Lice

"Rites and music, odes and history, moral culture and virtue, filial piety and brotherly love, sincerity and faith, chastity and integrity, benevolence and righteousness, criticism of the army and being ashamed of fighting"--

"When these twelve gain an attachment, dismemberment ensues" [D 256/KH 13:106-7 (see Key to Citations at the beginning of the Notes].[5]

No sooner are they six than they are twelve. Any count is conventional, for lice are legion.[6] If they are, they are spreading, in geometrical progression. They are a contagion sapping the strength of the state.

"Longing for old age, (enjoyment of) eating, beauty, love, ambition, and virtuous conduct" [D 306/KH 20:159]--"the things people desire are countless" [D 211/KH 5:57].

Attributes of lice: they are nondenumerable, and they are desired. The question is not so much what they are, as how they are. Lice are not particular things, or even particular actions. They are a mode which any thing or action may adopt.

Lice grow naturally from the necessary functions of the body politic. "Farming, trade, and office are the three permanent functions in a state. Farmers open up the soil, merchants [import] products, officials rule the people. These three functions give rise to lice" [D 306/KH 20:159].

A third attribute: lice are a departure. They are necessary functions running away with themselves. The difference between a louse and a necessity is one not of nature but of degree and direction. If farmers produce more food than is needed for minimal health, then people eat for eating's sake. If merchants import more commodities than are needed for food production, then people own for the joy of possession. If there is eating for eating's sake and possession for the joy of it, then the officials who regulate production and consumption grow fat and rich, and begin to act in their own interests. Lice are excess: the overfulfillment of a need. Lice are a diversion: of energies away from the state.

Lice are the threat of a realm of self-indulgence in which desires are fulfilled for their own sake. They are the threat of a realm of self-interest in which desiring bodies act on their own behalf and on behalf of their own (family, caste). The feared dismemberment of the state is the creation or continuation of semi-autonomous social realms incompletely subordinated to the state and expending bodily energies the state could otherwise channel toward its ends. Correction: end.

1. WANDERING SCHOLARS ARE LICE. The various "statelets" of the Zhou dynasty were in constant battle. Their leaders, faced with incessant warfare and increasingly complex internal hierarchies, turned to the services of educated bureaucrats and military advisors called 'wandering scholars' (youshi). Beginning in the 5th century B.C., these wandering scholars became increasingly mobile, moving from one statelet to another, offering advice and analyses of current events and political philosophy. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) is the best known example. Various schools ofthought were generated by these men and their disciples, most notably Confucianism, Mohism, Legalism, and Taoism. Each school delighted in attacking the others, exposing weaknesses in their logic or decrying their effect on policy.[7]

From the time of its establishment in the 9th century B.C. until the formation of the Empire most of the chancellors of Qin were scholars brought in from other states. But The Book of Lord Shang and the legal documents express extreme suspicion about such people: "When 'wandering scholars' are staying somewhere without tallies, the prefecture where they stay will be fined one suit of armour." [H104/C3/W7.9b][8]

A second statute brings out the underlying rage of the state at those it cannot control: "Those who praise the enemy in order to frighten the mind of the population will be dishonored. What is to 'dishonor'? To dishonour him when alive, and when the dishonoring is over, to cut him asunder--that is what is meant." [H134/D41/W8.29a]

The First Emperor pursued these policies to their logical extreme. Few events in Chinese history have had an impact equal to the famous Burning of the Books begun in 213 B.C. and the massacre of 460 Confucian scholars who were traditionally said to have been buried alive in 212 B.C. Significantly, the Book of Lord Shang was spared, along with medical and prognosticatory texts. Note that a calendrical/divinatory text was included in the tomb of the Qin official at Yunmeng.[9]

2. MORE LICE
a)FEUDAL LINEAGES AND PEASANT FAMILIES. The suppression of Confucianism and other moralist schools of philosophy removed the ideological base of support of the feudal aristocrasy, whose lands themselves were appropriated by the state. The territorial clans of the peasantry were undermined through reforms that realigned land divisions and placed all land under centralized administrative control. (See One Hole: "Unifying Abstraction and the Capture of Land" below).

b)MERCHANTS. The state attempted to control the flow of goods and capital. Officials inspected the marketplaces, checking people's passes and policing prices. In the Yunmeng statutes we find: "When a stranger has not yet presented his passport to the officials and trades with them, the fine is one suit of armour." [H174/D163/W8:33a] This was one of a number of mechanisms the cumulative effect of which was to prevent the emergence of capitalism: "The resources of the merchant," states The Book of Lord Shang, "are in his personal fortune. Thus in a single house within the empire is sequestered personal fortune and [monetary] resources. A person's resources consisting of a weighty fortune, he [may] perversely rely on this power[ful condition] abroad, and gathering up great resources, return to his house;[10] this would have been a problem for [exemplary rulers] Yao and Xun. Therefore Tang and Wu prohibited this, with the result that their success was established and their fame made." [D 220/KH 6:66]

Merchants and criminals were routinely exiled to border regions, where they would be absorbed into the rigid organization of the garrison colonies protecting the sedentary interior of the state from nomadic attack from the steppes [Bodde 1938:171].

c)CRIMINALS AND SELF-SERVING BUREAUCRATS. Large groups of "fugitives, bonded servants, and shopkeepers" were deported in 214 B.C. to labor colonies in the South, where they were put to work on large-scale agriculture-related projects [SJ 6:253/MH 2:169]. They were followed in 213 B.C. by "functionaries who had not been upright in handling court cases," some of whom were sent North instead to work on the Great Wall [SJ 6:253/MH 2:169].

3. SUMMARY. Anyone whose actions did not conform to the pattern of movements prescribed by the state was either immobilized ("erased" or hobbled by fines) or rechanneled (into forced service). The state displayed an obsessive fear of undisciplined movement of people and ideas, carefully preventing the creation of spheres of interest outside its direct control. In the vocabulary of the time, it destroyed the possibility of "perversely relying on one's own power and returning to one's house." That involved containing flows unleashed by its own policies, such as the movements of the new merchant class necessary to distribute the increased agricultural surplus created by government promotion of agriculture. It also involved attacking preexisting semi-autonomous formations: the feudal aristocratic families and the territorial clans.

CONTINUE

BACK TO CHAPTER 2 CONTENTS PAGE

BACK TO FIRST AND LAST EMPERORS HOME PAGE