I have stumbled upon a website, The New Legalist, (Chinese version here, with much more stuff) and am dismayed at the distortions I find there.

    It seems to be the product of people with a fairly unremarkable nationalist, anti-globalization, anti-Westernization mindset.  They are searching not only for a new basis for critique but also for a distinct non-Western cultural foundation upon which to build a new global presence for China.  I say this is unremarkable because it has traces of the Say No nationalists of the 1990s.  Indeed, its underlying cultural anxiety traces back to the 19th century and the worries then about the balance between Western knowledge and Chinese "essence," the old ti/yong distinction. 

     It is novel, however, in that, instead of the usual reach for Confucianism as the new and distinctively Chinese cultural foundation, these guys go for the Legalism. 

     Let me say right up front that I absolutely believe that ancient Chinese thought can provide novel and important insights to modern life.  It is something I think and write about almost every day.  China today, of course, is vastly different from ancient China; indeed, contemporary China is more similar to contemporary America than it is to ancient China.  The past really is a different country, one that is very far away.  Yet even in our fraught modern times, ancient thought is useful and interesting.  Americans, as well as contemporary Chinese, can learn much about themselves and their world from the ancient texts.

     When nationalism enters the picture, however, when the past is put to work to legitimize the political interests of contemporary ruling groups and states, serious problems arise.  Perhaps we are always doomed to misinterpret or misuse the past, but nationalist appropriations are almost always the most dangerous, because they can be invoked to rationalize war and killing; that is what nationalists tend to do, whether American or Chinese or Serbian or whatever…

      The New Legalists are nationalists who have seized upon and distorted the most brutish features of "Chinese culture:" Legalism.  It is true, of course, that Legalist thought has long been a central element of Chinese statecraft.  It is the intellectual apparatus that defined the centralized bureaucratic state that proved so resilient over the long stretch of history.   But we must always keep in mind the human cost of the consolidation and reproduction of that state.  Quite simply, Legalist rulers were quite willing to kill untold numbers of Chinese people to maintain and continue their autocratic hold on power.  They also oversaw the destruction of significant amounts of Chinese culture in their obsessions to hold on to power.  Just ask the Mohists (which we cannot because the Qin essentially wiped them out as an intellectual force).  What might China have been if the Mohists had survived and thrived?

      The fundamental inhumanity of Legalism is best illustrated by the brevity of the Qin dynasty, which lasted only about 15 years, a fleeting moment in Chinese history.  The extreme brutality of Legalist rule, in its purest Qin form, was unsustainable.  It was only after the Han dynasty emerged and backed off Qin’s totalitarianism (though keeping a good dose of Legalist statecraft) that the centralized bureaucratic state could find its bearings. 

     As to the aesthetic destructiveness of the Legalist Qin one of the best demonstrations is to be found in the Shanxi Provincial History Museum in Xian.  When I was there a couple of years ago I was amazed at the extraordinary Zhou bronzes.  Beautiful, detailed work; supreme craftsmanship.  But when I reached the end of the long case of Zhou artwork, I turned to look for the next part of the permanent exhibit and there, across the hall, was a display of flat, crude pots and cups huddled up against an array of weaponry.  It was Qin, the time when all art was turned to the megalomaniacal purposes of the power-crazed ruler, when all craftsmen were forced to build a fantasy underground army to protect Qin in the next life.  Thousands upon thousands of people were sacrificed to the ersatz glory of the ruler.  Beauty was trampled under power.  And the people soon rose up and overthrew him. 

      That is the history that the New Legalists want us to embrace; but that is not quite how they tell it.  Here is there take on Qin’s extermination of intellectual life:

The First Emperor of Qin  is said to have burned
Confucian books and buried alive Confucian scholars (It’s not true
according to famous Chinese history book Shih-chi by Ssu-ma Ch’ien).

      Perhaps they mean to suggest that only the burying of scholars alive did not happen.  But careful scholarship tells us that (see Baumler comment here), while the actual burying of scholars alive is in doubt, the fact of extensive persecution of intellectuals and destruction of texts is certain.  We can quibble over whether the corpses of the scholars  were cold or not but we cannot deny Qin’s assault on Chinese culture. The New Legalists are trying to prettify an ugly history.

      Here’s another example:

Throughout human
history, the Chinese civilization is the only one which has not
flourished by force of gunboat conquest and colonial expansion but
through free interracial marriages and free migration, i.e., through
the unity of blood and land. It has been powerful at times, but never
an empire——it has been a highly-civilized organic social body. A
convincing evidence of the natural development of the Chinese
civilization is the fact that so far the distances between Shaanxi, the
location of its origin, and China’s current borders in all directions
are roughly equal.

      This is unadulterated rubbish.  Of course, the centralized Chinese state conquered and expanded by means of military force.  The Han did it; the Ming did it; the Qing (who I guess, since they were Manchu and not Chinese, don’t count for the New Legalists) did it.  "Free interracial marriages and free migration."  Yeah, sure.  Ask the Uighurs or the Tibetans.  All one big happy Chinese family.   And, additionally, the notion that "Chinese civilization" sprung up, fully formed, in Shaanxi, and then expanded outward, is fiction.  Someone needs to tell these guys to read what the archeologist’s and historians have to say about the ancient Chinese interaction sphere.

      I do not mean to suggest that Chinese civilization is somehow bad or different than others.  Quite to the contrary, I would argue that Chinese civilization, while it has its own unique features and inventions, was similar to other large-scale political formations in its use of both military force and cultural hegemony to secure compliance to the state within a given territory.   There is no need to white-wash that reality.

     But that is what the New Legalists are doing.  It is rather strange, really.  They take the most brutal element of China’s vast intellectual legacy and try to gussy it up.  They are obviously drawn to Legalism’s political realism, but they want to divert our attention away from precisely that same thing. 

     There are certain philosohical distortions as well.  The use of Legalism, which is staunchly anti-traditionalist, as the foundation for neo-traditionalist state legitimation strikes me as contradictory.  And then the enlistment of Taoism, and especially the Tao Te Ching, in this same project.  Wow.  That opens them up to all sorts of trouble: making Taoism serve nationalist ends.  But it’s getting late – maybe I’ll expand on those ideas tomorrow….