"The Rise of the Great Qin Empire" was recently broadcast on CCTV, and qin, as China's first great unified dynasty, has been debated for 2000 years. As a result, this popular TV series and original novels have also become the focus of public opinion.
Sun Haohui, the original author of "The Great Qin Empire," believes that the scholar Wen Yang's recent three articles have made a very good explanation of Qin's autocracy, and Wen Yang proposed that it is a kind of narrowness to understand the Chinese political civilization represented by Qin based on the legal concept of Montesquieu and other Western scholars.
On March 25, Sun Haohui participated in the forum of "Dialogue with Sun Haohui: The Great Qin Empire and China Today", where he spoke with scholar Wen Yang to reinterpret the social civilization framework woven by the Qin Dynasty and the cultural traditions it condensed.
"The Great Qin Empire" is a "spiritually oriented" work
In 1998, Sun Haohui resigned as a law professor at Northwest University and devoted all his body and mind to the creation of the "Great Qin Empire" series of novels, and in April 2008, he finally published this 5.04 million-word long-form masterpiece. In his words, he "has a fanatical worship of the Great Qin Empire" and hopes to use this novel to justify the Great Qin Empire, which has been saddled with the insult of "tyranny" for a thousand years.
To describe the history of Qin from a completely positive perspective has never been seen before, whether it is historical writing or novel writing. After the novel was published, the evaluation showed a serious "polarization" trend.
Many readers were impressed by the grandeur of the great unification era in the novel, and some people criticized the novel's Chinese academic creation, believing that Sun Haohui had done too much glorification of qin's tyrannical side. For example, bai qi, a Qin general who killed 400,000 Zhao troops in the Battle of Changping, was written by Sun Haohui as a character with feelings and righteousness, and "must not be taken for granted".
How to fill the "historical gaps" in the novel? Sun Haohui believes that this process is like Sherlock Holmes solving the case, the existing historical record is the scene of the crime, and the final outcome is the case itself. How to rationally reason through the clues of the "crime scene" and make the result conform to the ending is the part that the novelist should reasonably imagine.
Filling history through his own imagination, Sun Haohui wrote "The Great Qin Empire" into a "spiritual-based" work. He said that he wrote this novel not only to present the history of Qin in all aspects, but more importantly, through this history, "to comprehensively present and excavate the excellent core value system of The era of China's original civilization."
"The reason why everyone loves the Great Qin Empire is also because they love the sunshine spirit of the era it conveys, the spirit of the Great Truth of that era, and the spirit of endless strife and change in that era."
Sun Haohui believes that Chinese civilization has undergone three turns, and it is a turning point from primitive society to the national era. From the division of civilization to the unified civilization, the creation of a unified civilization is another turning point, from the agricultural era to the creation of a new Chinese civilization system in the industrial age is the third turning point.
"The transition system from division to unification, that is, the transformation of civilization and the creation of civilization completed by the Qin Empire, reflects the historical experience and the historical lessons it provides, which should be paid special attention to in our time."
Stills from "The Great Qin Empire"
Justifying Qin's name is to establish the right to speak for the nation
"It is precisely because 'Great Qin Empire' itself is a spiritual-based work, so people discuss 'Great Qin Empire' and always avoid a lot of basic historical questions." Since the launch of "The Rise of the Great Qin Empire", the discussion about "Great Qin Empire" has set off a wave of small climax.
"There are very few points of historical consensus among the Chinese people." Sun Haohui said that to justify Qin's name, to some extent, it is to establish the right to speak of national discourse.
"There are very few people in the West who oppose iconic political leaders and eras such as Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire. However, our country does not have a good person in the evaluation of historiography, all people are problem figures, and all events are problem events. China attaches great importance to history books, but Sun Haohui believes that Chinese there is no consensus on the basic issues of history, "We claim to be the country in the world that studies history most clearly, every day is recorded, every year is recorded, no day is not clear, but we are vague on basic issues, and this chaotic situation must be changed." ”
Sun Haohui believes that criticizing Qin is to some extent a kind of cultural lack of self-confidence, "We do not have a strong ideology to support our cognition of self-civilization, and we do not have a strong discourse system to show where the value of our civilization is, whether it is worth inheriting or not." ”
The fundamental solution to this problem is to "study history with the concept of the history of civilization" and systematically compare Western civilization with Chinese civilization.
Sun Haohui took the history of confrontation between agricultural civilization and nomadic civilization as an example, holding that only China, an agrarian nation in the whole world, relied on its own strict organization and relied on its strong survivability in civilization, starting from the Spring and Autumn Period, the Duke of Qi Huan, the Princes of Jiuhe, and the expulsion of Rong Di and xiongnu, all the way to the Warring States, the Qin Empire, the Western Han Dynasty, and the Eastern Han Dynasty, tirelessly and endlessly fighting against the nomadic peoples, and pushing the nomads in the northern region so that they could not go south.
Sun Haohui believes that the reason why China has resisted the onslaught of nomadic peoples is that the source of its experience is Qin, "because of its war wisdom, because of its tight organization." Whether in terms of the maturity of the form of the state or the degree of development of military warfare civilization, the foundation of Western civilization accumulation in the long-term development process of mankind is too far behind ours. ”
"To this day we don't have to say that we want to create a Sinocentrism like Western-centrism and marginalize the West." But there should be a true view of the history of civilizations that strings together our history. Wen Yang proposed that China is now facing a problem of reconstructing the history of world civilization, "using the ideological concepts of our civilization and our practices, mainly our national practices, to re-evaluate the countries of the world and the various civilizations in history." ”
Sun Haohui. Visual China Information