Yesterday someone commented on my article and said that I was excusing Qin Shi Huang for his reign. His words were so fierce and vicious that they made people shudder. Perhaps, as he said, the root cause of the lack of human rights and freedom of the Chinese people lies in the tyrant of Yun Zheng.
Maybe he has a point.
He may have read a lot of books and had a deep insight into the history of the Qin Dynasty; Or maybe his life was not satisfactory, and he felt the harsh living environment of the common people of the Qin Dynasty.
For such things, the author just laughed it off.
But what I'm trying to say is, when we're criticizing or praising others, are we able to think about it from a bigger perspective?
As we think, Qin Shi Huang was arbitrary, tyrannical, greedy for pleasure, and all dynasties proclaimed his cruelty and unkindness, he burned books and pit Confucianism, built the Afang Palace, the Great Wall, the Lishan Tomb, and so on.
However, if we consider it from the perspective of the long history, many things are not as simple as we imagined.
In fact, the construction of the economic, cultural, and political systems of any dynasty is not achieved overnight, let alone changed by one person.
We only know that the Qin Dynasty experienced only 14 years from its founding to its demise, and there were only two dynasties. But we don't know that from the first monarch of the Qin Dynasty, Qin Xianggong, to the last emperor of the Qin Dynasty, Qin II. This Great Qin Dynasty has gone through vicissitudes and gone through 610 spring and autumn periods.
And how much we know how much suffering and glory this country has gone through, perhaps we cannot make a biased conclusion, let alone attribute the root of all sins to one person.
Historian Lu Simian said: Qin Shi Huang has always said that he was a tyrant and wiped out his benefits, but in fact, this is unjust. He really had a great ideal in politics. Although Qin Shi Huang's policy was good, it seemed to be too hasty. The Great Wall was built in the north, and the two Yue were collected in the south, and in addition to the conquest at that time, troops were also sent to defend it; Since there are troops to defend it, it is necessary to transport food and pay to supply; In this way, the people are no longer able to bear the burden of servitude. He also followed the old habit before the Warring States period and abused the people to serve himself. The reason for the defeat of the Qin people was harsh, especially in their extravagance. The usage is deep, and the extension does not measure the people's power, which can be blamed as a mistake in governance, and extravagance is unforgivable.
In the author's opinion, at least until he unified the Six Kingdoms, he has been following in the footsteps of the ancestors of the Qin Dynasty.
For this, Jia Yi of the Han Dynasty saw it more clearly than we do.
Here I briefly list a few sentences from the "Treatise on the Passage of Qin" as follows:
Qin Xiaogong according to the solidity of the Cuihan, the land of Yongzhou, the monarch and the minister insisted on peeking into the Zhou room, there is a sweep of the world, including the meaning of the four seas, and the heart of annexing the eight wildernesses. When it was the time, Shang Jun Zuozhi, the internal law, farming and weaving, repairing the tools of war, and fighting the princes externally.
Filial piety is not, Huiwen, Wu, Zhaoxiangmeng's old business, because of the last policy, the south to take Hanzhong, the west to Ba, Shu, the east to cut the anointed land, the north to collect the key county.
As for the first emperor, the remnants of Fen VI, Zhen Chang Zhi and Yu Yu, swallowed two weeks and died the princes, performed the supreme and controlled Liuhe, and whipped the world with the beating and fluttering, and vibrated the four seas.
The rhetoric written by Changsha Taishou is really good, and people can't put it down.
But what I am more concerned about is that after hundreds of years of hard work in this country, after being handed over to Yingzheng, he did not disappoint. He even achieved feats that his predecessors had not done, he unified the six countries, completed the great unification of the country, and laid the basic pattern of China's political system for more than 2,000 years.
This is a historical feat, and it has become an eternal monument.
And while he was enjoying the glory, he appeared as an imperfect image. He is a woman's treasure and pursues immortality; He is arrogant, boastful, and a greedy for pleasure.
In short, he has a whole bunch of vices.
However, as I said above, he is a contradictory individual, but it is this imperfection that allows people to peek into the multifaceted nature of human nature, while he is more and more real.
If that great empire were in the hands of you and me, would we be able to take care of it better than him, and how could our dark history be criticized by the world?