The First Emperor
Dr Roel Sterckx, lecturer in Chinese studies, University of Cambridge, on legalism ...
Qin was located in harsh territory on the western edge of the Warring States. Its culture had been hardened by years of warfare against nomad tribes on its borders. It also lacked a class of intellectuals engaged in developing philosophies on moral behaviour, unlike some of the states situated more centrally, which bred great thinkers such as Confucius and Mencius. So Qin was a bit of a blank sheet for anyone who could import a new set of ideas and try out new ways of organising a state.
A laboratory for legalist ideas
The other reason why Qin turned out as it did is simply historical. In the 4th century, the Qin court engaged an adviser, Hu Shan Yung, who used the court and the state at large as a laboratory for his legalist ideas. There wasn’t a counter-flow of critical ideas that would question much of what the legalists had to say. Having different intellectual lineages competing with each other was not as much a reality in the state of Qin as it was in other parts of the Warring States.
During that period, the further you went east and south, the more diverse ideas became, the more varied, colourful and contesting were the intellectual debates. In the west, on the edge of civilisation, it was harder to establish ideas. The bare necessity of building up a state from virtually nothing, organising agriculture in a region that was notoriously difficult to till – all this meant that practical, legalist ideas were much more useful than some of the more intellectual Confucian or Taoist concepts that were arising in some of the other Warring States.
So you’ve got a fast-growing, powerful frontier nation that is the perfect breeding ground for a powerful doctrine.
The feudal legacy
What each of the Warring States had been struggling with for a couple of centuries was the feudal legacy, a political system in which land was divided and subdivided by overlords and given to their inferior noble dependants in return for services and loyalty to the central court. The borders of the Warring States of China changed all the time depending on how many feudal lords needed to be given a share. Whether you were ‘somebody’ in society was determined by your hereditary, aristocratic relationship to the central court.
Let’s say that you give some land to your younger brother, and he has to divide his land to give some to his children or to some of his collaterals to appease them and so they will have a fief on which they can draw income. You end up subdividing your territory so much that it is like a vine that no longer has a strong stem.
A very powerful machine
That was a situation that people like Li Si understood well, and they came up with a very innovative idea. The power base that a ruler should realistically aspire to is one that cuts out the middle man – no descendants, collaterals, relatives in the central court – and the ruler directly administers the population and the territory. In other words, authority is no longer based on a fragile balance of loyalty between aristocratic clans. It is absolute, enforced from the top, and facilitated by administrative reforms that enable the individual peasant household to have a stake in society.
What the legalists are actually proposing is that, rather than peasants serving as bondservants to an overlord in a specific fief, peasant households now have the power to own a plot of land, draw income off that land and even buy agricultural land. In return, they are taxed, by monetary means or by paying a portion of the harvest or through labour. As a result, they feel loyal to the central authority because that’s the only authority from which they can derive their livelihood.
That legalist idea must have been very appealing to the young king. This is because, through devising rules and regulations and implementing them very tightly in all your localities, you not only enforce practical measures, but you can instil a sense of authority all the way down to the lowest classes in society. This creates a very powerful machine.
Productivity and military capability
According to legalism, the main occupations of the state should be warfare and agriculture. The ideology emphasises that everybody in society should be fit enough to be conscripted and fight for the welfare of the state, and in peacetime, they should be demobilised and revert to agriculture – productivity on the one hand and military capability on the other. So it’s no surprise that merchants, people who actually live off goods that somebody else produces, are actually held in fairly low regard in that society, because they’re not producing anything off the land.
The young king Ying Zheng was clearly ambitious, but realised that the only way to get what he wanted would be through a radical reorganisation of his power base. What he also realised, more than the other contenders during the Warring States period, was that, to be militarily efficient, you had not only to ensure that your military technology was good, but that the economic, administrative and social structures that underlay it were kept within a tight fist.
On the eve of the unification of the Warring States, a number of combustible elements came together. Qin had undergone two centuries of military, agricultural and administrative reform and was ready to implement these ideas across a wider territory. The young king Ying Zheng was set on a political future that would transcend Qin’s boundaries. The manipulative and very clever Li Si alerted the Qin court to the fact that everything was in place, that the legalist ideology had been developed far enough to be exported beyond Qin. And, finally, there was weakness, intrigue and discord among Qin’s rivals.
Meritocracy with a pinch of salt
Legalism was meritocratic in the sense that jobs, offices, administrative duties were no longer associated with an aristocratic background. In other words, if you were capable of being a good administrator, then you would get the job. It also enforced efficiency, which had not been witnessed before. However, it’s important to remember that meritocracy at that time needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. It applied to only two main occupations: being a good soldier in the army and being a productive member of the administrative unit to which you belonged. Put these two ingredients together and you have a fairly efficient economic and military machine.
It is difficult to tell how much the mind of the individual Qin soldier could be manipulated with ideas of great empire and loyalty to the king or, later, the idea of a Qin empire. But what is quite clear is that, once you give peasants a stake in their land, they’re going to be motivated to defend it. Conscripting the same people in wartime that you rely on during peace gives them a sense of belonging to one unit.
A social spy network
The unification must have been a shocking experience for the old aristocracy – that is, all those who used to have a stake in society by means of family background or connections to the nobility. The first emperor came down heavily on these people, but he did it in a very clever way. He didn’t eradicate them; he moved them towards the capital, away from their own territories. This is something that recurs throughout Chinese history when dynasties try to establish themselves: they move the people that represent the old order close to the capital, where they can be controlled, where they will be under house arrest. According to Sima Qian, shortly after Qin Shi Huang conquered the Warring States, nearly 120,000 families were moved near to the Qin capital. These figures are probably exaggerations, but Sima’s text does show that the emperor used this technique.
Another very expedient legalist idea was social control. If you organise the population into units of five to ten peasant families, which Qin effectively did, and if you encourage people to keep an eye on each other and report crimes and disloyal behaviour, you create a situation in which nobody feels safe unless they behave according to the rules. You use one faction of the population to spy on another and vice versa, so creating a fairly efficient social spy network that can be used by central authorities to look into not only what people were doing but also what they were thinking.
Links to the 20th century
Some historians and cultural commentators try to make links between the legalist ideas implemented by the first emperor and political systems that were devised in the 20th century – Communism, Maoism and so on. There are parallels.
One of the main similarities is the intrusion of central authority into the nitty-gritty of individual lives, through a very efficient administrative control system. The neighbourhood committees that were a key ingredient of Communism and Maoism, and which were recognisable in many wards of China’s cities and countryside at least until the late 1970s, are something you could probably imagine in the state of Qin. This wasn’t an entirely new idea, even then, but what the Qin state managed to do was implement it on a scale that had not been seen before.
It must have been a shock for some of the ‘masters of philosophy’, as they’re sometimes called, these political advisers at many Warring States’ courts, when suddenly there was an ideology that talks about practical efficiency and doesn’t mention human nature or how humans are expected to behave in society, but simply tells them what to do through regulations and a very harsh set of rewards and punishments. Equally suddenly, those workshops of philosophical ideas, those laboratories of intellectual and social engineering that had existed in various courts of the Warring States, disappeared. The voices of these people were no longer allowed to be heard. It was probably not directly comparable to episodes in later Chinese history such as the Cultural Revolution, but it must have been a nervous time to have been an intellectual or a political adviser.
