I Introduction
Malesevic’s reading explores different views on how conflict, social thought, as well as social structure can be connected and how they each impact one another. With this in mind, the lectures for Global History and my occasional read on Chinese history as a hobby got me wondering what is it, exactly, that caused ancient China to form into a coercive, universal empire, instead of forming a balance of power in international politics like Europe.
I came to realise that Pre-Qin China (in this blog, I will specifically refer to the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods as Pre-Qin China) shared many similarities with early modern Europe. Pre-Qin China was a multi-state system and experienced the prevalence of war, the competition between neighbouring states, and the expansion of inter-state trade. However, it was Qin’s unification of China, adoption of Han Feizi’s legalism, as well as policies which determined the development of Chinese history.
II Pre-Qin China
During Pre-Qin China, although each state ruled differently and had their own preferred school of thought, the international competition pushed the states to check one another and it resulted in them all being engaged in balancing their foreign policies and opening up the amount of freedom to the people. For three centuries, China witnessed checks and balances between the states and elevated the status of the citizens.
As the scale of the battles grew, rulers allowed the peasants to participate in warfare which were previously exclusive for the nobles. By using peasant-soldiers, this opened up the possibility for the taxes and corvee to form the national strength. In order to motivate the people to give up their lives for the nation, rulers enabled bargains of land grants, providing impersonal legal rights so it was also applied to the nobles, and the freedom of expression. The freedom of thought opened up the Golden Age for Chinese philosophy and enabled the Hundred Schools of Thought to flourish, including Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, and Legalism. The Mencians were radical in putting forth ideas such as resistance and tyrannicide.
Although the conflict in Pre-Qin helped construct the balance and develop ideas such as freedom in thought, it was also the nationalism produced by conflict that deconstructed the balance and instead developed the idea of domination. Due to the coinciding combination of an anti-pluralist thought, Qin’s capability to not only conquer the kingdoms in terms of the land, but also in culture, as well as the fact that this domination occurred early in Chinese history so it becomes the precedent for the future dynasties.
However, the eventual disruption to the balance occurred not only on Qin’s part in developing systems based on ideas of monopolisation, but also that the balancing system gradually weakened for the other states. Although they did form alliances, the ideas of monopolisation then caused them to disintegrate so that they could seize territorial gains from weaker neighbours as stronger neighbours took over more land.
III Changes made by the Qin
In terms of reforms, Shang Yang undoubtedly contributed to the rapid development of Qin to exert control over the freedom of expression because one of its ideas involved ‘strengthening the nation and making the people rich’ and not the other way round. His policy on taxation further enhanced the state domination and independence. Another of his policies assigned land to soldiers based on merits and had to strip land away from nobles unwilling to fight. Shang Yang pushed to emphasise on agriculture and cultivating wastelands as well as immigration much more than commerce, which in a way, developed an intrastate habit. As a result, his reforms could be summarised as handing out handsome rewards and enforcing brutal punishments to all social classes. This system motivated peasant-soldiers to work hard in agriculture and war, as his policy was focused on strengthening the country and helping the citizens become richer. The material incentives for the Qin proved to be effective in pushing forth the idea of domination, which in return dampened constitutional state systems and increased the interest in expansionism in the interstate context.
All of Shang Yang’s reforms then heavily impacted how the Qin Dynasty ruled China: with the legalism’s strong focus on ruling the people as ‘one’, Emperor Shihuang enacted many policies to unite instead of balance. This included the 焚书坑儒 (burning many books from the Hundred Schools of Thought if they didn’t agree with legalism, and burying the Confucian scholars alive for protesting). Furthermore, Emperor Shihuang united the languages, currencies, and metric system of all seven kingdoms. While the unification of China brought at least three centuries of wars to a stop, it also introduced the idea to dominate instead of balance. Furthermore, the efficiency brought about by uniting the country’s philosophies into one formed the basis for China’s tendency to assimilate different ideas (the combination of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism) into one rather than allowing different ideas to exist at once in the future dynasties. This precedent will then become the model system for future dynasties. Unlike the Athenians’ democracy or the Romans’ republic system which allowed western culture to have the precedent of individualism and balance, China has long been following the tradition of a coercive, united empire since 221 BC and it the ideas did not allow the balance to persist.
