Fields of Blood (19 page)

Qin had arguably developed the first secular state ideology, but Shang separated religion from politics, not because of its inherent violence but because religion was impracticably humane. Religious sentiment would make a ruler too benign, which ran counter to the state’s best interests.
“A State that uses good people to govern the wicked will be plagued by disorder and be destroyed,” Shang insisted. “A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys peace and becomes strong.”
¹⁰⁵
Instead of practicing the Golden Rule, a military commander should inflict on the enemy exactly what he did
not
wish for his own troops.
¹⁰⁶
Unsurprisingly, Qin’s success was deeply troubling to the Confucians.
Xunzi (c. 310–219), for example, believed that a ruler who governed by ren would be an irresistible force for good and his compassion would transform the world. He would take up arms only “to put an end to violence, and to do away with harm, not in order to compete with others for spoil. Therefore when the soldiers of the benevolent man encamp they command a godlike respect; and where they pass, they transform the people.”
¹⁰⁷
But his pupil Li Si laughed at him: Qin was the most powerful state in China, because it had the strongest army and economy; it owed its success not to ren but to its opportunism.
¹⁰⁸
During Xunzi’s visit to Qin, King
Zhao told him bluntly: “The Confucians [
ru
] are no use in running a state.”
¹⁰⁹
Shortly afterward Qin conquered Xunzi’s native state of Zhao, and even though the Zhao king surrendered, Qin troops buried 400,000 of his soldiers alive. How could a junzi exert any restraining influence over such a regime? Xunzi’s pupil Li Si now emigrated to Qin, became its prime minister, and masterminded the lightning campaign that resulted in Qin’s final victory and the establishment of the Chinese Empire in 221 BCE.

Paradoxically, the Legalists drew on the same pool of ideas and spoke the same language as the Daoists. They also believed that the king should “do nothing” (
wu wei
) to interfere with the Dao of the Law, which should run like a well-oiled machine. The people would suffer if the laws kept changing, maintained the Legalist
Han Feizi (c. 280–233), so a truly enlightened ruler “waits in stillness and emptiness” and “lets the tasks of themselves be fixed.”
¹¹⁰
He did not need morality or knowledge but was simply the Prime Mover, who remained immobile but set his ministers and subjects in motion:

There was, of course, a world of difference between the two: Daoists deplored rulers who forced their subjects to conform to an unnatural fa; their sage king meditated to achieve selflessness, not to “get results.”
¹¹²
But the same ideas and imagery informed the thinking of political scientists, military strategists, and mystics. People could have the same beliefs yet act upon them very differently. Military strategists believed that their brutally pragmatic writings came to them by divine revelation, and contemplatives gave strategic advice to kings. Even the Confucians now drew on these notions:
Xunzi believed that the Way could be comprehended only by a mind that was “empty, unified, and still.”
¹¹³

Many people must have been relieved when Qin’s victory put a stop to the endless fighting and hoped that the empire would keep the peace. But they had a shocking introduction to imperial rule. Acting on the advice of Prime Minister
Li Si, the First Emperor became an absolute ruler. The
Zhou
aristocracy—120,000 families—were forcibly moved to the capital and their weapons confiscated. The emperor divided his vast territory into thirty-six commanderies, each headed by a civil administrator, a military commander, and an overseer; each commandery was in turn divided into counties governed by magistrates, and all officials answered directly to the central government.
¹¹⁴
The old rituals that had presented the Zhou king as head of a family of feudal lords were replaced by a rite that focused on the emperor alone.
¹¹⁵
When the court historian criticized this innovation, Li Si told the emperor that he could no longer tolerate such divisive ideologies: any school that opposed the Legalist program must be abolished and its writings publicly burned.
¹¹⁶
There was a massive book burning, and 460 teachers were executed. One of the first inquisitions in history had therefore been mandated by a protosecular state.

Xunzi had been convinced that Qin would never rule
China because its draconian methods would alienate the people. He was proved right when they rose up in rebellion after the death of the First Emperor in 210 BCE. After three years of anarchy,
Liu Bang, one of the local magistrates, founded the
Han dynasty. His chief military strategist,
Zhang Liang, who had studied Confucian ritual in his youth, embodied Han ideals. It was said that a military text was revealed to him after he had behaved with exemplary respect toward an elderly man, and even though he had no military experience, he led Bang to victory. Zhang was not a
bellicose man. He was a Daoist warrior: “not warlike,” weak as water, frequently ill, and unable to command on the field. He treated people with humility, practiced Daoist meditation and breath control, abstained from grains, and at one point seriously considered retiring from politics for a life of contemplation.
¹¹⁷

The Han had learned from Qin’s mistakes. But Bang wanted to preserve the centralized state and knew that the empire needed Legalist realism because no state could function without coercion and the threat of violence. “Weapons are the means by which the sage makes obedient the powerful and savage, and brings stability in times of chaos,” wrote the Han historian
Sima Qian. “Instruction and corporal punishment cannot be abandoned in a household, mutilating punishments cannot be halted under
Heaven. It is simply that in using them some are skillful and some clumsy, in carrying them out some are in accord [with Heaven] and some against it.”
¹¹⁸
But Bang knew that the state also needed a more inspiring ideology. His solution was a synthesis of
Legalism and Daoism.
¹¹⁹
Still reeling from the Qin inquisition, people yearned for “empty,” open-minded governance. Han emperors would maintain
absolute control over the commanderies but would refrain from arbitrary interventions; there would be strict penal law but no draconian punishments.

The patron of the new regime was the
Yellow Emperor. All empires need theater and pageantry, and the Han rituals gave a new twist to the ancient
Shang complex of sacrifice, hunting, and warfare.
¹²⁰
In autumn, the season for military campaigning, the emperor held a ceremonial hunt in the royal parks, which teemed with every kind of animal, to provide meat for the temple sacrifice. A few weeks later there were military reviews in the capital to show off the skills of
elite troops and help maintain the martial competence of the min, who manned the
imperial armies. At the end of winter there were hunting contests in the parks. These rituals, designed to impress visiting dignitaries, all recalled the Yellow Emperor and his animal troops. Men and animals fought as equal combatants, just as they had at the beginning of time before the sage kings separated them. There were football matches in which players kicked the ball from one side of the field to the other, to reproduce the alternation of
yin
and
yang
in the seasonal cycle. “Kickball deals with the power of circumstances in the military. It is a means to train warriors and recognize who have talent,” explained the historian
Liu Xiang (77–6 BCE). “It is said that it was created by the Yellow Emperor.”
¹²¹
Like the Yellow Emperor,
Han rulers would use religious rituals in an attempt to take the bestial savagery out of warfare so that it became humane.

At the start of his reign, Liu Bang had commissioned the Confucian ritualists (
ru
) to devise a court ceremonial, and when it was performed for the first time, the emperor exclaimed: “Now I realize the nobility of being a Son of Heaven!”
¹²²
The
ru
slowly gained ground at court, and as the memory of the Qin trauma faded, there was a growing desire for more solid moral guidance.
¹²³
In 136 BCE the court scholar Dong
Zhongshu (179–104) suggested to
Emperor Wu (r. 140–87) that there were too many competing schools and recommended that the six classical Confucian texts become the official state teaching. The emperor agreed: Confucianism supported the family; its emphasis on cultural history would forge a cultural identity; and state education would create an
elite class that could counter the enduring appeal of the old aristocracy. But Wu did not make the mistake of the First Emperor. In the Chinese Empire there would be no sectarian intolerance: the Chinese would continue to see merit in all the schools that could supplement one another. Thus, however diametrically opposed the two schools might be, there would be a Legalist-Confucian coalition: the state still needed Legalist pragmatism, but the ru would temper Fajia despotism.

In 124 BCE Wu founded the
Imperial Academy, and for over two thousand years all Chinese state officials would be trained in a predominantly Confucian ideology, which presented the rulers as Sons of Heaven governing by moral charisma. This gave the regime spiritual legitimacy and became the ethos of the civil administration. Like all agrarian rulers, however, the Han controlled their empire by systemic and martial violence, exploiting the peasantry, killing rebels, and conquering new territory. The emperors depended on the army (
wu
), and in the newly conquered territories the magistrates summarily expropriated the land, deposed existing landlords, and seized between 50 and 100 percent of the peasants’ surplus. Like any premodern ruler, the emperor had to maintain himself in a state of exception as the “one man” to whom ordinary rules did not apply. At a moment’s notice, therefore, he could order an execution, and nobody dared object. Such irrational and spontaneous acts of violence were an essential part of the mystique that held his subjects in thrall.
¹²⁴

Thus while the ruler and the military lived by the “extraordinary,” the Confucians promoted the predictable, routinized orthodoxy of
wen,
the civil order based on benevolence (
ren
), culture, and rational persuasion. They performed the invaluable task of convincing the public that the emperor really had their interests at heart. They were not mere lackeys—many of the ru were executed for reminding the emperor too forcibly of his moral duty—but their power was limited. When Dong Zhongshu objected that the imperial usurpation of land caused immense misery, Emperor Wu seemed to agree, but ultimately Dong had to compromise, settling for a moderate limitation of land tenure.
¹²⁵
The fact was that while the administrators and bureaucrats championed Confucianism, the rulers themselves preferred the Legalists, who despised the Confucians as impractical idealists; in their view, King
Zhao of Qin had said it all: “The
ru
are no use in running a state.”

In 81 BCE, in a series of debates about the monopoly of salt and iron, the Legalists argued that the uncontrolled, private “free enterprise” advocated by the ru was wholly impractical.
¹²⁶
The Confucians were nothing but a bunch of impoverished losers: