The Book of Lord Shang

Apologetics of State Power in Early China

Yang Shang, Yuri Pines

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542333
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Compiled in China in the fourth–third centuries B.C.E., The Book of Lord Shang argues for a new powerful government to penetrate society and turn every man into a diligent tiller and valiant soldier. Creating a "rich state and a strong army" will be the first step toward unification of "All-under-Heaven." These ideas served the state of Qin that eventually created the first imperial polity on Chinese soil. In this new translation, The Book of Lord Shang 's intellectual boldness and surprisingly modern-looking ideas shine through, underscoring the text's vibrant contribution to global political thought.

The Book of Lord Shang is attributed to the political theorist Shang Yang and his followers. It epitomizes the ideology of China's so-called Legalist School of thought. In the ninety years since the work's previous translation, major breakthroughs in studies of the book's dating and context have recast our understanding of its messages. This edition applies these advances to a whole new reading of the text's content and function in the sociopolitical life of its times and subsequent centuries. This fully annotated translation is ideal for newcomers to the book while also guiding early Chinese scholars and comparatists in placing the work within a timeline of influence. It highlights the text's practical success and its impact on the political thought and political practice in traditional and modern China.

PART I

1

SHANG YANG AND HIS TIMES

Shang Yang, the alleged author of the Book of Lord Shang, is arguably the most famous and most influential statesman of the Warring States period. His biography is narrated in chapter 68 of Records of the Historian (Shiji 史記) by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 90 B.C.E.); other chapters provide additional details about Shang Yang’s career. The biography itself is not entirely reliable: it contains many literary embellishments and the admixture of later legends; many of the stories told by Sima Qian (or by the authors of his primary sources) should be read cum grano salis (Yoshimoto 2000). Nonetheless, the biography is not pure fiction, either; some paleographic discoveries actually corroborate a few of its details. It can therefore be conveniently utilized to reconstruct the factual skeleton of Shang Yang’s career.

AN ASPIRING OFFICIAL

Shang Yang (originally named Gongsun Yang 公孫鞅) was a scion of the ruling house of the tiny statelet of Wei 衛 located to the south of the Yellow River in today’s Henan Province (hence, his occasional appellation as Wei Yang 衛鞅, or Yang of Wei). Once an important medium-size polity, his home country had deteriorated to a position of utter insignificance by the time of his birth, so that even aristocratic pedigree could not ensure him a decent career. Having realized this, Gongsun Yang departed to the neighboring state of Wei 魏 (hereafter “Wei” refers only to this larger polity unless otherwise indicated). This was a clever choice. At this time (ca. 360s B.C.E.), Wei was approaching the apex of its power. Its ruling house descended from a ministerial lineage in the state of Jin 晉, the major superpower of the preceding Springs-and-Autumns period (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 B.C.E.). By the middle fifth century B.C.E., the heads of the Wei lineage had become de facto (and in 403 B.C.E. de jure) independent of their mother polity. Having partitioned Jin with two other ministerial lineages—Zhao 趙 and Han 韓 (not to be confused with the later Han 漢 dynasty)—the Wei leaders positioned themselves as the true heirs to the glory of Jin and acted as the major hegemonic power in the Chinese world.

The state of Wei was an appropriate destination for an aspiring man-of-service not only because it was powerful but also because it was the most amenable to foreign advisers. Back in the times of the founding father of an independent Wei polity, Lord Wen 魏文侯 (r. 446–396 B.C.E.), Wei adopted a novel policy of welcoming experts in administrative and military affairs from whatever social background and from whatever country of origin. Soon enough, Lord Wen could boast of a stellar team of advisers. Most notable of them were Confucius’s major disciple Zixia 子夏 (507–? B.C.E.), the skilled strategist Wu Qi 吳起 (d. 381 B.C.E.), and an important reformer, Li Kui 李悝 (fl. ca. 400 B.C.E.), who is often viewed as Shang Yang’s precursor. These men strengthened the state of Wei and bolstered the prestige of their patron, Lord Wen, who was, after all, a usurper strictu senso. After Lord Wen’s death, the policy of employing skillful individuals of heterogeneous backgrounds continued, gradually becoming the rule not just in the state of Wei but throughout the Chinese oikouménē.

If we believe an anecdote told in the Stratagems of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce 戰國策) and retold by Sima Qian, Gongsun Yang started his career in Wei as a retainer of the prime minister, Gongshu Cuo 公叔痤. On his deathbed, Gongshu Cuo asked his ruler, Lord Hui (later King Hui of Wei 魏惠王, r. 369–319 B.C.E.) either to appoint Yang prime minister or to execute him so that he would not serve a foreign country. Lord Hui did not heed either suggestion, which gave Yang the chance to respond to a job offer issued by the newly ascended Lord Xiao of Qin 秦孝公 (r. 361–338 B.C.E.). Gongsun Yang’s westward relocation to Qin changed his own fate as well as that of Qin and the entire Chinese world.

The state of Qin, to which Shang Yang headed, was a less-enviable employer than Wei. Once a great power, this state had declined in the fifth century B.C.E. because of internecine conflicts between the rulers and powerful ministers. By the early fourth century B.C.E., Qin was reduced to a marginal polity with little influence on the interstate dynamics of that age. The country’s resurrection started under Lord Xiao’s father, Lord Xian 秦獻公 (r. 384–362 B.C.E.), who initiated reforms aimed at restoring centralized power and reinvigorating the military. Yet it was under Lord Xiao that these reforms truly matured. Upon his ascendancy, Lord Xiao issued an edict in which he emphasized the desire to restore the erstwhile glory of his ancestors and to end the age of humiliation by foreign powers; he invited foreign advisers to come and propose ways of strengthening the state and promised to award them fiefs (Shiji 5:202). Shang Yang was among those who responded to this call, and he was to satisfy his employer completely.

THE WORLD OF THE WARRING STATES

Before we continue with Shang Yang’s career, it is time to pause and ask what challenges—and opportunities—necessitated reforms in Wei, Qin, and other contemporaneous polities. In the early fourth century B.C.E., the Chinese world stood at a crossroads. On the one hand, it faced a severe crisis that threatened the very foundations of the sociopolitical order; on the other hand, this age also offered unprecedented opportunities for innovative statesmen and thinkers. Among a variety of recipes for curing political and social ills, those offered by Shang Yang proved by far the most effective, albeit highly questionable in moral terms.

The crisis that engulfed the Chinese world from the second quarter of the first millennium B.C.E. can be defined as a progressive devolution of state power. The first to lose their authority were the nominal rulers of “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia 天下), the kings of the Zhou 周 dynasty (1046–256 B.C.E.). Back at the beginning of their rule, the Zhou “Sons of Heaven” (tianzi 天子) enfeoffed relatives and allies in strategic locations throughout their realm (Li Feng 2006). The kings initially exercised authority over the fiefs, but these fiefs gradually turned into highly autonomous entities. By the eighth century B.C.E., as the Zhou dynasty was badly battered by domestic and foreign foes, the former fiefs became independent states de facto. These states waged wars, formed alliances, annexed weaker neighbors, and paid little if any attention to the kings’ nominal superiority. On the ruins of the Zhou dynastic realm, a new multistate system arose, and stabilizing this system in the absence of the effective authority of the Sons of Heaven became an arduous task.

Throughout much of the Springs-and-Autumns period, efforts were made to find a viable modus operandi for the multistate order. Initial attempts at stabilization focused on the idea of hegemony: a powerful state was expected to act under the aegis of the Son of Heaven and impose its will on smaller polities. By the late seventh century B.C.E., unilateral hegemony had failed and was replaced by competing alliances led in the north by the state of Jin 晉, the nominal protector of the house of Zhou, and in the south by the rising power of Chu 楚. At first, the two alliance leaders tried to achieve stability for their allies, yet their efforts were undermined by intense interalliance competition. A few statesmen’s last-ditch attempts to attain peace in All-under-Heaven through the grand disarmament conferences of 546 and 541 B.C.E. failed miserably as well. By the late sixth century B.C.E., the simultaneous weakening of Jin and Chu and the subsequent rise of peripheral powers, especially the southeastern “semibarbarian” polities of Wu 吳 and Yue 越, marked the final collapse of efforts to salvage a viable multistate order. A centuries-long “war of all against all” ensued, eventually giving the period under discussion its ominous name: the age of the Warring States.¹

Parallel to the disintegration of the Zhou realm, similar processes of weakening of the ruler’s authority occurred in most of the regional states that comprised the Zhou oikouménē. By the late seventh century B.C.E., it was the turn of regional lords to be challenged by their underlings, heads of powerful ministerial lineages. These lineages monopolized top positions in the state hierarchy, turning them into their hereditary holdings. Parallel to this shift, they also appropriated land allotments, which had formerly been granted to ministers in exchange for service, and turned them into ministates in their own right under the lineage’s control. The allotments’ masters maintained independent administration, were in full possession of the material and human resources of the allotment, and even conducted independent military and diplomatic activities, expanding the territory of the allotment at the expense of weaker neighbors. The lords of the state continued to enjoy ritual prestige, but in terms of political, economic, and military power they were completely eclipsed by their ministers.²

The lack of effective authority within individual states brought about woeful turmoil. Through the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., dozens of regional lords were assassinated, expelled, or otherwise humiliated by their underlings; others survived only by skillfully exploiting conflicts among the ministers. Most states eventually became entangled in debilitating struggles between the lords and powerful aristocrats, among major ministerial lineages, and often among rival branches within these lineages. These struggles in turn caused repeated foreign intervention, blurring the differences between internal and external affairs and sweeping away the remnants of sociopolitical stability.

The crisis of the regional states reached its nadir in 453 B.C.E. (de jure in 403 B.C.E.), when the state of Jin—once the leading superpower—was partitioned among the three ministerial lineages of Wei, Han, and Zhao. In Qi 齊, another powerful polity, the trajectory was different: a single powerful ministerial lineage, the Chen 陳 (Tian 田), eliminated its rivals, usurped power, and in 386 B.C.E. replaced the seven-century-old ruling lineage, appropriating thereby the state of Qi. Other states, such as Qin and Chu, avoided ministerial usurpations but suffered repeated outbreaks of domestic turmoil. Stemming the forces of disintegration became the singularly important dictum for statesmen of the age.

As it happened, the events of the fifth century B.C.E. marked a shift toward the regeneration of centralized authority. Having usurped power in their domains, the leaders of the Wei, Han, and Zhao lineages in Jin as well as the heads of the Chen lineage in Qi were determined to prevent renewed fragmentation. They instituted a series of reforms aimed at limiting ministerial power. Hereditary officeholding and the adjacent system of hereditary land allotments, the hallmarks of the aristocratic age, were discontinued and replaced with a system of flexible appointments and salaries paid primarily in grain and precious metals. Henceforth, even when allotments were granted (which in itself became a rarity), the recipient was expected to benefit economically but not to rule the allotment as an independent stronghold. More consequentially, the pool of potential candidates for officeholding increased dramatically. In marked departure from the practices of the aristocratic age, persons of relatively humble origin, members of the so-called shi 士 stratum, were now eligible for the highest positions of authority. The rise of shi marked the end of the aristocratic age and the beginning of a new era in Chinese history.³

Shi originally were the lowest segment of the hereditary aristocracy: minor siblings of aristocratic families, whose birthright did not entitle them to occupy high offices. Most made their living as stewards and retainers of noble lineages: specialists in ritual, military, or administrative matters. Shi were the major beneficiaries of the internecine conflicts that decimated aristocratic lineages. For regional lords, it was expedient to replace the unruly aristocrats with the “men-of-service” (as I occasionally call the shi henceforth). Shi could be ap...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Map of the Warring States World Around 350 B.C.E.
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: The Book Of Lord Shang
• Fragment of “Six Laws”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List