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Some light on ancient political philosophy

By Zhu Yuan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-12 07:50

If Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) earned himself a name as the originator of the idea of political pragmatism because of his book The Prince, his Chinese counterpart Shang Yang (390-338 BC), prime minister of the Qin State in Warring States Period (475-221 BC), gained his fame as a Legalist (fajia, a school of thought) for his book Shangjun Shu, or the Book of the Lord of Shang.

That Machiavellian has become an expression to mean cunning, amoral or opportunistic in a general sense suggests that Western scholars have put this Italian statesman and philosopher in the right perspective. The impact of Shang Yang's political theory was even greater that it could be interpreted as the theoretical foundation of China's autocratic monarchist system in nearly 2,000 years.

The study of Shangjun Shu is as important for gaining deeper insight into the country's ancient political system as the research of Machiavelli and his political theory for the understanding of ancient Italian and European political systems. For China, a country with a much shorter history of rule of law, it is of practical significance to make a clear distinction between the modern rule of law and the rule by law advocated by Shang Yang more than 2,000 years ago.

The latest book Studies on Shangjun Shu's Political Thought by Zhang Linxiang, a doctoral graduate from Northwest Normal University, shed some light on the nature of Shang Yang's political philosophy.

Different from his predecessors, most of whom considered this ancient statesman as the creator of legal system and advocator of the idea of rule of law, Zhang argued that what Shang Yang had proposed was in nature the rule by law, with its emphasis on how the king or emperor could make his subjects contribute to the country's prosperity by working hard in their fields and to the country's military strength by sacrificing their lives in the battlefields.

If anything, the idea Shang Yang proposed to his emperor is the same as what Machiavelli had put forward in his book The Prince. Their idea of political pragmatism can be boiled down to the principle that the ends justify the means.

For example, Shang Yang said that sever penalties must be inflicted to make subjects be willing to sacrifice their lives for the ruler as too many rewards would spoil them. He insisted that subjects would be fearful under severe penalties and then a little bit of reward would make them willing to fight to their death for their ruler. This idea is quite similar to that of Machiavelli, who said: "Benefits should be conferred gradually, and in that way they will taste better," and "It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both."

It goes without saying that the political philosophy of both only served the needs of autocratic rulers and showed no concern for the rights and interest of the general public. What is noteworthy is the fact that some Chinese historians or experts on political philosophy still think highly of Shang Yang and his political philosophy, which they believed had contributed to the first unification of Chinese nation by emperor Qin Shihuang, who established the country's first feudal dynasty of Qin (221-206 BC). Such a way of reasoning has actually followed the principle of ends justifying means, which was exactly the core of Shang Yang's political theory.

One thing despicable about the political philosophy of both Machiavelli and Shang Yang is that they had no respect for the ordinary people. Both suggested to rulers that ordinary people should be ruled with whatever means for their unconditional obedience and absolute abandonment of their own right and interest.

That the Qin Dynasty lasted only 15 years before it was overthrown by an uprising testifies to the negative impact of Shang's political theory. In fact, a combination of Confucianism and Legalist philosophy represented by Shang Yang dominated in the rule of the later dynasties.

Since Legalist school of thought was once praised in the middle of 1970s and some still believe that the rule by law advocated by Shang Yang is similar with the rule of law the country is trying to build nowadays, it should be more than necessary to know the true nature of his political theory.