A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (8 page)

European historians have traditionally seen world history as starting in the Middle East and then passing through Greece and Rome to Western Europe. But a civilisation emerged in northern China which surpassed any in Europe, survived in one form or another for over 2,000 years and was responsible for some of humanity’s most important technical advances.

The Ch’in Empire, founded in 221 BC, ruled over more people than the Romans ever did. It had 6,800 kilometres of roads (compared with the 5,984 kilometres of the Roman Empire), built to common design so as to cope with chariots and carts of standard axle width. It was able to put an estimated 300,000 people to work on the 3,000 kilometres of the first Great Wall,
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and up to 700,000 on constructing the first emperor’s tomb, with its ‘army’ of life-size terracotta soldiers. Canals linked the great rivers, creating an internal waterway system without parallel anywhere in the world.

The empire was the culmination of centuries of economic and social change. Some people had turned to agriculture at about the same time as in Mesopotamia, growing millet and domesticating pigs and dogs in the north, learning the very different techniques required to grow rice and domesticate buffalo in the Yangtze River valley further south.

Cities and states arose after 2000 BC built by people using neolithic techniques. By the end of the 17th century BC metal workers had learnt to combine tin and lead with copper to produce bronze, and aristocratic warriors were using weapons made from it to carve out a kingdom for the Shang Dynasty on the Yellow River in northern China. It seems to have been dominated by an aristocracy that combined military, priestly and administrative roles. It was a class society, practising the sacrifice of servants at royal funerals, but private property does not seem to have developed at this stage.
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Under the Chou Dynasty, from the 11th century BC, kings delegated much of their power to 100 or so local rulers in a system often described as ‘feudalism’ (making parallels with Medieval Europe),
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although some historians claim what existed was a version of Marx’s ‘Asiatic society’, not feudalism, since texts relate that the organisation of agriculture was not based on individual peasant plots. Rather, administrative direction regulated ‘common peasants in their daily life’—not just their work, but also their ‘marriages, festivals and assemblies’.
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The peasant was told each year what crop to plant, when to sow and when to harvest. He could be ordered to leave his winter home for the fields, or to leave the fields and shut himself up in his home.
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In any case, the history of the Chou Dynasty was one of almost incessant warfare between the rival lords.

Over the centuries, the multitude of mini-states coalesced into a handful of large ones as technical change made it possible to wage war more effectively. The number of chariots increased, there were new techniques of siege warfare, and the sword and crossbow enabled conscripted peasant footsoldiers to stand firm against charioteers for the first time. Such warfare, in turn, provided rulers with an incentive to pursue further technical advance. During the 4th and 3rd centuries BC (known as ‘the age of the warring states’) these rulers initiated the clearing of the northern plain and river valleys, the draining of marshy regions and the spread of irrigation, often on a massive scale. An iron industry also grew up, organised on a scale unmatched anywhere else at the time, with the large scale production from moulds of cast iron tools and weapons—not just swords and knives, but ‘spades, hoes, sickles, ploughs, axes, and chisels’.
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New agricultural methods increased output: intensive farming based upon deep ploughing with oxen; the use of animal dung and human ‘night soil’ as fertiliser; the cultivation of wheat and soya beans as well as millet; the planting of leguminous crops to restore the fertility of the land; and an increased understanding of the best times for sowing.
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The surplus grew ever larger.

Jacques Gernet notes, ‘The age of the warring states is one of the richest known to history in technical innovations’, with the ‘development of a considerable trade in ordinary consumer goods (cloth, cereals, salt) and in metals, wood, leather and hides. The richest merchants combined such commerce with big industrial enterprises (iron mills and foundries, in particular), employed increasing numbers of workmen and commercial agents, and controlled whole fleets of river boats and large numbers of carts…The big merchant entrepreneurs were the social group whose activities made the biggest contribution to the enrichment of the state…The capitals of kingdoms…tended to become big commercial and manufacturing centres…The object of the wars of the 3rd century was often the conquest of these big commercial centres’.
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But rulers could only successfully embrace the new methods if they broke the power of the old aristocracy. ‘Parallel with technological change in agriculture…were socio-economic changes’ and ‘political reforms in several states’.
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The Ch’in state could eventually conquer the others because it implemented these changes most systematically. It relied on a new central administrative class of warriors and officials to crush the old aristocracy. These gave the key role in cultivation to the individual peasant nuclear family, allowing it to own the land, pay taxes and contribute labour directly to the state rather than to the local lord. ‘It was the new productive force of the small farmers that supported the new regime’.
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This was a social revolution, the replacement of one exploiting class by another, from above. It was a revolution carried through by armies, which exacted an enormous toll. One classic account claimed, probably exaggeratedly, that there were 1,489,000 deaths during 150 years of war from 364 to 234 BC.
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The last few years of pre-imperial China were ‘a monotonous recital of military campaigns and victories’, with one victory allegedly involving the beheading of 100,000 men.
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The establishment of the empire was accompanied by the deportation of no fewer than 120,000 of the old ‘rich and powerful’ families.
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The transformation was not just the result of the initiative of a few rulers deploying powerful armies. The changes in technology and agriculture had set in motion forces which the rulers could not control and often did not want.

As the surplus produced by the peasants grew, so did the demand of the rulers, old and new, for luxury goods, metal weapons, horses, chariots, bows and armour for their armies. The peasants needed a constant supply of tools. All these goods could only by supplied by ever greater numbers of craft workers, operating with new techniques of their own, and of merchant traders operating between, as well as within, the individual states. Standardised metal weights and then coins circulated, further encouraging people to trade.

The influence of the merchants was demonstrated when the richest of them became chancellor to the future emperor in 250 BC, was granted land comprising 100,000 households and surrounded himself with an entourage of 3,000 scholars.
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Cho-yun Hsu goes so far as to suggest, ‘In the years of turmoil from the 5th to the 3rd century BC, there was the strong possibility of developing a predominantly urban-centred social life rather than a rural based agrarian economy. Large and prosperous market centres flourished and the urban mentality of profit making…predominated’.
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The German-American historian of China, Karl Wittfogel, argued, while still a Marxist in the 1930s, that there were similarities between China in this period and Europe during the later stages of feudalism almost 2,000 years later.
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China could have been transformed by the merchant ‘bourgeoisie’ into a new society based overwhelmingly on production by wage labourers for the market. Instead, it fell under the dominance of the bureaucracy of the state, which succeeded in channelling the surplus away from both the merchants and the old aristocracy and concentrating it in its own hands. The merchants supported the state in its struggle against the aristocracy, only to see themselves robbed of the fruits of victory by the state bureaucracy.

Certainly, the state repeatedly attacked the merchants under both the Ch’in Dynasty and its successor, Han (from 206 BC to AD 220). The first Han emperor, for instance, ‘forbade merchants to wear silk and ride in carriages…Neither merchants nor their children and grandchildren were allowed to serve in the government’.
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The state took control of two of the key industries, salt and iron, to ensure, as a Han document tells, ‘the various profits of salt and iron are monopolised [by the empire] in order to suppress rich traders and rich merchants’.
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Higher taxes were levied on trading profits than on agriculture, and the wealth of merchants who tried to evade the taxes was confiscated. During the 54 year rule of the emperor Wu (141-87 BC) ‘the merchants’ properties were forcibly seized by the imperial power. In order to survive the merchants often had to establish ties with the bureaucrats or even the court’.
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Often protection of the peasants was the hypocritical excuse for such attacks. Document after document from the period complained that commerce and industry were ruining the peasantry, causing repeated famines and rural unrest and, at the same time, providing merchants with the means to threaten the state. This in turn, created dangers from an impoverished class. According to the emperor Wang Mang in AD 9, ‘The rich, being haughty, acted evilly; the poor, being poverty stricken, acted wickedly’.
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The centuries in which these different exploiting classes jostled with each other for influence were necessarily also centuries of intellectual ferment. The members of different classes tended to see the world in different ways. Rival philosophical and religious schools emerged as different social groups attempted to come to terms with the changes taking place around them.

Confucius (born in the 6th century BC) and his 4th century BC follower Mencius advocated a respect for tradition and ritual combined with honesty and self control. In subsequent centuries this was to become the conservative ideology of the supposedly enlightened administrators, who kept society running on traditional lines while living a very comfortable life. In Mencius’s time it did, however, imply a repudiation of the methods of greedy princes. The repudiation went even further in the case of Motzu, who lived some 60 years after Confucius. He established a sect which sought to establish, by authoritarian means, an egalitarianism based on common frugality, opposed to selfishness, luxury and war. By contrast, the current later to be called Taoism preached that individual salvation lay not in collective action, but in learning techniques which helped the individual to withdraw from the world and master it. Versions of Confucianism and Taoism were to vie with Buddhism for people’s minds through much of later Chinese history, while egalitarian sects were repeatedly to emerge to express the bitterness of the poor.

But the immediate victor in the ideological battles of the last centuries BC was a different current, usually called ‘legalism’. This laid the central stress on the strength and bureaucratic functioning of the state itself. It insisted that the state’s officials should only be concerned with fulfilling its laws, without being sidetracked by concerns with personal virtue preached by the followers of Confucius and Mencius.

Legalism justified the role of the administrators as the embodiment of the general good. It also fitted in with the merchants’ stress on rational calculation and fear of arbitrary political decisions, which would disturb their money making. Its maxims were popularised, for instance in hymns for the masses which portrayed the administrator and the state’s edicts as the essential safeguard for society as a whole.

The rulers did not depend simply on intellectual persuasion to win acceptance of their totalitarian view of the world. They also did their best to ensure people were not presented with any alternative. The first emperor decreed the burning of all books which referred to the old traditions: ‘There are some men of letters who do not model themselves on the present, but study the past in order to criticise the present age. They confuse and excite the people…It is expedient that these be prohibited.’ People who dared to discuss the banned books ‘should suffer execution, with public exposure of their corpses; those who use the past to criticise the present should be put to death together with their relatives’.
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At first, the increased power of the state did not prevent continued advance in trade and artisan production—indeed, they benefited from government measures such as the building of roads and canals, and the extension of the empire into south China, central Asia, Indochina and the Korean peninsula. There were further important technological advances: steel was being produced by the 2nd century AD (a millennium and half before it appeared in Europe); the world’s first water-wheels were in operation; and the wheelbarrow, which enabled people to move more than twice their own weight, was in use by the 3rd century AD (1,000 years before its arrival in western Europe).

But the independence of the merchants-entrepreneurs as a class was curtailed. They were unable to establish themselves as a force with their own centres of power, as they were in the cities of late Medieval Europe. Instead, they were increasingly dependent on the state bureaucracy.

The peasants’ lot scarcely improved after the measures taken against the merchant class. Taxes to the state ensured they lived scarcely above the breadline when harvests were good and fell below it, into famine, when they were not. At all times life consisted of almost endless drudgery. The soil of the north China plain demanded continual attention between planting and harvesting if it was not to dry out or become infested with weeds or insects.
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Yet between a third and a half of the produce passed straight into other hands.

It should never be forgotten that all the ‘wonders’ of the empire—the Great Wall, the canals, the emperors’ tombs, the palaces—involved millions of hours of labour and were of decreasing benefit to society as a whole. After the first emperor heard from a magician that he could achieve immortality if he stayed aloof from other men, ‘He ordered 270 palaces to be furnished with banners, bells, drums and beautiful women, and to be linked by walled or roofed roads…Anyone revealing his presence would suffer death’.
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On one occasion, when he believed there was an informer in his entourage, he put 460 men to death.
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