A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium by Chris Harman Page B

confiscated. During the 54 year rule of the emperor Wu (141-87 BC) ‘the merchants’ properties were forcibly seized by the imperial power. In order to survive the merchants often had to establish ties with the bureaucrats or even the court’. 29
    Often protection of the peasants was the hypocritical excuse for such attacks. Document after document from the period complained that commerce and industry were ruining the peasantry, causing repeated famines and rural unrest and, at the same time, providing merchants with the means to threaten the state. This in turn, created dangers from an impoverished class. According to the emperor Wang Mang in AD 9, ‘The rich, being haughty, acted evilly; the poor, being poverty stricken, acted wickedly’. 30
    The centuries in which these different exploiting classes jostled with each other for influence were necessarily also centuries of intellectual ferment. The members of different classes tended to see the world in different ways. Rival philosophical and religious schools emerged as different social groups attempted to come to terms with the changes taking place around them.
    Confucius (born in the 6th century BC) and his 4th century BC follower Mencius advocated a respect for tradition and ritual combined with honesty and self control. In subsequent centuries this was to become the conservative ideology of the supposedly enlightened administrators, who kept society running on traditional lines while living a very comfortable life. In Mencius’s time it did, however, imply a repudiation of the methods of greedy princes. The repudiation went even further in the case of Motzu, who lived some 60 years after Confucius. He established a sect which sought to establish, by authoritarian means, an egalitarianism based on common frugality, opposed to selfishness, luxury and war. By contrast, the current later to be called Taoism preached that individual salvation lay not in collective action, but in learning techniques which helped the individual to withdraw from the world and master it. Versions of Confucianism and Taoism were to vie with Buddhism for people’s minds through much of later Chinese history, while egalitarian sects were repeatedly to emerge to express the bitterness of the poor.
    But the immediate victor in the ideological battles of the last centuries BC was a different current, usually called ‘legalism’. This laid the central stress on the strength and bureaucratic functioning of the state itself. It insisted that the state’s officials should only be concerned with fulfilling its laws, without being sidetracked by concerns with personal virtue preached by the followers of Confucius and Mencius.
    Legalism justified the role of the administrators as the embodiment of the general good. It also fitted in with the merchants’ stress on rational calculation and fear of arbitrary political decisions, which would disturb their money making. Its maxims were popularised, for instance in hymns for the masses which portrayed the administrator and the state’s edicts as the essential safeguard for society as a whole.
    The rulers did not depend simply on intellectual persuasion to win acceptance of their totalitarian view of the world. They also did their best to ensure people were not presented with any alternative. The first emperor decreed the burning of all books which referred to the old traditions: ‘There are some men of letters who do not model themselves on the present, but study the past in order to criticise the present age. They confuse and excite the people…It is expedient that these be prohibited.’ People who dared to discuss the banned books ‘should suffer execution, with public exposure of their corpses; those who use the past to criticise the present should be put to death together with their relatives’. 31
    At first, the increased power of the state did not prevent continued advance in trade and artisan production—indeed, they benefited from