States period any claim the Zhou had to the Mandate of Heaven disappeared as did Confucius
who died around the year 479 B. C. Within one lifetime after the death of Confucius, the order
and dignity of which he wrote was swallowed by chaos. At least seven warring states fought
each other (and neighboring barbarians) from around 403 B. C. until one of the states, the Qin
(pronounced chin) conquered all the rest which gives a clue as to why China is called “China.”
Roughly contemporary to the Roman Empire in the West, two dynasties rose up to consolidate
China under one centralized government, creating the Chinese ideal for empire. The one Qin
ruler who launched the first of these dynasties therefore ranks up there as a Great Man among the
other Great Men of whom we have spoken. Having subdued the other warring states and
brought order out of chaos in 221 B. C., the first Chinese emperor boasted his dynasty would last
for ten thousand generations. The Qin only made it about fifteen years, however, before being
replaced by the much longer-lived Han Dynasty (202 B. C. to 220 A. D.). Still, Shi Huang Di
could rightly say, as he had carved onto a stone, “I have brought order to the mass of beings and
have submitted acts and realities to the test: everything has the name which is appropriate to it.”
Qin was the westernmost of the Zhou states, and because of this fact, the Zhou assigned
them the tasks of raising horses and defending against central-Asian barbarians. Their society
was thus built by men rewarded for prowess in war, and when the last Zhou ruler fled they
expanded. The Qin were neither urban nor culturally advanced, so the other states viewed them
as a rather backward place populated by people little better than the barbarian tribes they fought
on the frontier. The Qin strove to overcome this image by recruiting advisers from all other parts
of China. By the third century B. C., Qin society was made up of exceptionally law-abiding, taxpaying, and productive farmers. The man who would launch the consolidation of China came to
the throne of the Qin state in 247 B. C. at the age of nine as King Zheng. When these frontier
famers used their horses and the advice of two able ministers to fight behind their new young
king, Zheng systematically conquered the other warring states until he ruled, “All-UnderHeaven.” All the weapons of the opposing states were confiscated and melted down to make
twelve giant statues for what became a new emperor in his new capital city at Xianyang. King
Zheng took the name Shi Huang Di which means “First August Lord,” or simply First Emperor.
Shi Huang Di proved an organizational genius and workaholic as emperor. He divided
his new realm into 48 military districts called commanderies. Each of these was staffed by three
officials who were all supposed to keep checks on one another—a civil governor, a military
governor, and a direct representative of the First Emperor. In doing this Shi Huang Di earned for
himself a reputation of being cruel, arbitrary, impetuous, suspicious, and superstitious. This
negative reaction was the result of his replacing existing officials with his own as he turned
China into one state with uniformity of taxation and the erasing or ignoring of former
boundaries. All old states and noble houses were abolished. All private ownership of weapons
was forbidden, and hundreds of thousands of prominent families were forced to move to the
capital to avoid local rebellions. The diverse heritage of these varying Chinese traditions was
thus erased. The Emperor standardized even weights and measures and adopted a single coinage
in the form of copper coins with square holes cut in their center. The zeal for standardization
also extended to thought and education. In 213 B. C. an edict was issued that ordered all books
other than those on agriculture, medicine, and divination to be burned. When scholars protested,
460 were buried alive. Protest ceased. Education was permitted only for those selected to be
officials in the imperial government.
The vital difference in all this reorganization of the general population by Shi Huang Di
was that the people were detached from their formal allegiances and brought under the direct
control of the new centralized government. The Qin therefore had access to an unprecedented
amount of manpower both in the army and in the conscript civilian labor force. Both conscripted
and convict labor were used to build a system of roads radiating out from the capital, canals for
irrigation and transport, imperial palaces, imperial tombs, and fortifications. In fact, all old
fortifications that had divided the warring states were torn down, and those that had been built
along the northern boundaries were consolidated into the construction of the Great Wall of
China. The wall was one of the most ambitious construction projects undertaken by any
civilization and eventually stretched 1,400 miles interspersed with garrisons. Nearly every
subsequent dynasty made improvements on it, and the Great Wall remains one of the only manmade objects visible from space, that is discernible with the naked eye by orbiting astronauts.
Shi Huang Di used his army not only to secure his northern boundary but extended the southern
boundary as far south as modern day Hanoi in Vietnam.
Another impressive feat of the Qin is among China’s national treasures. Shi Huang Di
had a massive tomb constructed for himself but also a life size terra cotta army buried about a
half mile from the tomb to guard him in the afterlife. This curious and monumental task speaks
to the pride the First Emperor had in his military, as there is rank upon rank of thousands of
infantry soldiers carrying real bronze weapons accompanied by four-horse drawn real chariots
(the horses were clay). To add verisimilitude, the statues were originally painted in as many as
thirteen bright colors and modeled after real soldiers in the real army. The figures were molded
from interchangeable parts but hand finished so that no two were identical. A portion of this
massive toy army is unveiled and on display indoors under a huge pavilion.
The First Emperor’s successes were due in no small measure to his determination to
manage every detail of his government himself. Shi Huang Di set daily quotas of paperwork for
himself, and he did not rest until he had read and made a decision about that daily weight of
documents. He made several tours of the country to inspect the new China and to let his subjects
be awed by him. Another stone tablet he installed at a sacred shrine said that his empire
extended from there in all directions and that “Wherever human life is found, all acknowledge its
sovereignty.”
Shi Huang Di survived three assassination attempts and then understandably became
obsessed with a search for immortality. He set out into the eastern regions in search of Daoist
magicians. He hoped to find an elixir that would preserve his life but died on this journey in 210
B. C. When his ministers could hide this fact no longer, Qin power disintegrated. The legitimate
heir was murdered by his younger brother, and uprisings soon began. A group of conscripted
peasants were delayed form their assignment by rains and while waiting decided to become
outlaws. To their surprise they immediately found thousands of malcontents eager to join them.
The Second Emperor killed his own chief minister but was then assassinated by the new chief
minister who was in turn killed by the successor he had put on the throne as the Third Emperor.
Do you sense the Mandate of Heaven slipping? Qin generals began using their armies to garner
power to themselves, and nobles left over from the warring states raised new armies. The man
who came out on top of all this swelling tide of distaste for harsh Qin rule was Liu Bang who
would rule in Chinese history from 202 B. C. to 195 B. C. and in the process founded the new
centralized Han Dynasty. One of his reforms was to relax the Legalist perspective favored by
Shi Huang Di and to temper it with Confucian modes of moderation. For a taste of the Legalist
perspective here is a lengthy document excerpted from the writings of Han Fei, a Han prince
who had defected to the Qin prior to their winning the war of the Warring States period.
No country is permanently strong. Nor is any country permanently weak. If conformers
to law are strong, the country is strong; if conformers to law are weak, the country is weak. . . .
Any ruler able to expel private crookedness and uphold public law, finds the people safe
and the state in order; and any ruler able to expunge private action and act on public law, finds
his army strong and his enemy weak. So, find out men following the discipline of laws and
regulations, and place them above the body of [Confucian] officials. Then the sovereign cannot
be deceived by anybody with fraud and falsehood. . . .
Therefore, the intelligent sovereign makes the law select men and makes no arbitrary
promotion himself. He makes the law measure merits and makes no arbitrary regulation himself.
In consequence, able men cannot be obscured, bad characters cannot be disguised; falsely
praised fellows cannot be advanced, wrongly defamed people cannot be degraded. . . .
To govern the state by law is to praise the right and blame the wrong. . .
The law does not fawn on the noble. . .
Whatever the law applies to, the wise cannot reject nor can the brave defy. Punishment
for fault never skips ministers, reward for good never misses commoners. Therefore, to correct
the faults of the high, to rebuke the vices of the low, to suppress disorders, to decide against
mistakes, to subdue the arrogant, to straighten the crooked, and to unify the folkways of the
masses, nothing could match the law. To warn the officials and overawe the people, to rebuke
obscenity and danger, and to forbid falsehood and deceit, nothing could match penalty. If
penalty is severe, the noble cannot discriminate against the humble. If law is definite, the
superiors are esteemed and not violated. If the superiors are not violated, the sovereign will
become strong and able to maintain the proper course of government. Such was the reason why
the early kings esteemed Legalism and handed it down to posterity. Should the lord of men
discard law and practice selfishness, high and low would have no distinction.
The means whereby the intelligent ruler controls his ministers are two handles only. The
two handles are chastisement and commendation. What are meant by chastisement and
commendation? To inflict death or torture upon culprits, is called chastisement; to bestow
encouragements or rewards on men of merit, is called commendation.
Ministers are afraid of censure and punishment but fond of encouragement and reward.
Therefore, if the lord of men uses the handles of chastisement and commendation, all ministers
will dread his severity and turn to his liberality. The villainous ministers of the age are different.
To men they hate they would by securing the handle of chastisement from the sovereign ascribe
crimes; on men they love they would by securing the handle of commendation from the
sovereign bestow rewards. Now supposing the lord of men placed the authority of punishment
and the profit of reward not in his hands but let the ministers administer the affairs of reward and
punishment instead, then everybody in the country would fear the ministers and slight the ruler,
and turn to the ministers and away from the ruler. This is the calamity of the ruler’s loss of the
handles of chastisement and commendation.