In Our Time - Chinese Legalism

Episode Date: December 10, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the origins and rise of Legalism in China, from the start of the Warring States Period (c475 - 221 BC) to the time of The First Emperor Qin Shi Huang (pictured), down to Chairman Mao and the present day. Advanced by the Qin statesman Shang Yang and later blended together by Han Fei, the three main aspects of Legalism were the firm implementation of laws, use of techniques such as responsibility and inscrutability, and taking advantage of the ruler's position. The Han dynasty that replaced the Qin discredited this philosophy for its apparent authoritarianism, but its influence continued, re-emerging throughout Chinese history.WithFrances Wood Former Curator of the Chinese Collections at the British LibraryHilde de Weerdt Professor of Chinese History at Leiden UniversityAndRoel Sterckx Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History at the University of Cambridge.Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 338 BC, the Chinese statesman, Shang Yang, was torn apart by four chariots pulling in opposite directions, and his entire extended family was murdered. His violent death was the revenge of the aristocrats in his state of Chin, enraged by reforms who'd imposed which made all equal before the law. Shangyang's legal structure survived him, strengthening the state of Chin until he dominated rivals. A century later, Chin produced the first emperor of a unified China,

an emperor best known globally now, for his terracotta army. Legalism, as Shangyang system became known, has often been vilified for putting law above family ties and for the harsh punishments it imposed. Successive leaders have seen its value, though, from the Han dynasty that overthrew the Chin down to Mount Zedong in the 20th century. with me to discuss Chinese legalism are Francis Wood, former curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library, Hilda de Viette,

Professor of Chinese History at Leiden University, and Rul Sturkes, Joseph Needham, Professor of Chinese History at the University of Cambridge. Francis Wood, the period in which legalism emerged is called the Warring States period. Who was warring and why? The warring states grows out of the previous system of the Zhou Dynasty.

start with the Shang, about 3,000 years ago. Shang ruled the Yellow River area of China. Then the Zhou come in from the slightly to the northwest. We're still talking about a tiny area in the north of China. And the Joe decided to rule their area by infifing family members and trusted advisors. So they set up separate rulers in all over their domain. And gradually, this system breaks down. The central authority of the Joe breaks.

down and separate little states emerge. You start off with about 100 little states, but by the time we get to the warring states in about 481, then there are by then seven major separate states which are fighting each other for control. Now, there's a fairly important aspect to it, which is that in all of those states, things are beginning to change,

and they're moving from a feudal, sort of aristocratic system of administration, to one in which you have, administrators who are trained, who are appointed by the central state, and who administer different areas, collecting taxes and registering the population for military service. So you've got separate states all tending towards a slightly more modern version of administration, but fighting each other for supremacy. This is 400, 300 BC.

We're talking about that time, yeah. What about life in those states that made legalism so, began to make legalism, so attractive? I think one thing is that you have these administrators who are not, as it were, local lords, but they're appointed by the centre. They register the population, and they are, so they're not interested in sort of their own gain

from their area, but they are, as it were, bureaucrats. For the population, I mean, it was said that at the beginning they grumbled enormously at the imposition of laws and punishments and rewards and so on. But eventually they realized that you could leave something in the road and no one would pinch it, and the mountains were no longer full of bandits and robbers. So for ordinary people, up to a point, legalism was seen to be a protection against aristocratic misrule. We call it legalism.

You three scholars call it legalism now, but that word came in much later. But it was essentially to do with making and writing down laws which everybody had to keep. It was that. And I suppose, but one perhaps should talk more strongly about the sort of rewards and punishment for actually following the laws. Yes, well, we're coming to punishments in a second. I just can you give us more idea of the extent of the laws and what the idea of laws meant to persons in the warring states? I mean, I've said somehow, I read somewhere that it meant that everybody was equal before the law. Now, was that true?

And if so, what change did that bring? I think it was true up to a point. I mean, there are always problems. I mean, the reason that Shang Yang was torn apart was because he tried to impose a legal punishment upon the heir to the throne of the state of Chin and this guy rather disagreed with that idea. But in theory, yes.

I mean, there's quite a lot of the legal system survives in documents which have been unearthed on bamboo slips. And you can see that legal cases were looked at in a proper and sort of arbitrary manner. You had to investigate legal cases. You had to see what was right and what was right. wrong and punishments and rewards and so on were fixed. So people knew where they were. Hilary DeVette, we mentioned Shangyang. What do we know about his life, the statesman?

Shangyang was a politician. It was active in the fourth century before the common era. He started his career as a lower level administrator in one of the smaller states that Francis was talking about, the state of way. He was somebody with bigger ideas, bigger ideas about how a small state could be turned into one of the leading contenders. And this caught the attention of the then ruler of the state of Qin. He was hired, he was made, Prime Minister, and he pushed through a package of reforms that accomplished this promise. How did he achieve such eminence? I've described him as a philosopher. Did he come from an aristocratic background? What sort of education did he have? How did he get to where he got to? From what we can tell, there is a book that

record some of his ideas, although he did not write it himself, it looks like he had a lower aristocratic background. And it means that he was trained in the traditions of his time. He was familiar with some of the ideas that were circulating confusion ideas, but also the ideas of military strategists, for example. But he was not somebody who had the kind of connections that would immediately push him to the top at the court of the state where he started his career. So, John, about talent then? being recognized. He was somebody with talent, and he was not the only one who was able to transform his career in this way at this point in time.

Rulers who wanted to make their states more competitive were looking for this sort of talent advisors who could help them transform what had been aristocratic feudal states into centralized states. Can you give us an overview of the main beneficial reforms that Shang Yang introduced? I think there are about three that are really important. First of all, he pushed through a taxation reform that was tied to a set of agricultural reforms. He divided up the land into small plots that would be worked on by agricultural families. The income from that land would be taxed directly by the state. And that was important because that would be, that would provide resources to turn the state into one that had a billiol. bureaucracy that could keep the resources flowing, and it could also manage an army, a large

army. All the peasants were... You had a farmer army, didn't you? That was the idea. Indeed. The idea was to make agriculture the foundation for that society, but at the same time to recruit the farmers as soldiers. So by this point in time, the size of the armies are incredibly huge. If we compare this to what was standard elsewhere in the world at this point in time, hundreds of thousands, to be precise. Secondly, he also pushed through... Did this have a role in diminishing the importance of the aristocrats with their chariots?

Was this a counterweight and in fact a superior force to the aristocratic chariots which dominated military warfare at that time? Well, it was certainly a way to increase the size of armies and to mobilize armies that would be able to expand the size of the territories of the kingdoms. Arrasonic warfare was mostly tied to certain conventions. It could have been a force that accomplished more, but the conventions prohibited aristocrats from expanding in the way that states would once, they had recruited

universal armies. So I introduced to a one. Two and three to go. Two and three to go. So the second one that's quite important is that he divided the state of Chin up into administrative districts. That would allow the state to control those taxes, to make them flow to the center. I should add that this was not necessarily a new idea. Other states had similarly experimented with this idea. But what was remarkable about Zhang Yang is that this was pushed through in a systematic way. And finally, what was also important, he, as Francis has also hinted at, was responsible for coming up with a legal system that made collective punishment central to how the law would be enforced. And that meant that if somebody committed a crime or transgressed against the legal code,

not only that person would be responsible, but also those who were part of his or her team, those who were responsible for watching their behavior. Can we turn to Rule Sturkes for punishment? Can you develop the ideas of punishment that were formulated? The idea, as Hilda said, is rightly that you punish collectively. So that you don't simply punish somebody who perpetrates a crime, but you might be taking out his entire family, his entire district.

You punish people by... His entire district? Yes, I mean, you could literally take out entire units. By take out, you mean what I think you mean? Execution. So these were extremely harsh. Mutual implication was one of those principles underlying punishment.

That means that if you failed to report a crime, you would be punished as severely as actually the person who commits the crime. So that's one important aspect of it. A second aspect that's very important. important is the public nature of punishments. We do find records that increasingly insist on the fact that criminals would be executed at market spaces in public places and would be exposed there. Another feature that's quite fascinating about the legalist view of punishment is actually that

crimes committed among kin were judged to be more severe than crimes that were actually committed by strangers. And that is very interesting because that, you know, that touches perhaps on some confusion ideas, you know, of the family unit or the family as a sanctioning unit. There were punishments that were extremely hard. Can you, excuse me, it's fascinating. What explanation was given for that? So if you committed a crime inside your family,

it was more severely punished than if a stranger committed a crime on your family. So basically, if as a father, you know, you decided for some reason to beat your son to death, that wouldn't be a punishable crime. If a son denounced his father, that will be punishable, or if a son denounced his grandparents, that would be, you know, a severe, a severe crime. And the ways in which people implemented punishment, the physical nature of it, was also graded. And so these punishments, they graded, they were graded from the most physically mutilating punishments, which meant chopping off the nose, chopping off limbs, tattooing the face, mutilating visual parts of the body, shaving of the beard and shaving of the hair was one of the lighter punishments.

It was a so-called insult to somebody's manhood, if you want. To obviously, you know, the most severe punishments, boiling people alive, you know, quartering them and so on and so on. One was able to redeem oneself from one's crimes by buying oneself out of some of the more severe punishments. And specifically, officials were able to do that, not by paying cash, but by by handing over shields and armor.

So there was a very military kind of nature about the redemption of punishment there. How does this differ from a reign of terror? For the people on the ground, I assume, it doesn't differ from a reign of terror. I mean, terror is seen as, in one way, a binding mechanism that guarantees that the institution of rulership is seen to be absolute.

We're talking about legalism and that which were most clearly opposed it was Confucianism, which had come before it and remained throughout it and continued after it some way. Can you tell us the main differences between what we now call legalism and Confucianism? They are very different philosophies, although they also share some things in common.

Let me first talk about the differences. Confusions would look at human beings as people you could morally cultivate into better persons. So Confusions believe that there is a set of ethical values, a set of virtues, that everybody can adhere to become a better person. Legalists take a dimmer view of human beings as almost a white sheet, as people who can be manipulated, who are best not educated, and who need to be trained to be obedient subjects of a collective.

Ignorance was knowing things was very dangerous for most people. That's correct. That's correct. ignorance, books, philosophy, literature, all the things that might distract you from hard labour and from potentially questioning the ruler would be... And this is the legalist side. Confucianism is entirely different.

Confusions do like the past, who tend to invoke the past, you know, to justify what they do in the present, like the canon, like the training of literality based on a literary canon and so on, whereas legalists wouldn't. Confusions define authority very positively in a sense that it's something that everybody can achieve ultimately, whereas the legalists tend to define authority very negatively. The ruler dictates and everybody just follows on. They do have one thing in common, though, and that is that both of these philosophies are ruler-based, ruler-centered.

They do believe that society is best ruled with one person at the top. And Confucius might think that this has to be an enlightened, a morally educated person, Whereas the legalists probably think more in terms of a institution. Even if you have a mediocre ruler, it's the institution that needs to remain standing. Francis Wood, how is the chin state making use of its legalism to overcome the other six states? I think it was basically what it did was really put these ideas into practice much more effectively than anybody else. I mean, Hilda mentioned raising armies. I mean, one of the things that was important was to make population registers,

make sure you've got enough people in the army. And these armies were absolutely huge. So it's a question really of enforcement that you have also. I mean, I think the ruler, particularly the First Emperor, was obviously quite a kind of charismatic character. And he was probably known throughout the country. I mean, he travelled the country. He chose black as his colour.

So he would travel in a massive chariot with black flags, everyone dressed in black through fields of peasants wearing, kind of plain homespan and so on. It really is to do with the effectiveness of the policy, a ruthless ruler who puts these military particularly ideas into practice. One thing that attracts, one of the many things, one of the things attracted my attention was how they seem to tackle everything. The weights and measures were standardised throughout this mass tract of land.

Coinage was standardized, the language was standardized and still exist to this day. how easy was that to do because it's an enormous task, isn't it? Yes, and I think people don't really give enough. And roads were standardised for us, so that chariots could use them. He made, yes, the First Emperor had huge roads constructed, had a great north road going north roads so that he could get to different parts of the country.

And I think when people don't realise how chin starts off as a tiny state, it grows, it swallows up the others. But by 221, when he unifies the country, we then see China as we know it now. It's not just that Yellow River Valley area in the north. He's ruling China from the Liaodong Peninsula right down to the south, but of course makes use of this administrative structure that was already there, that you have bureaucrats sort of trained in administration with law books sent out to each part of the country.

And as you say, the standardisations are quite extraordinary. In order to unify the country, the unification of a script is frightfully important, and that lasts to the present day, holding China to keep. in a way that might have broken apart otherwise. Standardising weights and measures, and of course, weights and measures were checked carefully by the local bureaucrats, and they had to check the local granaries. They had to check everything.

They had rule books which said, if we find rat holes in the granary, you will be punished, you'll be fined one shield, and three mouse holes equal one rat hole. So he's got this administration over the whole country, which is standard operating to standard rules with a standard script, a standard coin, the coinage, which lasted up until the 20th century.

And he has a country of 52 million people when we, in 200 BC, are about 2 million. Exactly. And doing what? In comparison. Oh, not doing too badly. We can dig into that later. Hilda, Hilda Deverert. Another key name is Han Faye. Who is he and why is he important? Han Faye was active about a century after Zhang Young. He started his career also in a different states, but perhaps in comparison to not only Shang Yang, but most of the other advisors of the time, he was well positioned. He belonged to an aristocratic family and would

have been in a position actually to play a role there. But he had one problem. He couldn't communicate very well, literally. He was a stutterer. But that also had its advantages. It meant that he actually sat down and wrote out his ideas very systematically. So we could say that whereas Shangyang was the person who put Qin on the map through his set of reforms. Hanfei was the one who systematically wrote out what legalism was really about. You asked earlier, is it only about law codes? It isn't really. Hanfei was also somebody who fought very carefully about how can we make this legal system work.

And in order to do that, there were a couple of other things that were important. First of all, as Will has already discussed, he fought very deep. about how can you secure the position, the authority of the ruler. He also thought about how do you set up a bureaucracy and how do you make sure that that bureaucracy doesn't go corrupt, how do you control it effectively? That was very important for a ruler. Law was part of this as well, but law was what these bureaucrats should be using to make sure that they could keep control over the population. The ruler couldn't do that directly for that he needed a reliable bureaucracy. He worked out these ideas very systematically. When it comes to, he comes to, he's a

for example, to the position of the ruler, he argued that morality, the sort of thing that was important to Confucius was irrelevant. What was important was simply the position of the ruler, and everybody should respect that. The problem he said that we're having with the warring states is that people do not respect the position of the ruler. They question their morality, their intelligence, their talent, and that leads to the kind of constant overthrow of rulers. If you don't want that. If you want stability, you need to make sure that everybody respects the position of the ruler, absolute obedience. Secondly, when it comes to the bureaucracy, he made it a key point that whereas it was important that people know the law, that was probably the only thing that they

needed to know. They shouldn't look at other things, but they needed to know the law that was public, but everything else that happened in the court should be absolutely held in secrecy. So a ruler should never divulge his feelings, his plans, his ideas to his bureaucrats, because that would lead to them taking advantage of him. So there's sort of a psychological dimension to this plan as well. And this is perhaps also one of the reasons why we find Hanfez writings in management sections. managers who prefer an authoritarian rule might sort of get something out of how do you keep your ideas secret at the same time how do you get a sense of who's trying to get too close to you to take advantage of you and so forth and the link which you make in your notes with Machiavelli and Machiavelli's way of going forward is something that we might draw on later

Rul Thurks how sing can we just talk a bit more about this legalism because it's begun to be used as a tool of power, doesn't it? So you don't rush out with your chariots and kill people and stab people. You actually say, we're going to rule this thing by the law. They're going to make the law so ferocious that nobody dare disobeyed. And we're going to

train at meritocrats who are at our command and they're going to implement it. This is a heck of a change, isn't it, in this great civilization. I'd like to know more about how they how they managed to, not get away with it's the wrong word, how they managed to do it, really?

It was an extremely efficient machine. I think actually what the legalist probably invented is bureaucratic efficiency at its best, and it actually invented what is probably the agent at the center of political philosophy ever since. That is the bureaucrat. An official, for an absolutist ruler, for a legalist ruler, was a necessary evil.

You need them because they are the conduct, they are the link between what the court wants to be in, implemented in the localities. And on the other hand, they are the people who report back to the court. They report, they gather taxes, they report back on population registered and so on. But you want officials who, at no point in that process, when information gets from the court to the localities and back, impose their own selfish interpretation on them. And they're entirely dependent on the court. And they have to be... They don't have a hinterland of land relationships with other powerful persons. in one way they're running things

but the other way they're absolutely dependent. In the ideal world they are absolutely independent and they don't have private interests. Now where that works very well in the legal estate is of course when you are trying to implement either military measures or economic measures. I mean you can't turn people overnight from farmers into soldiers unless of course you've got a very tight

bureaucratic network of people who execute it on the ground. The idea that an official actually sort of interferes with the nitty-gritty of what happens almost in the private sphere of somebody's life is part of that whole culture. So in essence you want to turn a population into a population that is obedient, that is guided by a set of professionally trained officials who have no self-interest and simply sort of, you know, do what the regular wants them to do. But a society that is encouraged, in fact, a force to spy on each other to an extraordinary extent. That was one of the

you know, that was one of the elements in this. It's a society as you we must imagine it to be a society which you know which was tense at all times in times of peace. So when

the farmers were not transformed into soldiers, tax and surplus of revenue was meant to be to be spent on military affairs, to keep people busy, to keep them trained. In times of peace, farming is not simply about producing agricultural produce, but farming is about control of the population. And in essence, warfare and farming are two skills that are transferable. So the idea is, in many of these texts, the way you work the fields, the way you fight the soil, is a skill that is easily transferable on the battlefield.

And the units, the cooperative units of farmers on the fields, create bombs that are easily transferable in a military context. So if every citizen adult male doubles up as a farmer and a military conscript, you are creating a formidable military machine. Francis, the temptation is to think that the warring states glide into legalism. Now, it's an extraordinary change. I mean, I'm struck by how big a change it is in just the way whole of life is organized. Were there, there must have been rebellions against it,

fights against it. It can't have just sauntered down street and everybody said, oh, look, we've put a new system. I think what's important is to see that sort of gradual development. without sort of talking about legalism as a theory, the sort of practice. And as Rao was saying, these bureaucrats from the third century BC, they were paid salaries. They were no longer dependent on the agricultural produce of the land.

So they're very different. Society is changing a lot in its form of organisation. But if you were to take, for example, the First Emperor, I mean, obviously in order to... Can you miss dates here? The First Emperor. Well, he unifies. He's born in 259 BC, but 221 is the important time,

when he unifies the whole of China. He pulls China together. That's when China becomes China, and it's ruled by someone who calls himself the First Emperor, and he comes from the Chin, which has conquered all the other states. So you have someone like that who is, as Raoul says, he's in charge of this state, which has got all these bureaucrats there. But it's been a very gradual process.

It's been a long process of people getting used to, the idea of the way they serve the central state. And I mean, apart from military, you know, as Raul was saying, you've got agriculture and military, but you also have the system of Corvay Labor, another form of taxation. So that one of the things that the First Emperor did in Chin was to build massive roads and massive canals. I mean, there were waterways linking the south of China

with almost the very north. And there were these roads... A distance off. Sorry? How long is that? Thousands of miles. Yeah. At three thousand.

Is there something like that? Yes. And then these roads which go right up to the north, right to the west. So imperial roads which were built so that imperial passage was easy. And also, you know, communication was easy, that all these bureaucrats needed to communicate with the centre and vice versa. So a lot of the time people, instead of actually fighting after they've established a state of chin, would spend their time instead of being military, they would be labourers on these massive imperial projects, which again keeps them sort of engaged. and facilitate trade.

Yes, well, facilitate trade is another question. There's a sort of aspect of anti-mercantilism in legalism. Yes, but isn't it true that they're moving more towards trade here or not, internal trade? I might have got this completely wrong, so put me right, we can move on. I think one of the reasons for linking all the waterways is, of course, to make sure that grain can flow from the basin, you know, wonderful places like the Sichuan Basin into the centre.

I mean, the conquest of Sir Juan was one of the most important aspects of Chin's rise to power. Hilary Ler Ler Ler Lerner, how did China change under the First Emperor? Can you give us some broad brushstrokes as to how it changed under him? In some ways, what Francis has just described are the key points. What we essentially get is a state that is in control over agricultural production, army, infrastructure, and that is also at the basis of legalism itself, the idea that everything needs to be centralized to make the state stronger. And that essentially is implemented under the first emperor. We could also say that in terms of his personal style of ruling, there is also

a significant change. Until this point, most rulers had been kings. They were content in most cases to rule over a defined area. When the emperor came to power into 21 BCE and had unified the various states, contending states, he picked a new name for himself. He called himself the August sovereign Huang Di, a term that had up till this point, T been reserved for supreme leadership, either religious leadership, or it had been used for the sage kings of the past, the mythical sage kings of the past. So the expectation was also that this would be a new lasting system. And the new here is quite important. He had the idea that this was a radical break with what had been

and that it would be something that would be consolidated down the line. Ruth Sark, can you tell us why legalism became vilified after the fall of the first, well the second, the emperor's son after the fall of the chins and the Han dynasty came in? they became vilified because one of the great laws in dynastic history in China is that you also always should vilify your immediate predecessors and so it is not not not not exclusively a Chinese phenomenon indeed you're right the charge was that that Chin had all the tools to unite you know this sort of

disparate landscape into a unified empire but that actually you know with a regime you know, of terror, you don't, you don't necessarily run something for the long term. So there were scholars and literati in the Han who, you know, created this image of savage chin. Ironically, though, the Han continued most of Qin's institutions. And so it is, it is interesting to see that people borrow ideas from Shangyang in court debates, you know, as late as the first century BC. So what happened is that, I suppose, the critics turned to the personality of the First Emperor

rather than criticizing institutions of Qin in their criticism, where the continuities are very, very clear, is in law. So the Han legal code is almost a copy of the Qin legal code. And so there was criticism, there was a rhetoric out there, but deep down on the inside, a lot of the institutions that the legalists had put together. were continued. And that's a position you hold as well, Francis, isn't it? But the vilification by the hand

of this legalism was quite effective in that propaganda was quite effective for many centuries. Well, it's one of the most enduring stories of Chinese history that if you want to sort of think of evil, you think of the First Emperor. I mean, I think, you know, in contrast, one should remember, there was no rebellion against him during his lifetime. Admittedly,

you know, he ran a fairly strong state, but never I heard about that, yes. But nevertheless, during his lifetime, it wasn't until his successor took over that there was a fairly immediate rebellion. But it's quite extraordinary. The Chinese legend about the First Emperor, I mean, it goes back to saying he's illegitimate. He's the son of a prostitute and a merchant, which is all very bad. Physically, he's described in the most extraordinary kind of animal-like terms with the face of a wolf and the breast of a chicken and all sorts of things like that. And it is, as Raul said, it's to do.

with justifying the mandate of heaven that the Han has been appointed by heaven, as it were, to overthrow this evil beast. And so they have to kind of start it. But he is really one of the strongest kind of hate figures in Chinese history. And Confucianism comes

back into play more with the hand, doesn't it? Hilda. Can you tell us how that happened and catch us how that happened? Yes. Well, under the hand as rule was saying, there is actually continuation of all of this, but it's dressed up as something quite different. The early Han emperors go back to sort of a mixed system where they allow some of the aristocrats some more power, they give them some land that they can control.

But over time, that gets taken back too. They appoint Confucian scholars, or we could call them classicist scholars who are well trained in the textual tradition, who also edit the texts of the past. They also write history. So the idea is to curate that past far more carefully than the chidens. had done. But at the same time, I think we should say that legalism was vilified, but in many ways, it sort of became part of a larger Chinese repertoire of rule, that it is there. And I think one of the more significant legacies, I would say, that traditionally Confucians had actually been advocates of a feudal order, because that was ultimately what had existed during the Zhou Dynasty of

the Dildo-Chin Empire. The occasionally later on find back. echoes of this. We find people in 12th centuries saying what was actually really wrong about the chin was not so much the emperor, but it was the fact that they divided the entire space up into administrative districts. And what that meant actually is that it vested authority in the law, not in people, not in people who were responsible, who were moral, and so forth. But ultimately they never go back

to this plan. Rule, we've heard about the reputation of the first emperor, Mr. Evil, over the centuries. What about the reputations of Shangyang and Han Fei? Well, very dubious. In moments of this unity, when people need to find arguments for sort of gathering power and getting military and economic activity up and running,

some reformers throughout sort of the ages have invoked Shangyang and Han Fei as people who have valuable ideas. But generally speaking, very little has happened in terms of taking their ideas further. Very few commentaries were written, for example, on the texts that were produced by Hanfei and attributed to Shangyang. But, you know, as we've been saying a number of times, we should probably look at these thinkers as being part of, you know, the political DNA, you know, of China from very early on.

So on the instance, there's an expression in Chinese, you know, to be a confused. on the outside and be a legalist on the inside. And that basically means, you know, you do, in essence, uphold, you know, this desire for unity, this desire for uniformity, you know, imposition of power, the one ruler. But on the outside, you dress this up with a confusion culture, with literature, with literality that are trained, you know, in a proper tradition and so on. And you should be educated and you should be kind. And you should be kind and you should be educated and so on. And in essence, that's how legalism, you know, has been

I mean, I suppose, many rules were closet legalists, you could say throughout, throughout sort of Chinese history. And that perhaps runs into the present day, actually. You want to develop that, right? Mao Zetong took up legalism with no compunction whatsoever. No, absolutely. I mean, I think it's very true what Rao says, that, you know, it's there underneath,

but it's incredibly rare to find it mentioned throughout history. On the other hand, Chairman Mao proudly announced in the 1950s that the First Emperor had only buried 416 scholars and he had managed 460,000. His maths was a bit kind of peculiar. Buried alive, actually. Well, I mean, this is probably some...

As might be, I don't want to re go there. Probably something that never happened anyway, but Chairman Mao liked it as a story, and it's very characteristic for him. And also in the very peculiar movement of 1970s, 73 onwards, there was a movement in China called Criticise Lin-Biao, criticised Confucius. Lin Biao was the disgraced head of the army who'd fled in 1971, probably to Russia, and it was discovered, it said, that he was a secret Confucianist. So you come back to a

Confucian legalist battle throughout the 70s when legalists are the good guys and Confucianists, who include Lim Biao, you know, thinks must restore the old order and so on, the kind of super-conservatives. They are the bad guys. So, I mean, that's probably the strongest moment in which legalism kind of was revived in modern China. Otherwise, as well said, it's there underneath, but it's disguised. Was there a sense in which legalism and the imposition and the concern with itself through these systems made China reluctant to have anything to do with the outside world? There's enough going on in its mighty empire.

Was there something in legalism that would have, contributed to that. It's an interesting question. I don't see a strong external dimension there. And if we, if you look at sort of how it has been appropriated in the present day, it is to bolster confidence in the Chinese mission, but there isn't necessarily sort of an anti-foreign element to it. I think what came up with with Monta-Dung, what I think appealed to him is the fact that like the legalist, particularly like the first emperor, he was. keen to create something new and he had no compulsion about dismissing the past. What's happening in the present moment more is a sort of an eclectic move to pick from

legalism, from Confucianism, elements from Chinese culture that can bolster confidence. And indeed, and turn it inwards. And that's actually how even, you know, public figures and politicians in China today are using legalist ideas, most notably, Xi Jinping, you know, the president of the People's Republican, and Secretary General of the Communist Party has been quoted as quoting from the Hanfeitser and he mentioned

he quoted something along the lines that if those who uphold the law are strong then the state will be strong and those who uphold the law are weak then the state will be weak he's not addressing the people he's addressing of course the people in the party he's oppressing he's engaged

in an anti-corruption campaign within his party but there's a wonderful idea how somebody can actually sort of go back to these classical thinkers and sell them somehow as very contemporary without actually openly to be seen to be dictatorial in the same way as the first emperor would have been.

Francis, Francis Wood. Well, yes, because at the same time, there's quite a kind of promotion of Confucianism. So it's very much like the Han dynasty again, that underneath you've got this tough underpinning and on top you start going back to the good old days and the gentle days of Confucius. Is there any...

Sorry, Hilda. I was going to add that, yeah, It's a nice mix of legalism, Confucianism and Leninism, because ultimately now the position of authority that needs to be protected is that of the party, not necessarily just Xi Jinping himself. Does Confucian really play a part today, then? Any of you, Francis? Well, they've revived the Confucian rituals at the temple and office,

so that kind of happens annually. And yes, no, it's been mentioned again, as well as opposed by people like Seeking. They bring back Confucius as being the good old days. Do you have to be a secret Confucianist, okay? you admit to it? Well, I think you can admit to it now. As a sort of tourist, you can go to the Confucian temple and dress up as Confucius

and listen to Confucian music, etc. It's a kind of popular thing. Hilda. Yes, and there is also an expectation that this will help, that the younger generation in particular is suspected of being too materialistic and that going back to Confucian values might help in some way. And actually, there is a foreign element as well, or at least an attempt to see.

set of these Confucian academies abroad, is also part of the mission, to show that there is a Chinese moral culture that will now be part of the way in which China defines it, socialism. And there are two ideas that transpire in both the use of legalism and confusionism actually in China today. First is that hierarchy is a good thing. Society is by definition hierarchical. And secondly, that good citizens are people who are very role-conscious.

They know where their place is in society. and so they try and stick to that and that's obviously something that can be used and exploited by people in power in various ways. Briefly and finally, Francis, is the word legalism used in China today? No, not really. I mean, except amongst students of philosophy, no.

But it's there. The ideas are there, but it's not openly spoken about. Thank you very much, Francis Wood, Hilder de Verde and Rule Sturke. Next week we'll be talking about Caucasian rhythms an intrinsic clock mechanism that pervades the body, including the brain. That'll be fun. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

You look at Chinese history and you think, well, it's all Confucian. And then you think, no, there's always a legal code. And they're just dressing it up and administering it by people who've lent the Confucian classics. You know, they defeat the First Emperor, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They kind of wipe everything out. But then as we're not that much better. in your notes after a century or so and creep back to what we call legalism. Well, never really abandoned it.

I mean, it's fascinating how universal the ideas are. Actually, I increasingly, as I study these texts, more and more, you see actually, you know, sort of even in China today, you know, a great deal of these ideas bubbling up or the great deal of the concerns that the First Emperor and the legalists were struggling with are actually concerns of politicians in China today. How do you control a population? Most importantly, how do you prevent a population from moving around?

How do you prevent... Oh, you forgot that. It hasn't. They moved and delivered. That's what you... Registered. How do you prefer... We knew where they were all the time.

Yeah, and that may be why legalism itself doesn't come up. I think for them, it's not necessarily associated with the kinds of traditions that we tend to analyze. For them, it's just part of a repertoire of political ideas that are around. And the same actually goes with Confucianism to an extent. it is sort of a shared cultural Are there to bend the philosophies in order to do this enormous embarking this enormous expansion

economic expansion into Australia and Africa and South America and so on? Is there something that justifies that in any of their philosophical systems? Feed the people. It's keeping your granaries well stuffed even if your granaries are now in Africa and South America.

And here we could say that actually if we move further to the hunt, some of the prime ministers who partially also adopted legalist ideas did have an agenda of expanding certainly in some directions that where there were resources or horses like chins in china and room and yeah yeah so that that does get justified but it also is always questions because confusions are always very sensitive to this idea that it might cost too much it might be too much of a burden on on the population so we should be far more careful in pushing forward but there is certainly that element as well and

comes back through time, 11th century, for example, and there's another move to go to go west. But I think what's probably different when we compare it to sort of European expansionism is that there is always somebody and people in powerful positions who put a break on. We don't want to see this happen. And to go back to your Africa, China and Africa, the big conundrum now is, of course, China needs to feed itself. Now, if we go back to the legalists, you know, we said agriculture is the absolute economic basis of society. Now, of course, the conundrum is, you know, how does a, how is a tradition that actually values agriculture as the primary source of somebody's livelihood? How does it turn into the mercantile society that it has become? How do you deal with merchants who like moving peasant move around?

You can't control them. You can't tax them. How do you control these people? And at the same time, ensure, did you have enough people on the ground who are actually productive? and this is a tension actually that runs almost through 3,000 years of Chinese history. There are many more philosophy and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4.