It is significant that before the founding of the empire, the people of Qin, although technically Han people or 'civilized' Chinese, were themselves scoffed at by the central states as 'barbarian.' They not only lived in close proximity to 'barbarians' but even shared certain habits of dress and religious beliefs, and frequently intermarried [Creel 1970a:201, 210-217]. "Qin has the same customs as the Rong and the Di," complained a minister of a neighboring state in 266 B.C. "It has the heart of a tiger or a wolf..." [SJ 44:1857/MH 5:179]. From the very beginning, the empire-to-be exhibited the predatory proclivities of the war-machine. "Rong," in fact, meant "military" [Creel 1970a:198]. Qin directly acquired elements of the military apparatus it would later use to conquer China from the Rong and the Di (and their descendents the Hu and the Xiongnu). Other elements it acquired from them indirectly, in interaction with them and against them.
In the first category are the crucial military advances that made the conquest of China possible. Chief among them was the shift from the ritualized, fixed-position, chivalric chariot battles of the Spring and Autumn Period to the strategic mobility of armies composed of mounted archers and foot soldiers--'barbarian' ideas both. In Qin in 541 B.C. squadrons of foot soldiers were used instead of chariots in difficult mountain terrain to fight 'barbarians' who did not play by the rules of 'civilized' warfare. By the 4th century, old-style chariot battles were a thing of the past [Maspero 1978:242; Hsu 1977: chap. 3; Shaughnessy 1988]. But Qin alone had fully divested its army of its chivalric trappings. "Qin had organized a light and mobile army in which horse and foot soldiers predominated. The other states continued to make use of chariots, and conducted war according to the rules of feudal tactics. They made great demonstrations of strength, then disbanded their troops. Qin made war relentlessly" [Granet 1930:95].
The mobility associated with the nomads of the steppes ("they swoop down like a flock of birds, but when they find themselves hard pressed and beaten, they scatter and vanish like the mist" [SJ 110:2892/RGH 2:165]) was paradoxically used to fortify the state. When sedentary society shakes itself from its torpor long enough to attack, it marks the place with a substantially more rigid, small-scale version of itself: the border garrison. Increased mobility accompanied by hardening of the arteries. The commandery can be viewed as a concretion, a kind of precipitate, marking the spot where sedentary society meets its nemesis. It is a new formation carrying the state that gave rise to it and to whose protection it is dedicated to an incomparably higher power. Its internal organization is a virulent hybrid combining the hierarchical leanings of the sedentary proto-bureaucracy and the flexible-response capabilities of nomadic military organization: the five-by-five cell structure of the Qin dynasty was a direct descendent of the five-man squadron instituted in state armies when the cavalry-infantry configuration was adopted. The commandery, cell structure, and a host of other militarist mechanisms (described earlier in this article) represented a volatile mix: fortification circle plus line of attack: a uniquely unstable formation that sprang up on the margins and then spiralled inward: a unification machine that swallowed up everything in its path, beginning with the state of Qin itself, then its neighboring states, then all of China, at which point it shot out the far side into the other nonsedentary space, the sea.
The absolute state is the form the nomadic war-machine assumes when it enters sedentary space and transforms it--and is transformed by it. The imperial war-machine is the sedentary translation of nomadism. The cavalry, the single most important instrument of the Qin conquest and centralization [Granet 1930:411; Lattimore 1962: 422; Shaughnessy 1988], was a sort of nomadic carrier infecting the territory of China. It brought with it a nomad germ that mutated at the frontier, inducing a monstrous rebirth of its new host body.
It is simplifying things to explain the militarist centralization of China by the state's need to protect itself from an outside enemy. First, because nomadic attacks, while a constant irritant, never fundamentally threatened the stability of the state [Lattimore 1962:441]. Secondly, and more suggestively, the nomads themselves were creations of the state.
The Rong and Di 'barbarians' were probably not to begin with racially distinct from the Han [Chang 1977b:397]. They were distinguished by their mode of subsistence and political organization. The racial divergence was the result of their being squeezed out toward the steppes as Qin consolidated its hold over the 'wastelands' within its borders in order to expand food production based on state-controlled intensive agriculture [Lattimore 1962:39, 167-68, 328, 453]. Although Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian and other historical records are not clear on the distinctions between the 'barbarians' indicated by the terms "Rong" and "Di," and the later "Hu" and "Xiongnu," it appears that the former were remnant populations of mixed agriculturalists or pasturalists within the Qin territory, while the latter were those same populations after taking to the steppes and transforming from sedentaries and transhumants into true nomads. After adapting to their new environment--inventing a mode of social organization with technologies all its own--the nomads turned back against the centralizing sedentary space of the state from which they were expelled. The Qin confronted the newly-arisen nomads around the 4th century B.C., at the point that its westward territorial expansion reached the edge of the Central Asian steppes [Lattimore 1962:168-69].
Despite Chinese fortifications the frontier areas never formed an impermeable shell, but continued to be a porous site of two-way exchange of people, goods, and techniques [Lattimore 1962:468; SJ 110 passim]. The frontier should be seen less as a limit between territories than as the crucible and mutual conversion site of two social vectors moving in opposite directions.[30] This is graphically illustrated by the fact that the feudal aristocrats who were exiled by Qin to the border--and often deserted to the nomads--were replaced in the interior by hardened border troops and re-sedentarized nomads in the direct service of the state [Lattimore 1962:420-21, 433; SJ 110 recounts numerous instances of desertion to the nomads in the early years of the Han Dynasty]. The two-way movement was not limited to people. The nomads' technical contributions to the state were returned in the form of metallurgical innovations such as the crucible steel saber (the favored instrument of imperial dismemberment, which was retransmitted by the nomads to other states, moving from its birthplace in the Qin dynasty to India, Persia, and Arabia by way of the Scyths [Mazaheri 1958:678-80]). The commanderies were also a base of trade with the nomads, and across their lands with Europe and the Middle East. According to Lattimore [1962:174, 492], such trade, culminating in the fabled Silk Road, must be seen as the result rather than the cause of China's imperial policies since it primarily concerned luxury items (which were anathema to the Qin but a natural outgrowth of its economic consolidation). When an object of sedentary origin remained in the hands of the nomads (and vice versa), it was converted, reinvented to fit its new milieu. For example, the use of gold in nomadic art is so different from that of sedentary society that it must be considered a different cultural element [see Deleuze and Guattari 1987:492-99]. (The same could be said of horse riding and the stirrup, regardless of which side of the cultural divide they originated on.)
Of the scholars who have written on early China, it is Lattimore's work that is closest in spirit to our own in its relentless attention to material detail[31] and simultaneous insistence that there is no adequate empirical explanation for historical events. He steadfastly maintains that both the future nomads who refused to submit to the empire-in-the-making and the sedentaries who ejected them chose their destinies.[32] Ultimately, it was a question of "lifestyle," or what we would reinterpret in terms of supra-individual desire. Two modes of desire, two social machines, found themselves in the same geographical space and entered into conflict. Both were radically transformed in the process, one spinning outward from their common crucible and continuing conversion site, the other inward. Simultaneously attracted and repelled by the other, both were energized by the tension of their interaction, impelled by it to carry the logic of their respective desires to its extreme conclusion. Both founded empires. An empire of the steppes stretching all the way across Asia arose in strict simultaneity with the Chinese empire: two mutually determining mirror-image megamachines at opposite extremes of the range of possibility of human social organization--and of terrain. Both found (created) their ultimate geosocial space. The smooth versus the striated. In an external tension which is endlessly recapitulated within the borders of the unified state, in a continuing tribute to its bastard past.[33]
2. LAND CHANNELS AND OPEN SEAS. Sima Qian remarked that Qin was maintained by the Water
Element: "The First Emperor ... believed that the authority of Zhou had been supplanted by Qin
because Qin's element was water and Zhou's fire. So began an era of the Power of Water. ... He
renamed the Yellow River the Powerful Water" [SJ 6:237]. Although he was able to harness the
flow from west to east across the land, the First Emperor was at a loss when confronted by
unchannelable expanse of the sea. The cascade toward imperial perfection had run its course.
3. REVENGE OF THE LICE. The Qin dynasty did not long survive its founder, with whose body it was so intimately bound. It fell four years into the reign of the Second Emperor, after a massive revolt by escaped conscripts joined by remnants of the feudal aristocrasy.[34]
4. MODIFIED HYDRAULICS. The next dynasty knew how to separate the power to attack and the
power to retain: by accepting bounds, by accepting a degree of internal striation and the existence
of semi-autonomous, yet carefully circumscribed, realms of interest. The Han resurrected the louse
of morality from the ashes of Confucian wisdom, and with it the feudal aristocrasy from which it
sprang. The Han injected a state-subordinated feudal family morality into the structure bequeathed
by Qin. The Han did not fundamentally redraw the logic of the Qin flow-chart, only added
measured impediments to its reaching its extreme conclusion. It cooled the Qin dynamism down
with gentleman scholars and aristocrats, freezing it at a lower level of virulence, moderating it to
create a sustainable, if imperfectly liquid, imperial apparatus.
5. WATER CYCLE. All of the working pieces whose interaction would shape China for the next two
thousand years were in place. Chinese history would be a series of dynasties drowned by sudden
takeovers originating at the edge of the steppes or destroyed from within by rising tides of peasant
rebellion. In every case, after arriving at the eye of imperial power, the conquerors would become
the conquered. The imperial apparatus would invariably convert its enemies to it, sucking them into
its freeze-frame whirlpool. The eternal return of the outside of the State, from which the State
arises.
The empire would always resuscitate, largely intact only under different management. Until 1949. The internal nomadism of the Long March would finally deal a decisive blow to the old machinery, thirty-seven years after the empire formally died. The spiralling stopped. Or did it? When the Cultural Revolution was losing momentum in the mid-1970s the debate on whether to continue it was couched in terms of an alternative between the Legalism of Lord Shang and the Confucian Middle Way [Li Yuning 1975, 1977]. Mao died, and the Cultural Revolution ended. Confucian "moderation" was back. The Great Helmsman, pickled to eternity, lies dead-center in the Square of Heavenly Peace, within earshot of the Forbidden City. "Square of Heavenly Peace": Tiananmen. The events of June 4, 1989 show that even a "moderated" imperial apparatus does not renounce the use of brute force against democratic "lice." Has the spiralling stopped?
CONTINUE
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