On Weakening the People

A weak people means a strong state and a strong state means a weak people. Therefore, a country which has the right way is concerned with weakening the people. If they are simple they become strong, and if they are licentious they become weak. Being weak, they are law-abiding; being licentious, they let their own ambition go too far; being weak, they are serviceable, but if they let their ambition go too far, they will become strong. [D 303/KH 20:155]

Lice are the people's strength. They give the people the autonomy, will-power, and resources to pursue their own ends. Strength for the people is weakness for the State, which has only one end (without end). The people's counter-State desires must be pared away to make all their energies available for service to the pared-down state of attack.

"A country that practices knowledge and cleverness will certainly perish" [D 201/KH 4:46]. "A country," on the other hand, "where the wicked govern the virtuous will be strong" [D 200/KH 4:45].

The right way to rule is to lavish torturous affections on one's subjects. "If penalties are made heavy and rewards light, the ruler loves his people and they will die for him" [D 200/KH 4:46]. Desires will then flow in the right ("wicked") direction. Loving violence toward the people begets loving violence for the ruler.

A country which knows how to produce strength but not how to reduce it may be said to be a country that attacks itself, and it is certain that it will be dismembered. A country that knows how to produce strength and how to reduce it may be said to be one that attacks the enemy, and it is certain that it will be strong. [D 202/KH 4:47]

A proliferation of lice, because it opens doors and encourages an envigorated people to follow diverging paths, is a poison that undermines the unity of the State and saps the strength of the body politic as a whole. The poison can be tortured into dormancy, but is never eradicated.

If the country is strong and war is not waged, the poison will be carried into the territory. ... But if the country thereupon wages war, the poison will be carried to the enemy, and, not suffering from rites and music and parasitic functions, it will be strong [D 199/KH 4:44].

A hydraulics of vigor and violence the goal of which is to flush dismemberment out of the State and into the enemy's camp, through the sole outlet of war.

1. THE LAW AS INSTRUMENT OF TORTURE: The penal code of the Qin included the following types of punishments: death penalty, hard labor, banishment, castration, and a variety of fines.[16] Reflecting the military obsessions of the Qin state, most fines were payable in shields or suits of armor. Dismemberment was a favored penalty: criminals were perceived as dismemberers, and paid their debt to society in kind. There were at least four methods of carrying out the death penalty: beheading, referred to as "casting away in the marketplace"; "being torn apart by carriages"; being cut in half at the waist; and drowning, for convicted lepers. The term "casting away in the marketplace" makes an explicit equation between the undisciplined flows of trade and dismemberment. The inclusion of death by drowning for lepers suggests a connection between criminality and disease. There were five categories of hard labor: wall-builders (male) and grain pounders (female), gatherers of firewood for sacrificial rituals (male) and sifters of white rice (female), bond servants and bond women, robber guards and watchmen. These punishments involved some form of mutilation. The males of all five groups had their beards shaved off (apparently regarded as a form of public humiliation). The wall-builders also had their heads shaved (a practice still used in contemporary China for criminals). Other mutilations, in ascending order, included tattooing the face, cutting off the nose, cutting off the left foot, and cutting off the right foot. Several of these mutilations (particularly tattooing of the face) appear to have been connected to the marking of the prisoner as a 'barbarian' unfit for the State.

"It is a significant fact that the first codes are supposed to have been promulgated during the hunt, that is to say, in the Marches which are the home of the Barbarians. The penal code, while it exceeds simple family justice, or the procedure of the vendetta, is like martial law, or the right of war." [Granet 1930:221] (See From the Steppes to the Sea: "Nomadic Carriers" below)

The treatise on law in the History of the Former Han Dynasty (Han Shu) remarks: "Qin put together Shang Yang's law of mutual responsibility and created [under him] the execution of kindred to the third degree [i.e., including parents, brothers, spouse and children]. In addition to bodily mutilation and capital punishment, there were the punishments of chiseling the crown, extracting ribs, and boiling in a cauldron." [Bodde 1986:58, quoting Hulsewe 1975:332].

Several authors of the Legalist system ended their lives as its victims. These include Han Feizi, who was poisoned by Li Si, in turn executed by the Second Emperor. Shang Yang also died a victim of his own principle of unbending application of the law. He had antagonized the Heir Apparent by having his Tutor's nose cut off for a minor infraction. When Shang Yang's patron, the Duke of Xiao, died, Shang Yang fled. He attempted to take refuge in an inn, but the innkeeper told him, "Anyone who attempts to stay in an inn without proper credentials is a criminal." The innkeeper was merely quoting the statutes of Qin as seen in The Book of Lord Shang. Shang Yang tried to flee to the safety of his own fiefdom, but was captured, then torn to pieces by four horses in 338 B.C.[17]

2. POISONOUS WORDS. The chapters on defenses against seige in the Muozi include a discussion of rituals to be performed before doing battle with the enemy. They indicate that war was viewed by many of the statelets at the end of the Warring States period as an evil inflicted by an outside aggressor which had to be exorcised by ritual, magical, and military means [Yates 1980]. Qin employed ritualistic curses against the enemy, as evidenced by the "cursing the Chu" inscriptions engraved in 313 B.C. by King Huiwenwang of Qin [Li Xueqin 1986:239].

The enemy, however, was also within. The Yunmeng legal documents include a suit brought against a fellow villager for his "poisonous words." The man was found guilty and punished by ostracizaton. The word "poison" appears to have been taken literally. [H206/E24/W.8.37b] Contentiousness, or social disunity, was perceived as a bodily violation.

3. SUMMARY. The reduction of the people's desires required the imposition of a vicious, physically mutilating system of punishment designed to transmit internal "poison" (disunity) to an outside enemy and to prevent the enemy from injecting poison back into the State. Without such an enemy, the State could not work its magic. As part of the process, the people were made to experience punishment as an expression of the emperor's love for them. Waging war became their only opportunity to express their love for him. Loving one's ruler meant learning to love one's own dismemberment and death.

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