The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

by Michael Wood

As for the role of the intellectual, the key was to determine the Way (dao).

Politics, then, was Confucius’ first and foremost concern, which is also true of Chinese philosophy as a whole. Chinese thought, it might be said, has revolved around two central questions: the harmony of the universe and the harmony of society, cosmology and politics. Hence, the central vision of Chinese philosophy for 2,500 years has been political and ethical.

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.

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.

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. Like many great books, though, many of Confucius’ profound insights have stood the test of time.

‘He defined our collective values of hard work, duty and benevolence; his belief in universal brotherhood in this age of individualism makes his message still true after 2,500 years, for all the world!’

a revolutionary transformation in thinking in different parts of the world around 500 BCE. He said that ‘this century can be seen as a major epoch in the history of humanity… a kind of revolution, which produced at the same time in several parts of the world geniuses, Greeks, Persians, Jews and Indians, who set the tone for the future’.

So was this extraordinary simultaneity mere coincidence?

What we can say, then, is this: that Confucius and his disciples lived in a period of history when the great Bronze Age civilisations had gone. In their place were competing Iron Age city-states, in Archaic Greece, the Ganges valley and the Warring States of China.

The key point is that their preoccupations are about human beings and their place in the cosmos.

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

As it happened, it would be achieved not by agreement, but by force, by one of the most remarkable rulers in Chinese history: Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor.

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

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.

When asked how to stabilise ‘All Under Heaven’, Mencius, China’s second sage, replied: ‘Stability is in unity.’ If the ruler is humane and just, ‘nobody will not follow him: if this really happens the people will go over to him as water flows downward. Who will stop it?’

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 history and a ‘blatant assault on traditional culture and moral values’.

To facilitate this new order, Lord Shang recommended practical reforms which, in essence, have survived through Chinese history. First was the division of society into counties, districts and villages.

Warfare, then, was the way to establish effective kingship, and severity was the way to hold it.

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.

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

Arms and armour were never set aside and the people were exhausted and impoverished. The masses hoped they would obtain peace and security and there was nobody who did not wholeheartedly look up in reverence. This was the moment to preserve authority and stabilise achievements and lay the foundations of lasting peace.

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. It was clear to all at the time that this was a moment of profound change.

Henceforth, only the unified empire would be the legitimate form of rule. 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.

In China, however, the ‘Great Unity’ was an almost inbred ideological myth from the pre-Qin past, which was never abandoned, even in times of catastrophic breakdown.

So, writing and information were essential tools of the Qin autocracy. In the third century BCE, the government was already developing standardised population data for use in taxation, crime and labour conscription and a system of village registration we see again in later periods, in the Yellow Registers of the Ming dynasty, or even the present Resident Identity Card system introduced by the PRC (People’s Republic of China) in 1984.

The first political genius of Chinese history, Qin Shi Huangdi bequeathed China the template of a state unified by force. He also passed on the dark model of the ‘all-powerful emperor’, in whose person coercive power, morality and law were all combined. These two legacies would provide a continuing tension in the heart of China’s political culture.

The Qin’s way of thought has always met with approval in periods of Chinese history when disorder threatened. Mao described himself as a mixture of Marx and Qin Shi Huangdi.

But the Qin unified China. From then on, for all its ups and downs, the idea of China as a unitary civilisation persisted as the goal to return to; in the opening words of the famous Ming novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written more than fifteen centuries later: ‘The empire that is united will one day fall apart, and what is divided will come back together again. So it has always been.’

Nor was their watchword forgotten: ‘Are kings and nobles given their status by birth?’

Despite his peasant origins, Liu Bang had some experience in law and administration. Therefore, as emperor, he began by abolishing the most repressive Qin laws, while keeping their bureaucratic structures.

In terms of the broad ethos of governance, the early Han rulers had followed the legalist leanings of the Qin. However, under Wu and his successors, Confucius was rehabilitated and imperial scholars were entrusted with devising a new curriculum that would serve the state. They collated and reconstructed the classics banned by the Qin and added more, with commentaries on the canon created by Confucius.

Spring and Autumn Annals,

The Han scholar Dong Zhongshu argued that the Han had proved themselves the legitimate successors to the true models of kingship, the Zhou. Their mixture of Confucian humanism and legalist harshness, empowered by Confucius’ vision of history, would survive to the twentieth century.

In the Han period, this perennial historic confrontation between the sedentary and nomadic focused on the vast semi-nomadic confederation of the Xiongnu.

In spring 110 BCE, led by the emperor himself, a ‘colossal’ Han force of twelve army groups assembled at Yunyang on the Hanshui River in Hubei, 200 miles southwest of Xi’an.

‘As a piece of logistics this was a tour de force’, noted a later writer, ‘though in reality it did not achieve very much.’

History is one of the keys to Chinese culture; in all states, the rulers create the narrative of a common past with which people can identify and which helps create allegiance, but in no state has this been more important. The famous story of the Qin emperor killing historians and burning books was emblematic: ‘fearing the power of the past to discredit the present’.

History was political in the truest sense. In no Chinese epoch of imperial times, therefore, are there historians like Herodotus or Thucydides, who were writing for themselves. In China, history was written to endorse the assumption of the Mandate of Heaven.

A younger contemporary of the Greek historian Polybius, Sima was born in around 145 BCE, seventy-five years after the death of the Qin emperor.

Historical Records,

Aged twenty, that journey around China was of crucial importance in Sima’s life, as a similar journey had been to Confucius.

All the way, he asked questions of old people about their stories and traditions, which as he discovered were often diametrically opposed to received versions in official texts.

Sima started his task after his father’s death in 109 BCE. Three years later he was made court astrologer. In 105 BCE, he was also one of the scholars chosen to reform the Qin calendar and produce a new Han calendar. Sima Qian’s learning was being recognised by all, and he was a valued councillor of the great emperor, who was now in his mid-fifties and had been on the throne for forty-one years. But then came a fateful change in his fortunes.

The problem for Sima Qian, as for all historians, was how to organise his picture of the past. To use Western analogies, should it use narrative like Herodotus or Polybius, biography like Plutarch, or analysis of institutions like Aristotle? If those comparisons seem to exaggerate the intellectual originality of a writer two millennia ago, they are there simply to point out that intuitively, and perhaps consciously, Sima perceived that, in history, no one approach will do.

Indeed, for him, history is a prime source of morality.

In the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt wrote that good is on the limited scale in history, evil on the unlimited.

it is the historians who ensure that in the long term the record of good deeds, human values and justice is passed on. Preserving the memory, then, is also a moral task.

Letter to Ren,