The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

Chinese thought, it might be said, has revolved around two central questions: the harmony of the universe and the harmony ...

In Europe, shaped by Roman and Germanic law, the institution of kingship developed a legal custom separate from political authority. These two paths have marked the traditions of the East and West to this day.

the main body of the text conveys one voice, which is forceful, idiosyncratic and, as Elias Canetti has written, ‘the oldest complete intellectual and spiritual portrait of a man’. Just as Marx warned his followers he was not Marxist, Confucius certainly was not a Confucian in the way that Chinese civilisation eventually enshrined him, and indeed as the Mao age vilified and dethroned him.

He was often called a teacher, but he was also a political agitator with a sense of mission.

He was driven by an unshakeable belief in his own divinely inspired calling to reform the political order in China and seems to have believed that heaven had chosen him to bring people back to the path of righteousness, as defined by the first Zhou kings, and reunify the civilised world.

It is easy, of course, to use conformity to reinforce a repressive system, even though Confucius was adamant that the sage’s duty was also to oppose unjust rule. Yet the idea of just rule depended on moral education, and Confucius was not an advocate of a legal system, let alone of separating executive and legislature.

Confucius believed in human nature and mistrusted laws.

Legal rules, he thought, were not the best way of creating a just order. This was best achieved through a matrix of ritual and moral conventions, inculcated through education.

In the West, the inheritors of Roman law and Germanic custom came to believe that the government of men is always flawed, unless limited by a strong legal system. They gradually developed the idea that states should be ruled with the informed consent of the governed. This is a major divergence, even by the time of the Song dynasty, when in England, for example, the law was already something the king should obey.

Still, failure to establish the rule of law would remain one of the most intractable problems in the Chinese political tradition until the end of the empire. Since then, it would be partially addressed under the Republic, trampled by Mao, revived in the 1980s, but has stalled since the early 2000s.

Confucius himself had always insisted on the duty of intellectuals to oppose arbitrary and unjust power. That is easier said than done, as the whole of Chinese history will show.

Confucian humanistic ideals were eventually written into the Chinese state’s educational system in the tenth century and over the next centuries spread to Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

How do we set Confucius and the Chinese age of philosophers into the bigger picture of what we might call the global cultural history of Eurasia, in the sixth-fifth century BCE?

In the mid-first millennium BCE, across Eurasia, there were certain common experiences in material culture, societies in transition from Bronze to Iron Age culture that developed powerful monarchies and large-scale cities.

These key figures all lived within a handful of generations, between the 550s and the fourth century BCE. Some, like Confucius, the Buddha and some of the great pre-Socratics, may even have been alive at the same time.

All of them show the beginnings of social diversification, and in all there were thinkers of genius. There were the philosophers and scientists in Ionia: Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Anaxagoras. The Buddha’s contemporaries included Jains, Ajivikas, sceptics, rationalists and atomists. All of them question the nature of the mind and the physical universe. In China, too, this is the period known as the Age of Philosophers, the ‘Hundred Schools of Thought’, with Daoists, Mohists and Confucius’ followers such as Mencius.

It would be stretching things to suggest the political concerns of Confucius had much in common with the Buddha’s disputes about karma with other religious groups in the Ganges plain.

But no matter how well he and his itinerant band of disciples were first received on their travels, they made enemies among palace cliques and corrupt ministers and were usually forced out.

For all his later fame, Confucius was a failure in his own lifetime.

Despite China’s sense of a common culture and script, and the deep myth of unity that went back to the prehistoric legends of Yu the Great, no one was going to cede power to the declining Zhou order, the mediocre contemporary heirs of the noble duke of Zhou.

The rise of the Qin empire has been justly called ‘one of the greatest epics in human history’.

in the 240s BCE, under their leader King Zhang, they burst onto the stage of history, ended Zhou rule and unified China. Zhang then became the First Emperor. Though they only ruled all China for fifteen years, the Qin were the superpower that changed the story of China for ever, leaving structures of governance and contours of thought that still exist today.

The path to China’s unification had been laid over the previous two centuries during the age of the Warring States (480s–221 BCE), a time that had also seen intense battles of ideas.

In the ‘universal disorder’ of the time, nobody was willing to cede power to the waning Zhou rulers, or to embrace the notion of virtue – de – when realpolitik was a necessity.

Even the famous Dao De Jing, written by Laozi around the sixth century BCE, saw the logical extension of the vision of unity as a correspondence between the political and metaphysical orders:

When asked how to stabilise ‘All Under Heaven’, Mencius, China’s second sage, replied: ‘Stability is in unity.’

By the third century BCE, all agreed that unity of government was the precondition to implementing the principles of the Way, and hence the path to peace and the Great Unity.

Of course philosophers, especially Confucian ones, could not advocate that it should come about through violence. It was impossible to contemplate a just prince killing his way to power. But nor was it likely that any of the big states would voluntarily surrender power.

China was united by the sword and by a ruling ideology very different fro...

The key text that underwrote the unification is The Book of Lord Shang. Written by a Qin dynasty thinker of the fourth century BCE, it is one of the most remarkable books of the ancient world, East or West. It has been called the first totalitarian manifesto in hi...

It has even been praised in our own time, when totalitarian rule was justified as ‘the first stage of socialism’, a temporary phase on the path to a Marxist utopia.

"Temporary" LOL

The core of the book was written around the 340s BCE, though parts of the text were added in the next century. The book advances a legalist argument for a new form of state in which governmental power penetrates right to the base of social order, creating a society wherein every peasant is a diligent tiller of the soil, every soldier a brave and loyal supporter of the state, and every official an unswerving enforcer of a harsh code of retributive law.

First was the division of society into counties, districts and villages. At the base, the smallest unit was a grouping of five families mutually responsible for each other’s conduct, with the deputed head member personally liable for any crime.

There were thirteen categories of quantifiable data, including name, place of origin, gender, names and number of children, whether too old or young to work, social ranking (as defined in the lawbooks) and holdings of animals such as horses and oxen.

Benevolence, in fact, was not the answer to attaining ‘the Great Harmony’ as Confucius had thought, though it might be workable in the future, when unity and obedience had been fully established. For now, though, a harsh law would prevail.

Warfare, then, was the way to establish effective kingship, and severity was the way to hold it. From family registration to the overarching conception of rulership, this was the blueprint for a total state.

By the third century BCE, there was also a revolution in military technology. High-grade weaponry and mechanical crossbows were developed, and the ability to put huge, highly disciplined armies into the field was one of the reasons unification finally became a possibility.

Yet as the Zhou declined over a century or so, the Qin developed a strong sense of their own separate cultural identity as well as a certain Spartan toughness. In 255 BCE, the Qin annexed the Zhou royal lands, the last symbol of the old political order that had endured since the eleventh century BCE.

In a series of rapid shock assaults, the Qin overcame their six main rivals, the ‘ten thousand chariot states’. Chinese imperial history had begun.

Between 230 and 221 BCE, they swallowed up the kingdoms of the old Warring States and followed up their military triumphs with measures to fulfil the legalist blueprint.

The Qin legal system was introduced with reformed weights and measures, coinage and script. There were new state rites aimed at unifying the realm. Draconian population swaps and ethnic cleansing brought 120,000 families of the ‘rich and powerful’ from recent...

For administrative purposes, the country was divided into thirty-six commanderies linked by a 6,800km road system. A series of long walls was constructed across north and northwest China, joining up the border walls of earlier states and adding up to 4,000 kilometres – the forerunner of the ‘Great Wall’.

An 800km superhighway ran between the capital (near today’s Xi’an) and the northern military bases, where armies totalling 300,000 men were stationed.

These developments were so swift and so far-reaching that they can only be compared with those introduced after the revolution of 1949 and the still-continuing counter revolution, which began after 1979.

Bringing order then was at the centre of Qin propaganda, and popular support for the unification was a major factor and a justification for the regime’s ruthless severity.

In the future, even when the state fell apart, (as after the Tang, Song and Ming) a centripetal force pulled it back together again. From then on, unity was legitimisation.

given so many differences in regions, cultures and languages, why was the idea of China’s unity so strong that it could be restored time and again? Indeed, the remarkable fact is not that at times it disintegrated, but that it always came back together.

The most remarkable and controversial leader in Chinese history, later Confucian scholars were deeply hostile to him, saying that he ‘relied solely on mutilation punishments and penalties … while the master wielded textbook and ink’. One famous story alleged that he burned the history books and buried 460 scholars and historians alive.

harsh as he undoubtedly was, this negative picture has been transformed by new archaeological finds which allow us for the first time to get behind the lurid accounts of the First Emperor and begin to see the workings of the Qin empire at grassroots at this fundamental turning point in Chinese history.

for all the images we have of the brutality of the Qin, their rule was based on law.

Proof law and justice arent the same