Shih Huang Ti, First Sovereign Emperor, is widely regarded as an evil tyrant whose dynasty lasted only fifteen years (221-206 BC) because of his oppressive regime. Yet the imperial regimen he fathered survived his personal majesty by twenty centuries. Furthermore, some of his radical reforms extend beyond Imperial China into China as we know her today.
Let us not imagine that, with the fall of his Ch'in Dynasty, Shih Huang Ti's strict Legalist and despotic political policies were suddenly abandoned. Nor should we think the copies of the Classics which had escaped the censorious fires of his Grand Councillor Li Ssu were taken from their hiding places, and, suddenly, Confucian texts, scholars, and humanism were exalted. Nor should we believe everybody lived happily thereafter under benevolent rulers for the four centuries (206 BC-AD 220) of the Han Dynasty.
In fact, the Han rulers reinforced the centralized power seized from the previous dynasty. For instance, Emperor Wudi (141-87 BC) confiscated land from the nobles, controlled coinage, and even increased the taxes. He established government monopolies in iron, salt and grain, stifling rapacious private competition, and he otherwise regulated the despised merchant class always infamous for profiting at the public expense.
As for the Confucian scholars who allegedly proliferated like rats since the day Confucius (551-459 BC) said anybody can by self-improvement become a Gentleman, they found no cosy ivory tower awaiting them on palatial grounds. For the Literati, morality was above the positive law; their contempt for the profit-motive of merchants and public officials often found them sleeping on the cold, hard ground. After eating a bowl of rice and drinking some water, Confucius stretched out on moral grounds with the crook of his arm for a pillow, and proclaimed the profits of office to be merely fleeting clouds. After all, the Gentleman is not afraid of being homeless from time to time: "A Gentleman who is attached to a settled home is not worthy of being a Gentleman." Above all, the Gentleman walks the Moral Tao: "The Gentleman understands what is moral. The small man understands what is profitable." The Gentleman has a duty to withdraw to study and teach when inferiors rule the state, and to return in due course of time when the "Way prevails in the Empire." Of course, that is not the easiest path: "It is not easy to find a man who can study for three years without thinking about earning a salary." And he certainly does not study to become a merchant, peasant, or specialist: he is not a "vessel" for a narrow occupation, but a generalist who strives to broaden the Way. "The Gentleman devotes his mind to attaining the Way and not to securing food. Go and till the land and will end up by being hungry, as a matter of course; study, and you will end up with the salary of an official, as a matter of course. The Gentleman worries about the Way, not about poverty."
We are not surprised to hear that, in ancient China, "intellectuals" as a class eventually came in ninth on the social scale, just above the lowest status, the "beggars". Government officials followed by obsequious clerks were at the top. Of course many literate gentlemen wanted the government salary; that is precisely what the Legalists in power counted on instead of private morality. And those officials who received a good salary must have believed they were The Way, Incorporated. No doubt some of them strove to broaden the Imperial Highway so that more people could enjoy the Great Peace instead of suffer it like a beast of burden. Nonetheless, under the Han Dynasty, despite the Confucian humanism we hear of, the "utilitarian" law of the Legalists prevailed; that law was designed not to suffer contradiction but to put an end to discomfiting dialectics. Han Fei, the Legalist ideologue admired by the First Sovereign Emperor, once inquired into the "origin of dialectic" along the following dialectical line:
Somebody asked: "How does dialectic originate?"
The reply was: "It originates from the superior's lack of enlightenment."
The inquirer asked: "How can the superior's lack of enlightenment produce dialectic?"
The reply was: "In the state of the enlightened sovereign, his orders are the most precious among the words of men and his laws are the most appropriate rules to affairs. Two different words cannot be equally precious nor can two different laws be equally appropriate..."
According to Legalist doctrine, dialectic ends in the absolute rule of the emperor, and he is not to share that supreme power with anyone. The emperor brings hypocrisy to an end by rewarding those whose word is good and severely punishing all those whose deeds do not match their words:
"If the word turns out true, he should receive a big reward: if not true, he should suffer a heavy penalty. Therefore, stupid persons fear punishment and dare not speak, and intelligent persons find nothing to dispute. Such is the reason why in the state of an enlightened sovereign there is neither dispute nor controversy."
End of argument. And it has its positive point. In the final analysis, the sword rules over the pen. In ancient "China", the language was first written as divination on the broadest bones of dead animals. We also find laws promulgated on ceremonial vessels commemorating dead heroes. More pointedly, we find declarations on weapons: Pen and Sword, indeed! And it is no accident that the most ancient symbol for China is a weapon ensuring national security, or that gods of war become gods of literature as well - for what are we to do after peace is imposed? Still, we might not want to serve under a Legalist emperor who can legally behead his own prime minister because the minister's words break the precious Law of Identity that, A must equal A, and the Law of Noncontradiction deduced from it that, A cannot be equal to A and also to not-A. May Heaven and the Son of Heaven forbid! for that would throw the mind of the Emperor and therefore his Empire into turmoil.
Thus was the life of the mind that thrives on apparent contradiction put into jeopardy along with the body of any official and the courtly scholar it might inhabit. Therefore let us not overvalue the status of the highly ranked officials with grand titles, especially the salaried intelligentsia who might be emasculated, Legalized Confucians. Alas, Confucius has been used and abused to justify innovations he knew nothing of, including Legalism - Confucius did not seek to innovate: "I transmit but I do not innovate; I am truthful in what I say and devoted to antiquity."
For example, the Confucian scholar Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-86 BC), the Han court's Grand Historian and Great Astrologer, upon whom we rely for much of our ancient Chinese history, was castrated for not obeying the Imperial Law of Noncontradiction when he gave an opinion to the emperor: Ssu-ma said a certain general had in fact lost the war, BUT he was nevertheless a hero because he fought courageously and had won many previous battles. Therefore Ssu-ma lost his pride for confusing the emperor with an ambiguous statement about the unfavored general. Ssu-ma wanted to finish his history for us, therefore he chose not to commit an honorable suicide in order to escape the gross indignity of castration. He certainly provides us with insight into to the true status of a learned man in his day: he said he was not worth one hair on nine oxen, a mere ant to be crushed, the emperor's plaything, like a diviner or jester or singing girl, a so on.
Nonetheless Ssu-ma the so-called ant wrote a grand history from which we learn much of what we know about Shih Huang Ti and the Ch'in Dynasty. Of course the Grand Historian had a Confucian bias. For instance, Ching K'o, the man who nearly assassinated the King of Ch'in, is obviously a hero. And on the side of the Emperor are villains. Perhaps all the illustrious figures, whether good or evil, are, in the universal scheme and the grand course of history, merely "ants" like Ssu-ma. Maybe we should be wary of laying too much blame or fame (or infamy) on any one person who marks the time. As we study what we know of Shih Huang Ti in the context of what came before and after his rule, we do begin to doubt how unique and innovative he really was. Maybe the time was meet for his "megalomania" and "paranoia", for the grandiose exercise of "shih" (power, authority) celebrated by the Legalists as the veritable font of positive public law and devious secret statecraft.
We do know the First Sovereign Emperor stepped into the stream of history at a critical juncture during the troubled, disorderly time known as the Warring States period. Even he might agree with the view that, given the precedents of his circumstances, someone, anyone, was bound by the natural law of the royal road called the "tao" to fill the office he necessarily occupied as Son of Heaven, and, by its virtue, to unify the Warring States into what Westerners came to call "China" - his seat of power was in the state of Ch'in. In other words, or so the argument goes, he did not make China: rather, China made him; hence he is not entitled to much credit as a Famous Man, or, alternatively, as an infamous one.
Be that as it may, Shih Huang Ti is regularly discredited and viewed as an Infamous Man because of the successful means he employed; as if he could have succeeded otherwise; Or, perhaps unification is a bad idea in the first place. On the other hand, he has been praised occasionally by authors and politicians who risked being virtually or actually hung as totalitarians for publishing or acting out their imperialistic or authoritarian views. One notable instance is Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese language teacher who, in a 1958 meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, recounted that Shih Huang Ti had ordered the execution of scholars who had tried to place the traditional past as an obstacle in the way of present reform:
"What does he amount to anyway?", asked Mao. "He buried only 460 scholars alive, while we have buried 46,000 counter revolutionary scholars alive." A spate of books lauding Shih Huang Ti appeared a few years after Mao's statement - millions of copies were sold.
Both Mao and Shih Huang Ti were tyrants. Their lives differed in many respects, yet several of their policies were strikingly similar. Some of them are still in place. The new, supposedly politically correct symbols for the Republic of China includes the old symbol for the Middle Kingdom below which is the symbol for "king" transformed into "jade" by means of a dot placed beside it; the flowing dot appears to be the water of immortality flowing from jade. Will China ever be rid of its imperial history? Should it be? Was and is the tyranny worth it? Is evil relative and justified by relative good? Is progress to good always from previous evil? Those questions came to mind yesterday during my study of Shih Huang Ti.
Then, by good fortune, I encountered Professor George Lu in the university cafeteria. He is seventy years old. His father was one of Mao's students. His family was persecuted under Mao's regime because of his teachings in Taiwan and Europe: their property was destroyed and seized; they were killed or committed suicide. When he returned to China many years later and said to the Communists, "You murdered my family," they replied: "That was not us. That was Mao."
Professor Lu was pleased to hear I had written a little story about the Grand Historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien; he said one of Ssu-ma's direct descendants was teaching on the campus. And he was interested in my comparison of some of Mao's policies with those of Shih Huang Ti. I asked him if Mao was a good man or an evil man. He answered, "Mao was both good and evil. He was good before 1948, and he was evil after 1948." Professor Lu went on to say he is appalled by Western students who praise Mao's behavior after 1948.
I mentally noted, "Here is a man who actually hates Mao for good reason, for destroying his family, yet he can still calmly say something good about him."
I told the professor I had admired Mao's early struggle, but when I heard how Mao turned the country upside down several times over with countless loss of lives, I believed he had gone mad, so I threw away my precious copy of his little red book. As for Shih Huang Ti, I said I did not think the Emperor was as evil as he is said to be, or that he, misled by Taoist magicians, had lost his wits in the end. Of course this led to the subject of jade. Professor Lu told me a story about a magic robe that really works, then bid me farewell. As he walked away, I knew his experience with Chairman Mao and his story about the jade robe would influence the following chapters of my series.
I mused: Ssu-ma personally suffered under the Han Dynasty, but he considered the Ch'in Dynasty to be a much worse regime. And he should know: he was over two thousand years closer to it than we are, and the memories of the horrors, systematic accusations, executions, corporal punishment, families broken up, mass dislocations, forced labor, and much more, were still fresh in the minds of the survivors and their immediate descendents.
Furthermore, I instructed myself, as my humble text is motivated by the Tao, I must be sure to include some golden thread and pieces of jade.
T-To Be Continued In Next Chapter-T
Quoted:
Confucius, The Analects, Transl. D.C. Lau, New York : Penquin, 1987
Han Fei Tzu, The Complete Works, Transl. W.K., Liao, London: Arthur Probsthain, 1959