ChinaX Course Notes I transmit, I do not innovate.1 If you copy this document, please do not remove this disclaimer These are the class notes of Dave Pomerantz, a student in the HarvardX/EdX MOOC course entitled ChinaX. My ChinaX id is simply DavePomerantz. First, a very big thank you to Professors Peter Bol and Bill Kirby and Mark Elliot and Roderick MacFarquhar, to the visiting lecturers who appear in the videos and to the ChinaX staff for assembling such a marvelous course. The notes may contain copyrighted material from the ChinaX course. Any inaccuracies in here are purely my own. Where material from Wikipedia is copied directly into this document, a link is provided. See here. Left to right: Professor Peter Bol, myself, Professor Bill Kirby. 12/18/2014. Outside of Dumplings in Cambridge. 1 The Analects 7.1. See page 36. ChinaX Course Page 1 of 50 Part 2: The Creation and End of a Centralized Empire Introduction This is a 6 minute video of a discussion between Profs. Bol & Kirby. At the end of Part 1, China was in disarray with many warring states and 100 schools of thought. Let's see how it became a centralized bureaucratic empire. The Qin dynasty came out of the west conquering all other states. The Qin replaced the feudal aristocracy with a central government that sent its own officials to collect taxes and run the territories. The Qin doesn't last long, but the Han dynasty lasted 400 years and proved a centralized empire works, ironing out the relationship between government, society and the economy as it matured. Of note, there's a strong relationship between modern China and the Qin. The Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huang, was famous for unifying the warring states and also for suppressing dispute by burning books and burying scholars alive2. Mao Zedong compared himself to Qin Shi Huang3 as someone who took control of warring states and brought unity after a foreign invasion, in his view, dominated the political scene. The demonstration in Tiananmen Square was in support of the memory of Zhou Enlai, in support of Deng Xiaoping. People held banners saying 'Down With Qin Shi Huang', equating Mao Zedong with a brutal emperor who may have been two millennia distant but was as bright in their memory as if he'd ruled yesterday.4 We'll talk about how central government was formed and how the Han eventually fell apart. Comparing it to the Roman empire we see how foreign invasion opened the door to a new aristocracy and a new religion, Buddhism. Meanwhile in the Mediterranean, it was Christianity. Another parallel between China today and the fall of the Han is that the fastest growing religion, in numbers, is Buddhism, whereas the number of people who align themselves with the founding ideology of the PRC - Marxism, Leninism - are few. So in this section we want to think about the rise of a centralized empire and its subsequent demise and how that bears on later Chinese history. 2 See page 57, Qin Unity and the First Emperor. 3 From Carrie Fisher in BBC News, writing in an article that quotes Professor Bolhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang: In fact in 1958, Mao himself made the connection between himself and Qin Shi Huang. "He buried 460 scholars alive - we have buried 46,000 scholars alive," he said in a speech to party cadres. "You [intellectuals] revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold." 4 For references to the 1989 demonstration in Tiananmen Square, see: page 53 – Why the Tiananmen demonstrators shouted ‘Down with Qin Shi Huang.’ page 286 – Why the heavy-handed government response should not have been a surprise. page 315 – Reference to Mao as a latter-day Qin Shi Huang, purportedly by Lin Biao in the 571 plan. ChinaX Part 2 The Creation and End of a Centralized Empire Page 2 of 50 Unit 7: Forging a Unified Empire: Qin Historical Overview Year (BCE) Event 350 Shang Yang reforms Qin. Decades later, Qin begins its expansion. 316 Qin turns south, colonizing the non-Chinese states of Ba and Shu, the fertile lands of present day Sichuan Basin. 256 The King of Zhou surrenders, ending the 800-year dynasty. 231-221 The last decade of the Warring States ends with Qin conquering the remaining six states: 230 Han 229-228 Zhou 226-223 Chu 225 Wei 227-222 Yan 221 Qi 210 Death of the first emperor and subsequent fall of Qin. Thus is the ruler of Qin now the ruler of Tianxia, all under heaven. He replaced the Zhou feudal aristocracy with a centralized bureaucracy, imposing a unified currency, unified weights and measures, and most importantly, a common written language. While this was going on, the tribes of the northern steppes joined forces as the Xiongnu confederation, the first inner-Asian empire. To defend Qin, the emperor built the Great Wall (Changcheng). Though many of the institutions lasted thousands of years, the Qin fell after the first emperor's death in 210 BCE. Unit 7: Forging a Unified Empire Although the Zhou was nominally in control, it had no power to impose peace over the warring states of the third century BCE. Some other power had to arise. What is striking in the map of the period is how the Qin stands beyond the passes, small and isolated, in lands long ago abandoned to barbarians by the Western Zhou. ChinaX Part 2 The Creation and End of a Centralized Empire Page 3 of 50 Section 2: Qin Finds the Path to Power Kudos to Prof. Bol. This was one of my favorite lectures. In the third century BCE, a kind of stasis had settled over the warring states. The Zhou king had a nominal suzerainty.5 What sparked the Qin to fill that vacuum, driving in from the west to conquer the other states? Prof. Bol describes a conversation between Master Shang Yang and the lord of Qin6: Shang Yang travels to see the lord of Qin and says, I see that you are an ambitious man. The lord of Qin says, yes I am. Shang Yang said, well, tell me, do you want to be a king like the Zhou king: glorious, honorable, but powerless? Or do you want to be a hegemon, somebody who has the political and military power to make other states accept his will. And the lord of Qin says, I want to be a hegemon. Shang Yang says, well, you know if you do, you'll have to change your policies. You'll have to institute laws of your making. The advisers to the king are somewhat shocked, and the lord of Qin says, well, if I have to change my policies, that will create opposition. And Shang Yang says, it will create opposition, but if they lead to great accomplishment, people will accept the changes you make. The ministers, the high officials of the lords, gather round and say: This is wrong. We know that from antiquity, ritual has been the way in which to govern well: carrying out the rituals, performing the sacrifices, providing a model for the people. Your policy, these policies of laws, break with ritual. Shang Yang says, well, they do, that's true. But tell me: should you, lord, be making the rituals, or are you a slave to the rituals of antiquity? And again his ministers lean in and say, but the models of antiquity have proven the test of time. We should follow them. Shang Yang says, they were good in their time. But today is a different time. To ignore the opportunities today is to give up and try to imitate the ancients, and it will never get you anywhere. Shang Yang goes on to say that the lord of Qin has farmers, soldiers, and supervisory officials. He explains their purpose: the officials can lead the soldiers into battle with the wealth created by the farmers. We can see the hold that the rituals have over the ministers and the appeal that conquest has for the Qin lord. We can see how the Qin lord took advantage of a moment in history to fill a power vacuum and to overturn centuries of ritual ancestor worship. My own thoughts: Was the shift to a unified bureaucratic government inevitable, and if it hadn't been the Qin, it would have been someone else? To me, it's one of those examples where events can be viewed as driven by geography and climate and 'guns, germs, and steel'. Or viewed instead as the sum of the actions of motivated individuals. It's an interesting question. There are moments, like a skier turning on a mogul, when history balances weightlessly on the actions of one person. Through the Qin lord, Shang Yang changed Chinese history forever. Was this inevitable, that the ritualistic feudal aristocracy would transform itself to a bureaucratic empire? Or without Shang Yang, would history have taken a different course? 5 From Googlehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzerainty: a sovereign or state having some control over another state that is internally autonomous; a feudal overlord. As a nominal suzerain, the Zhou king had putative control but no real power. 6 From Wikipedia with my edits: Duke Xiao of Qin (381–338 BC) was the ruler of the Qin state from 361 to 338 BC during the Warring States period. Duke Xiao is best known for employing the Legalist statesman Shang Yang from the State of Wey and authorizing him to conduct a series of upheaving political, military and economic reforms in Qin.