Still, despite the harshness of his [Emperor Qin Shihuang’s] laws and the strength of his personality cult, occasional acts of sedition did occur. The only way to achieve perfect control over his subjects, Li Si informed Emperor Qin, was to eradicate thought itself:
Your Majesty . . . has firmly established for yourself a position of sole supremacy. . . . And yet these independent schools [Confucianists and others], joining with each other, criticize the codes of laws and instructions. Hearing of the promulgation of a decree, they criticize it, each from the standpoint of his own school. At home they disapprove of it in their hearts; going out they criticize it in the thoroughfare. They seek a reputation by discrediting their sovereign; they appear superior by expressing contrary views, and they lead the lowly multitude in the spreading of slander. If such license is not prohibited, the sovereign power will decline above and partisan factions will form below. It would be well to prohibit this. Your servant suggests that all books in the imperial archives, save the memoirs of Qin, be burned.
Qin Shihuang agreed, and issued an imperial edict:
Anyone owning classical books or treatises on philosophy must hand them in within thirty days. After thirty days anyone found in possession of such writings will be branded on the cheek and sent to work as a laborer on the northern wall or some other government project. The only exceptions are books on medicine, drugs, astrology, and agronomy.
Private schools will be forbidden.
Those who wish to study law will do so under government officials.
Anyone indulging in political or philosophical discussion will be put to death, and his body exposed in public.
Scholars who use examples from antiquity to criticize the present, or who praise early dynasties in order to throw doubt on the policies of our own, most enlightened sovereign, will be executed, they and their families!
Government officials who turn a blind eye to the above-mentioned crimes will be deemed guilty by virtue of the principle of collective responsibility, and will incur the same punishment as that inflicted for the offense itself.
The consequences of the edict were swift and devastating. Pyres of burning books lit up the cities and towns as China’s ancient literature was reduced to ashes. For possessing forbidden texts, three million men had their faces branded with the stamp of infamy and were deported to the Great Wall. Numerous scholars committed suicide in protest, while others hanged or drowned themselves out of fear.
It is for his punishment of 463 famous Confucian scholars that the Qin emperor is most notorious. These were individuals that the emperor personally tried and found guilty of conspiracy, sabotage and lese-majesty. In the supreme atrocity of a long record of brutality, he sentenced them to the five tortures: beating, amputation of the nose, branding of the cheek, amputation of the feet and castration. Only after being tortured and unmanned were they then they were buried up to their necks in the earth and their heads crushed by chariot wheels.
As far as ordinary people were concerned, they were treated by the state as a disposable resource of the state. The terra cotta soldiers discovered near China’s ancient capital of Changan may have survived far longer than the bones of those construction workers buried alive to hide the location of the tomb from grave robbers, but it is those old bones of real victims—not the terra cotta soldiers—that best express the early history of China’s superordination of state over society.
Source: Bully of Asia: Why China's Dream Is the New Threat to World Order (2017) by Steven W. Mosher.
It’s interesting even in ancient tyrannies, private schools were forbidden. I guess tyranny is tyranny no matter what time period. The State cannot be criticized.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment