The Confucian-Legalist State

Since the influential television quasi-documentary ‘River Elegy’ (1988), Chinese intellectuals have been fed the story that China, from time immemorial, has been in thrall to a super-stable government with a super-stable ideology, so that ‘China has no [significant or progressive] history’, as Hegel famously put it. (In the popular imagination, the themes of ‘Elegy’ have supplanted the Cultural Revolution ideology casting Confucians and Legalists as eternal foes in the unremitting class struggles of the pre-Communist era.) Deeply rooted in Michael Mann’s sociological analysis, yet cleaving closely to the narrative strategy deployed in ‘traditional scholarship’ (p. 178), this new book by Zhao Dingxin attempts to answer three main questions: (1) why was China able to achieve a unified, bureaucratic empire by 221 BC?; (2) why did the imperial institutions and ideology forged in the early empires show great resilience for two millennia?; and (3) why did China ‘fail’ to develop industrial capitalism, when the Chinese had a sophisticated economy in place centuries before Europe (England, really)? Professor Zhao provides as plausible an answer to these questions as we are likely to get at this stage in our inquiries. Considering a range of modes in which competition and conflict, not to mention interstitial developments or unintended consequences, arise, his reconstruction of the distant past seems less deterministic than most. Still, historians tend to look at the longue durée rather differently—deeply distrustful, on the one hand, of any search for origins and essences (metaphysical subjects in the eye of the beholder), and on the other mindful of the importance of path dependencies, the difficulties of cultural reproduction and the vagaries of human existence

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Bureaucracy · Capitalism · China · Class conflict · Communism · Empire · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy