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"The secret to making farmers obedient is to keep them half dead"
The above sentence, which sounds very harsh at first glance, comes from Tokugawa Ieyasu, a Japanese man during the Sengoku period.
Serving powerful kings such as Imagawa Yoshimoto, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and other powerful kings in his life, with years of forbearance, the "Battle of Sekigahara" defeated the Toyotomi family to dominate Japan in one fell swoop, creating Japan's last shogunate dynasty.
It stands to reason that a person who can achieve such a great thing should be a person of insight, and it is impossible not to know the truth that the power of the people is the strength of the country.
In common sense, a country can be strong only if the people are rich and strong, but the belief of "keeping the people half-dead" did allow Tokugawa Ieyasu to dominate the world.
All this comes from the wisdom of an ancient Chinese pre-Qin period.
He is the Shang Martingale we know, the one who helped the Qin State to enrich the country and strengthen the army with the ideas of the Legalists, and laid the foundation for the future Qin State to go east and conquer the world.
At the same time, Shang Martin's book "The Book of Shang Jun" was also regarded by later rulers as a word for the art of the imperial people.
Shang Martingale himself, also because of "self-restraint in practice", ended the life of legendary tragedy.
So what's going on here? Why is the country stable and strong when the people are poor and weak? Let's move on.
Shang Martingale its people
Shang Martingale was an important politician and reformer of the Qin state during the Warring States period.
The Spring and Autumn Warring States period was a period of great changes and development in China's ideology and political structure.
In world history, it was also this period known as the "Axis Age", which gave birth to outstanding politicians such as Confucius, Aristotle, and Shakyamuni.
Countless political schools and philosophical currents germinated between 300 BC and 200 BC, and profoundly influenced the ideas in the minds of people living in the Central Plains.
During this period, rulers attacked each other, and in order to annex their opponents and defeat enemy countries, they would stop at nothing to expand their national strength and wage war.
In the pre-Qin era, the various princely states that originally practiced the Zhou rites abandoned the original patriarchal ruling system of "monarchs and subjects, fathers and sons", and instead believed in the emerging doctrine that could "enrich the country and strengthen the army".
One of the most representative is the "Legalist Doctrine" during the Warring States period, which focused on the study of monarchical rule.
The name "Legalist" comes from the book "The Book of Law" by Li Wei of the Wei State, and there are two kinds of laws.
One is a written law decree against the people and other governed objects; The other is the "law of governance" provided to rulers, that is, governance thinking.
Later, the idea of "Legalism" was sorted out and refined by Han Feizi and Shen Bujie, and summarized into three disciplines: "Law", "Technique" and "Potential".
The real prosperity of Legalism originated from the Qin state becoming strong due to the change of law, and finally established Legalism as the guiding ideology for governing the country. The key person is Shang Martingale, who is between Li Wei and Han Feizi.
Shang Martingale, the court of the Weiguo Sect, originally named Gongsun Martin, entered Qin as an official through Jing Qing, the favored minister of Qin Xiaogong. Initially, Qin Xiaogong listened to Gongsun Martin's lecture on the way of benevolence and love, thinking that he was boastful.
Later Gongsun Martingale, with the utilitarian technique of "hegemonic" power, successfully attracted Qin Xiaogong to adopt the "Legalist Doctrine", thus becoming a powerful country.
In current history textbooks, Shang Martingale has always been a very positive "feudal reformer".
His story of "standing wood for faith" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and in the subsequent process of changing the law of the Qin state, the system of rewarding cultivation wars, private ownership of land, and awarding military merits made the Qin state strong, and finally martyred with his body, which seems to be a positive tragic figure.
But historically, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the evaluation of martingale.
On the one hand, after the Han Dynasty, the traditional Confucian image of the Qin state and Legalism has always been associated with the "brutal image" of destroying Confucianism.
On the other hand, in fact, Shang Martingale's ruling philosophy does have many violations of "benevolence" and are contrary to actual morality.
In the process of changing the martingale law, many controversial policies and theories were proposed, such as degrading the status of merchants and forcing adult men to separate from their parents and increase taxes, which had a great impact on the living standards of the people at that time.
One of the striking ideas of Shang Martingale is: "The weaker and more ignorant the people, the stronger and more stable the country." ”
This view stirred controversy at the time and in later generations, but became one of the core ideas of the Martingale reform.
In the Legalist work "The Book of Shang Jun", it will explain why the Legalists identified this view and its impact on the history of the Qin state.
What is the Book of Shang Jun?
Speaking of "Shang Junshu", we have to talk about how powerful this book is.
First of all, it is one of the representative works of the Legalist school in the Warring States period, with 26 articles in the book, but two of them are unfortunately lost.
As for the author, traditional history has always believed that it is Shang Martingale, but some people began to question this view in the Qing Dynasty.
There are now two popular views in academic circles, one that says that the entire book is a forgery, and the other that some of it was written by Shang Martin himself.
In short, the Book of Shang Jun was written between the Warring States period and the Qin Dynasty, which can reflect the political thought of the Qin people in that period.
The Book of Shang Jun records that the people of that era pondered various political issues in order to establish a powerful Qin state.
During the period when Shang Martin served as the prime minister of the Qin state, the Qin state was facing many internal and external challenges, and the social structure still followed the division system of the Zhou Dynasty, conservative and backward, with a huge gap between the rich and the poor, and political corruption was rife.
Shang Martingale knew that the strength and stability of the country could not be separated from a stable social foundation and a strong ruling force, so he would spend most of the "Book of Shang Jun" on how to change the political system, how to train the army, how to develop land and other policies.
However, he also understood that under the political conditions of the time, the key to a rich country and a strong army was the accessibility of government decrees and the unity of the monarchy and the people, and only when the decrees of the centralized government could reach all directions and be implemented to the letter, the above strategy could be implemented.
If the people of the Qin state were prosperous and educated, it could pose a challenge to the ruler, leading to unrest and instability.
Because in the eyes of Shang Martingale, the decrees of the Qin state should be drawn up by the monarch and the core of the government, and the local government only pays taxes and enforces, and does not need to have more ideas, the more ideas, the easier it is to cause changes.
Therefore, Shang Martingale believed that in the centralized model, the state used harsh laws and regulations to bind the people, and bound the people to the army and land in order to keep the country rich and strong.
And keeping the people weak and ignorant helps the country to be strong and stable.
Shang Martingale also took a series of measures to realize his theory.
First, he carried out the reform of the land system, abolished the system of divided ownership, and implemented a unified state-owned land system. This reform weakened the power of the nobility and increased the ruling power of the state.
Second, Martingale implemented a strict legal system that ensured the fairness and effectiveness of the law and its enforcement.
He vigorously developed agriculture and industry and increased the country's economic strength. Through these measures, Shang Martingale weakened the strength and wisdom of the people, making the country more centralized and stable.
The way of the "weak people"
There is a special chapter in the Book of Shang Jun called "Weak People", which is a record of how Shang Martin had in mind the means of making the people poor and ignorant, and the country rich and strong.
There is an important principle in Shang Martingale's political philosophy called "strong country and weak people".
He believed that for a country to become strong, it had to sacrifice the rights and participation of some people and limit their freedom and wisdom.
Although it may sound a little unfair in modern times, given the weak control of the government over the grassroots areas in ancient societies, in Shang's view, this was to ensure the stability and prosperity of the country.
Shang Martingale only cares about the strength of the country, but he is not completely opposed to the participation of the people in the political life of the country.
The historian Hu Tieqiu once said that for Shang Martingale, the state and the people are like two key parts of his ideal perfect machine, influencing and promoting each other.
The Qin State is like a complex machine that requires all the components to work in tandem to work optimally.
Therefore, although there is an opposition between the state and the people, we must not only see their conflict, but also think about their respective roles in the ideal political model depicted in the Book of Shang Jun.
In Shang Martingale's plan, the representative of the national will is the center of the monarch, while the people of the four directions are the vast resources and participants.
Through competition and contribution, the outstanding part can acquire the means of production and the status of the "new aristocracy", and then participate deeply in the formulation of policies.
Imagine a country that is strong and prosperous, but does not care about the interests and needs of its people, and such a country will not last long.
Similarly, a society in which the people are strong and powerful, but the country is in chaos, cannot be sustained.
Therefore, when discussing the relationship between the "strong country and weak people" in the Book of Shang Jun, we should avoid falling into opposing thinking, but should think about the interdependence of the ancient state and the people in the political model constructed by Shang Martingale.
Although the Qin Dynasty flourished and died suddenly, the ancient ruling ideology centered on the principle of "strong country and weak people" in Shang Martingale's political philosophy has always existed in ancient Chinese history.
The rulers of the Han Dynasty have always shown themselves as "respecting Confucianism" in official propaganda, but a sentence by Emperor Xuan of Han completely exposed the actual situation of Confucianism and internal law in the Han Dynasty.
"The Han family has its own system, which is originally a tyrant? He is pure moral teaching, with Zhou Zhenghu. ”
It can be seen that in the hearts of ancient rulers, the useful art of taming the people never goes out of style. For the ancient political history of East Asia, Shang Martingale's art of "weak people" has always been the mainstream trend of thought, which is why Tokugawa Ieyasu said at the beginning.
The ancient state was like a machine, where rulers and people engaged each other to make social mechanisms work more smoothly.
Therefore, the gears cannot be large and small or angular, and if the country is too strong, "the people's grievances will boil", and if the people are too strong, "they can also carry the boat or overturn it".
Only by paying attention to the interaction between the two in the ideal political model constructed by the Shang Junshu can we truly understand the meaning of the idea of "weak people".