CH' IN EMPIRE
The Ch'in state, with its core in the mountain-girded Wei River valley (in modern Shensi), was originally a small, poor, outlying dependency of the Chou feudal kingdom of China. The first among the Chinese to use the long iron sword, the crossbow, and cavalry (instead of chariots), the Ch'in developed a strong peasant army and constantly fought the barbarian nomads on its frontiers. The Ch'in became a legalist state as a result of the policies of rule instituted between 356 B.C.E. and 338 B.C.E. by the prime minister Shang Yang, author of the Book of Lord Shang, and the founder of Legalist thought.
Legalism and the Ch'in State
The Legalist (or Fa Chia) school of socio-political thought separated statecraft from ethics, advocated royal tyranny and docility of the masses, sought to make the state absolute, and was opposed to the contemporary philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism. Legalism sought to reform political and social institutions so that the sovereign could exert complete dominance over all subjects through reward and punishment. This cynical and pragmatic ideology emphasized (1) absolute royal authority over subjects, whose only duty was to serve the state; (2) statecraft to control and utilize ministers and people efficiently and totally; and (3) supremacy of the impersonal law that made no discrimination and enforced correct conduct by severe punishment. Improvement in agriculture and success in war were held to be the twin key of a Legalist state to hegemony over others.
Soon the ruthless Legalist kingdom of Ch'in emerged as the most efficient and regimented state of its time in East Asia. Its inhabitants were disciplined and hard-working, its agriculture was improved by great irrigation projects, its rule of law was stringent, its administration rational, and its ministers and officials served the state by dint of their merit and job performance. All intellectual dissent or political resistance was harshly suppressed, and the pursuit of leisure, learning, entertainment, and the arts by the people actively discouraged.
This Legalist state was divided into administrative districts. The government was centralized and the hereditary nobles were replaced by a bureaucracy as administrators and by the peasantry as owners of land. Being a militaristic society, all able men who were not farmers (paying very high revenues) were drafted into the army as conscripts; the peasantry also served the labor gangs (in the public work undertakings) or the military during the off-seasons.
After having built the foundation for a strong state, Shang Yang ultimately fell out of royal favor. Although finally as a captured rebel, he perished by the same laws he had made, his intellectual and political legacy outlived him. Not only Legalism remained the official ideology of the Ch'in, but the powerful Ch'in state also was in a position to embark upon a career of gradually subjugating its neighboring kingdoms.
At first, the Ch'in conquered the fertile states in the Ch'engtu plain (in modern Szechwan) in 316 B.C.E., and built irrigation projects on the Wei and the upper Yangtze River valleys. Increasing considerably, in this way, its territories and resources, the Ch'in became a front-ranking Chinese state by the turn of the century. However, the program of conquest was accelerated and completed toward the end of Ch'in dominance in Chinese history.
Shih Huang-ti
The greatest Ch'in ruler was Ch'eng, a megalomaniac with great ambition and energy, who succeeded to the throne in 247 B.C.E. He appointed the Legalist thinker Li Ssu his prime minister in 237 B.C.E., and together they made the state powerful enough so that in 230 B.C.E. it was poised to launch large-scale aggression to build an empire. The Chou dynasty had already fallen in 256 B.C.E., and there remained seven contenders to the Ch'in for the mutual war for hegemony in the region. Beginning in 230 B.C.E., the Ch'in ruler, in a series of campaigns, crushed all his rivals, including his strongest one, the Ch'u, in 223 B.C.E. The Ch'in unified eastern China in 221 B.C.E., and although they were soon to depart from the stage of history, the imperial unity in China continued, without interruption, until 220 C.E.
The triumphant Ch'eng, on unifying northern China and the Yangtze plains, became the emperor of China, declared himself the Son of Heaven, and assumed for himself the title of Shih Huang-ti, or the First Emperor. He decreed that since his house would last for all times to come, his successors were to be designated not by titles but by dynastic numerals (Second Emperor, Third Emperor, etc.). Although his own line lasted only for fifteen years, one should note that the Western name for China was derived from the Ch'in dynasty (the Chinese call themselves Han tsu, or "People of Han," after the Han rulers), and that the emperors of China retained the title of Huang-ti until imperial rule was abolished in 1912 C.E.
Ch'in Empire
Under its first emperor, as the Hsiung-nu (the forerunners of the Hun) Empire in the north proved too powerful, imperial China sought to expand in the south. The borders of China were extended southward by the defeat and absorption of the kingdom of Yue in 214 B.C.E., reaching, in the process, the Canton delta on the South China Sea and even the Red River delta in northern Vietnam. In the north, the Ch'in Empire stretched from southern Manchuria in the east, along the Great Wall to the Ordos bend of the Yellow River. The empire, however, did not include Korea in the northeast, Kansu in the northwest, Kweichow and Yunnan in the southwest, and Kiangsi and Fukien in the southeast.
The seat of this sprawling empire was the old Ch'in capital of Hsien-yang in the Wei River valley. It was connected by newly constructed roads and canals to the provinces of the empire. In a splendid city dominated by the imperial palace, the emperor ordered a lavish mausoleum for himself on nearby Mount Li. Beside the still unexcavated royal tomb, archaeologists have unearthed, in three huge pits, several thousand larger than life terra-cotta (hard, reddish-brown, unglazed pottery) soldiers with horses and weapons, each sculpted with individualized features. This elaborate ceramic army was designed to protect the First Emperor in his afterlife.
Similar extensive public works necessitated exorbitant taxation on all and the forced conscription of millions of workers, and, according to popular legends, many of them died to build the imperial walls and roads, canals, and monuments. Earlier kingdoms had constructed many long, massive walls as frontier defenses. To ward off the intrusive barbarians from the arid Inner Mongolian steppes, the emperor rebuilt the Great Wall along the mountains of northern China. Now Shih Huang-ti's most spectacular project was to repair and enlarge the segments into one linked wall of stone and earth, with fortifications, gates, and watch-towers. The wall, as it stands now, fifteen hundred miles long, is the reconstructed and developed structure built by the Mings in the fifteenth century. The wall, in Ch'in times, ran from northwestern Korea westward across the upper loop of the Yellow River; another wall ran from it across Shensi southeastward to eastern Kansu.
The Great Wall is regarded as the largest single construction project ever; it is the only object built by humans visible from the moon. Curiously enough, it was not very effective in preventing depredations from beyond. Waves of armed nomads would sometimes bypass it or bribe local garrisons to open the gates. The nomads could not be converted into settled farmers, and after years of indecisive warfare, Shih Huang-ti discarded his policy of expansion, and relied more on his walled frontier.
Administration and Economy
The Ch'in Empire was a centralized, totalitarian state into which the institutions, laws, and policies of the original Ch'in state were inducted by the emperor and his Legalist prime minister, Li Ssu. The emperor possessed absolute power over all affairs of the state; he had all the former princes and provincial nobles leave their estates and assemble at his court. Thus he compelled nearly all wealthy families, nobles and merchants, to settle in and around the capital, parceled out estates to them, and built for them replicas of their ancestral temples. He abolished feudalism and existing land tenures, distributing all lands of the aristocracy among the peasants. Land henceforth could be freely bought and sold, and fallow lands were reclaimed by extensive irrigation works. Increased grain production and weaving of silk textiles were encouraged by the state.
The empire was divided into forty regional civil and military units or commanderies, each under a governor, appointed on the nonhereditary basis of loyalty and merit. The old states were broken up into smaller administrative units so as to prevent the revival of their old power. The governors maintained order in the commanderies, enforced laws stringently, and extracted taxes and forced labor on behalf of the emperor; the commanderies, in their turn, were divided into districts administered by bureaucrats. All fortresses were destroyed and all weapons of the warriors in the countryside were melted so as to make any possible resistance against the imperial authority useless.
The first census in Chinese history helped the Ch'in to calculate precisely the revenue and labor available for military campaigns and public works. In order to maximize revenue, every single household was considered as a single unit of tax collection. To that purpose, primogeniture (the social rule by which the eldest son inherits the all estate and status of his deceased father) was abolished, residence of two adult males in the same house was forbidden, and slavery (except for minor domestic servants) was prohibited. Also, to prevent individuals building up wealth and power through marriages, daughters were disallowed to inherit property.
Chin Totalitarianism
The radical reforms of the Ch'in Empire were not confined to social reforms with an economic end. In keeping with the Ch'in vision of better, stable, and homogenous society, laws were passed, governing almost every aspect of life. A uniform law code was instituted, in which none was privileged; the Chinese written script, currency, weights, and measures were standardized for the sake of a centralized administration and increased economic activities. The common script forged a national cultural unity to an unprecedented degree, and is used, in a modified form, even today. Highways and canals were built for the passage of goods, and armies, and the emperor fixed the length of the axles of the two-wheeled carts and chariots so that their wheels would fit into the existing furrows on the roads.
The totalitarian government even sought to control the thinking of the population: studying and writing books were proscribed, all intellectual dissidence was suppressed. The prime minister, Li Ssu, was behind the emperor's policies of persecuting intellectuals, especially of Confucian and Taoist disposition. The emperor's cruelty is legendary: he is said to have buried hundreds of scholars alive for doubting his policies. At Li Ssu's instigation, the emperor, in 213 B.C.E., ordered all books, except those preserved at the imperial archives, and those that were Ch'in chronicles, Legalist texts, government records, and manuals of agriculture, trade, technology, medicine, and divination, to be confiscated and burned. Even criticizing the government or talking about history, literature, and philosophy meant being put to death along with one's family. Some books were saved as the owners memorized them before surrendering them, or hid them away securely until the order was rescinded by the Hans in 191 B.C.E. However, since at that age books were few and the literate class small, the damage to learning was considerable Another disaster for the ancient Chinese world of learning occurred in 206 B.C.E., when during the civil war, the Ch'in imperial library, where at least one copy of all the banned books was preserved, was itself destroyed.
Fall
The First Emperor died in 210 B.C.E. during one of his tours in the countryside, and soon intrigues, assassinations, and struggles for succession broke out. The alienated and oppressed scholars and peasants, who were growing restive under the Ch'in totalitarianism, now engaged in widespread and massive revolts. Many loyal commanders deserted, and rebel armies converged upon the capital, burning down the imperial palace in 206 B.C.E., and forcing the third Ch'in emperor to surrender. After four more years of chaos and civil war, a peasant leader, Liu Pang, emerged victorious, seized the reins of power, and established the Han dynasty.
The Legacy of the Ch'in
The Ch'in dynasty, despite unifying China, has been criticized for its harsh laws, high taxes, forced labor, and repression of disliked ideas. Although the first emperor innovated significant reforms and brought peace to China from raiders and bandits, his rigid and ruthless rule was very unpopular, and his death signaled the collapse of his dynasty. Some main features of the Ch'in administration (like centralized bureaucracy) and their social and economic reforms (like abolition of feudalism and standardization of currency) were continued by the milder Han rulers. In addition to the uniform Chinese script, the most enduring and productive legacy of the Ch'in consisted in their engineering achievements: the Great Wall, the network of roads and canals that unified the empire, and the extensive irrigation works that reclaimed enormous tracts of land from drought and flood. Despite the inhumanity of his regime, Shih Huang-ti was accorded praise as a nation-builder of vision and enterprise by Mao Tse-tung's Communist Chinese during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
This article was originally published by the University of Minesota (U.S.A) in the site http://www.cee.umn.edu/dis/ as IDL (Independent and Distance Learning). Now is not available anymore. This copy was saved by LC in March, 2002 and edited to be posted.
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