The Everlasting Empire (4 page)

Everything is ravaged and destroyed and there is no one to appeal to.
People lose either their fathers and elder brothers, or sons and younger
brothers. All are full of sorrow and sadness and do not know how to
protect themselves.
⁸

This plight of the tiny states generated the most curious attempt to institutionalize the multistate system: namely, two “disarmament conferences” in 546 and 541 BCE. The organizers proposed the creation of a mega-alliance, led simultaneously by Jin and Chu, legitimating thereby the bipolar world.
⁹
This initiative, however, failed miserably owing to the lack of mutual trust between major powers, and also to internal crises in both Chu and Jin and the rise of new “peripheral” powers, which further jeopardized the fragile interstate order. By the end of the sixth century BCE, the multistate system of the Springs-and-Autumns era was on the verge of collapse. On its ruins, the war of all against all ensued, giving the period following the breakup of the state of Jin in 453 BCE, and prior to the imperial unification of 221 BCE, its ominous name, the age of Warring States.

As the name suggests, the Warring States period was an age when diplomats were overshadowed by generals. Alliances were inevitably shortlived; treaties were routinely violated—sometimes immediately upon being concluded—and the increasing cynicism further diminished the appeal of diplomatic means of settling conflicts. A contemporaneous observer noted:

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Despite clear pronouncements and manifested principles, weapons
and armor arise ever more; [despite] outstanding and compelling argu-
ments, battles and offensives never stop; [despite] gorgeous sayings
and refined words, the world lacks ordered rule; tongues are worn off
and ears deafened, but no achievements are seen.
¹⁰

This gloomy summary explains why the multistate order was no longer seen as sustainable. As war became ubiquitous, attempts to preserve peace among rival polities were discontinued. In the meantime, a series of military innovations, and particularly the replacement of the aristocratic chariot-based armies of the past with massive infantry armies manned by peasant conscripts, changed the nature of warfare. Wars became longer and harsher; the size of the armies and the number of casualties steadily increased; and the texts of the late Warring States period inform us of dozens, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, of casualties in a single campaign. Slaughter of prisoners of war and of civilians, massive plunder, deliberate destruction of the enemy’s civilian infrastructure, and forced relocation of the hostile population—all exacerbated the sense of despair, eventually fueling the quest for unification.
¹¹

While devastating warfare contributed in the long term to the quest for unity, in the short term it strengthened centrifugal rather than centripetal forces. Each of the newly reformed Warring States was more cohesive internally than the aristocratic polities of the preceding age, and this internal consolidation occurred in tandem with increasing estrangement from neighbors. The separation was spatial, marked by long protective walls; administrative, as suggested by legal distinctions between native and foreign subjects; and cultural, as is indicated by the increasing divergence in the material and, to a lesser extent, written culture of major states. The decline of the aristocratic elite of the Springs-and-Autumns period meant partial abandonment of the Zhou ritual culture, which had once served as a common cultural denominator of the elite members. The new elite, some of whose members had risen from the lower social strata, was more diversified culturally than its predecessors. This diversification is particularly evident in the changing image of powerful “peripheral” states, Qin in the northwest and Chu in the south, which had once been considered members of the Zhou
oikoumenë
but by the fourth-third centuries BCE were treated as cultural strangers.
¹²
Cultural separation followed the lines of political fragmentation, indicating that centuries of division might well have resulted in the complete disintegration of the Zhou world into distinct quasi-national entities.

The process depicted above of internal consolidation of large territorial states, and their political and cultural separation from neighbors, unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is

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well known, these developments resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, however, the development trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the Warring States into full-fledged separate entities never materialized. Instead, these polities were submerged by the unified empire in 221 BCE, becoming thereafter a locus of ethnographic curiosity rather than of political separatism. Below we shall see how and why this happened and focus specifically on the extraordinary role of the thinkers of the Warring States period as promulgators of unification.

“STABILITY IS IN UNITY”

The Warring States period was a formative age of China’s intellectual tradition. This was an age of bold intellectual departures and remarkable ideological pluralism, unhindered by either political or religious orthodoxies. Thinkers competed freely for the rulers’ patronage, moving from one court to another in search of better employment. They proposed distinct remedies to social, political, economic, and military maladies, their views ranging from harsh authoritarianism to anarchistic individualism, from support of a laissez-faire economy to advocacy of state monopolies, from blatant militarism to radical pacifism. Yet this immense pluralism notwithstanding, the competing thinkers held core beliefs in common. Among these, the commitment to the universal benefit of All-underHeaven—eventually through political unification—stands as one of the most remarkable features of the Warring States period’s intellectual discourse. An individual state never appears as the ultimate beneficiary of the thinkers’ proposals, but, if at all, as a springboard for attaining the highest aim of resolving “universal” problems.
¹³

This remarkable universalism ostensibly stands at odds with the dominant tendency during the Warring States period of individual states to strengthen their sociopolitical cohesiveness. The contradiction reflects a major difference between the lives of members of the educated elite, or at least its highest segment, and those of the rest of the populace. In an age when most states actively discouraged emigration, the intellectually active elite members, the so-called
shi
(whom I shall hereafter dub “intellectuals,” for heuristic convenience; see more in chapter 3) were free to cross boundaries in search of better careers. Any known thinker of that age served more than one court; and this very flexibility of movement through the interstate “market of talent” broadened the intellectuals’ horizons, causing their concerns to transcend the confines of individual states. Eventually, this breadth of horizons became associated with high elite status, while localism—local customs and identities—was viewed as characteristic of culturally impaired commoners.
¹⁴
Lacking the intellectu

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als’ endorsement, the local identities of the Warring States never developed into a politically meaningful factor, as happened elsewhere, for example, in modern Europe.

The proclaimed universalism of the Warring States period’s intellectuals had immediate political implications: namely, their common commitment to the attainment of peace in All-under-Heaven. In an age of escalating warfare, of endless bloodshed and inherent lack of stability, in an age when rival states routinely tried to undermine domestic order in the neighbor polities, it was all too clear that the internal problems of an individual state would never be resolved unless the entire
oikoumenê
was settled. And, insofar as diplomatic means of stabilizing All-under-Heaven were inadequate, political unification became the only feasible way out of unending disorder. Therefore, the quest for unity became a peculiar intellectual consensus of the thinkers of the Warring States period, legitimating the universal empire long before it came into being.

The pro-unification discourse of the Warring States period developed gradually, with early voices being somewhat hesitant. Thus Confucius (551–479 BCE), the earliest and arguably the most prominent thinker of the preimperial age, proposed curbing political disintegration by restoring the early Zhou system, in which “rites, music, and punitive expeditions” were initiated by the Son of Heaven and not by regional lords.
¹⁵
Confucius’s later intellectual rival, Mozi (ca. 460–390 BCE), embedded his vision of unity even more deeply in the past. He claimed that in an unspecified antiquity, “when the people had just arisen,” there was a beastlike war of all against all, which ended only when “the worthiest and the most able [man] in All-under-Heaven” was established as Son of Heaven, creating thereafter a perfectly centralized and uniformly ruled universal state.
¹⁶
Mozi’s audience may well have understood that his narrative “invoked the past to serve the present”: this political myth aimed to demonstrate that unification was the only way out of current disorder and devastating mutual strife.

Whereas Confucius and Mozi embedded their quest for unity in appeals to the past (either the early Zhou or some unspecified primeval age), other thinkers proposed alternative justifications for the unification of the realm. Thus an exceptionally influential fourth-century BCE text, the
Laozi
, provides metaphysical underpinnings for political unification. Just as the universe is ruled by the uniform and all-penetrating force of the Way (
Dao
), so should society be unified under a single omnipotent leader. These ideas appear in the
Laozi
in a nascent form, but they were duly developed in later texts that utilized them to buttress the need for unity and also to lionize the future ruler of the unified realm to superhuman proportions (on which see chapter 2).
¹⁷
Yet intellectually engaging as they are, these and other philosophical justifications of unity mattered little

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for the evolution of the drive for unification in the second half of the Warring States period. The more devastating the interstate warfare became, the clearer it was that unity was needed not just because of historical precedents or metaphysical constructs but primarily as the only means of avoiding further bloodshed. This understanding is vivid in the following dialogue between one of the most important followers of Confucius, Mengzi (Mencius, ca. 380–304 BCE), and one of the regional kings:

[The king] asked: “How can All-under-Heaven be stabilized?”

[Mengzi] answered: “Stability is in unity.”

—“Who is able to unify it?”

[Mengzi] answered: “He, who has no proclivity to kill, is able to
unify it.”

—“Who will be able to follow him?”

[Mengzi] answered: “Nobody under Heaven will not follow him.
… If there is [a ruler] who has no proclivity to kill, then the people of
All-under-Heaven will crane their necks looking at him. If this really
happens, the people will go over to him as water runs downward: who
will be able to stop this torrent?”
¹⁸

Mengzi’s dictum, “Stability is in unity,” may be considered the common motto of the intellectual discourse of the Warring States period; but his moralistic idealism—expressed in the belief that only a benevolent and nonmilitaristic ruler, “who has no proclivity to kill,” would attain final unification—was pathetically naive. It was duly rejected by some: for instance, Mengzi’s elder contemporary and ideological antipode, Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE), argued that unity can be attained only through resolute and merciless military action against rival rulers. Shang Yang was notorious in his advocacy of attaining victory through “performing whatever the enemy is ashamed of.”
¹⁹
Yet blatantly militaristic Shang Yang and radically moralistic Mengzi, who considered aggressive war a “crime for which even death is insufficient punishment,” clearly shared the conviction that “stability is in unity”; Shang Yang explicitly stated that war is needed simply to “eradicate wars.”
²⁰
The commitment of intellectual antipodes to the same goal is revealing. By the middle of the Warring States period, the only true issue at stake was
how
to unify the world, not
whether or not
it should be unified.

Aside from explicit calls for unity, the discourse of the Warring States period facilitated the future imperial unification in a variety of other ways. For instance, the political mythology of that age backdated the notion of unity to the remote past, implying thereby that political fragmentation is an aberration and not an acceptable state of affairs.
²¹
Ritual compendia postulated the existence of a universal sociopolitical pyramid

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headed by the Son of Heaven as the singular ritually appropriate situation. The very language of political discourse, with its repeated postulates of the superiority of universality to particularity, was conducive to the goal of unification.
²²
Yet perhaps the single most important feature of pro-unification discourse is the firm association of the ruler’s legitimacy with his ability to attain universal unification. In the next chapter, we shall analyze the concept of a True Monarch, created by the thinkers of the Warring States period; here suffice it to say that the most pronounced consensus with regard to this quasi-messianic figure was that under his aegis the world would be firmly unified. Thenceforth and until the end of the imperial period, it was tacitly understood that a ruler who failed to attain unity was not “real Son of Heaven.”
²³