Culture and Law: How Han Succeeded Where Rome Fell.

[I gotta start by apologising for how long this took—I only realised when I started drafting this essay that almost all my knowledge of Rome comes from Chinese historians. And um, much like how western historians don’t know much about China, I’m pretty sure Chinese historians don’t really understand much about Rome. So I had to spend a lot of time binge-reading and researching Roman culture and history to make sure I was completely talking out my ass. Obviously, there is a MASSIVE amount of Roman history, and I couldn’t even scratch the surface of it. I did the best I could, I think the central thesis of what I’m trying to say still stands. But if some of my facts are laughably wrong, please let me know!]

Han Dynasty China gets compared to Rome a lot, both on the Chinese internet and on the western internet, and it totally makes sense why. They’re both massive superpowers existing around the same time, dominating their hemisphere both politically and economically. They came into power at roughly the same time period and fell to pieces at roughly the same time period. Rome broke into a western half and an eastern half, and Han Dynasty broke into a northern half and a southern half.

And then from that point on, China’s history and Rome’s history take two completely different paths. Two hundred years after the collapse of Han Dynasty, Sui Dynasty successfully unites all of China again. The Emperor of Sui Dynasty was not of Han ethnicity. He was of Xianbei ethnicity, a nation that was one of the staple barbarians that harassed Han Dynasty, who had never officially joined Han Dynasty, who had its own distinct culture and political customs.

And when he took over China, he completely adopted Chinese culture and Chinese customs and Chinese laws and Chinese political institutions, and Sui Dynasty was nigh-identical to Han Dynasty except a couple of targeted political reforms. And that’s not a coincidence in China. When the mongols took over in Yuan Dynasty, they didn’t build a mongol empire. They were the ones who made themselves fit in to a Chinese empire. Even to this day, Chinese people identify themselves as Han. They’re proud of being direct descendants of Han Dynasty. They still think that the People’s Republic of China is the exact same nation as Han Dynasty China, in a way that I don’t think even modern day Italians think they’re the exact same nation as the Roman Republic.

In the west, most of the discussion about comparing Han Dynasty to Rome I’ve seen is something like, “If Han Dynasty China and Rome went to war, who would win?” Which I find a lot less interesting than the question frequently raised on the Chinese internet. “How come Han identity has such stronger staying power than the Roman identity?”

And then usually, this turns into a brag fest about how Chinese culture is objectively better or something. I don’t think this is true at all. I don’t think the Han identity stuck around by sheer chance or evolutionary fitness. There’s plenty of outright history pointing to the fact that the Han identity was specifically crafted and engineered to optimise for staying power.

Let me tell you about Liu Che, the seventh Emperor of Han Dynasty, consistently ranked among the top 3 best Emperors of Chinese history. (Speaking of, anyone interested in a Top 10 List of Chinese Emperors In My Opinion?) A lot of people think this is because of his military accomplishments in defeating the Xiong’nu and expanding Han Dynasty territory to be the biggest it’s ever been. This, in my opinion, is only the third most amazing thing he’s accomplished.

Looking with 20/20 hindsight, in the broad scheme of history, the most important thing he’s actually contributed to China is Confucianism.

“But wasn’t Confucius a thing all the way back in the Warring States’ Period like 600 years ago? What’s it got to do with Liu Che?” you ask.

Before Liu Che came along, Confucius was just another philosopher among hundreds. He wasn’t the most important. He wasn’t the most popular. He wasn’t even foundational to the building of China. That was accomplished with a joint effort between the Legalists and the Mozi faction of technological pacifists. Confucianism was the most hated philosophy of Qin Shi Huang, who wrote the legal code that Han Dynasty was built upon.

But the head scholar of Confucianism at the time, Dong Zhongshu, offered Emperor Liu Che something no Emperor could ever refuse.

Immortality.

The foundational concept of Confucianism is the importance of rites and rituals and culture. Everything that comes afterwards is just Confucius’s idea of what a good culture should be. But that’s flexible. That can all be changed. Whatever Liu Che doesn’t like can be removed, and whatever Liu Che does like can be added in. It doesn’t damage the core concept of Confucianism.

“What is a nation? Is it the land? Is China not China if we lose a couple states to the north or gain a couple of states to the west? Is it the people? Is China not China when the current population dies and is replaced by a new generation? A nation is composed of its rites and its rituals and its culture and its customs. How can you tell if a nation is China? If a population is Chinese? By the fact that they wear their clothing right lapel over left. By the fact that they wear their hair pinned up. By the fact that they use chopsticks to eat. By the fact that they use red for weddings and white for funerals. By the fact that odd numbers are considered masculine and powerful. By the fact that their houses have a raised threshold. So long as these customs exist, no matter who rules China or who its people is composed of, it’ll always be China. This is how you create a Dynasty that never falls.”

“But it’s not that easy, is it? Disasters occur. War is inevitable. The general trend under heaven is that there is bound to be unification after prolonged division and division after prolonged unification. And culture evolves and changes and fades with the times. How do you actually enforce Han culture and Han customs, even when Han aren’t a ruling power anymore?”

“You blur the lines between culture and law.”

On the one hand, it is important to write cultural customs into the legal code and have it be enforced with clear and defined consequences. You enforce being filially pious to your parents. You enforce the celebration of the New Year, and the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Moon Festival. You enforce what each social class is allowed to decorate their houses with. You enforce how many good luck statues people are allowed to put on their rooftops. You break down the teachings of Confucius, and as much as possible, you work it into your legal code.

And at the same time, you work existing laws into the culture. You encourage a national culture of valuing exams and having an awe of well-learned people. You teach people to have a wariness and contempt of merchants. You promote poems that praise the beauty of doing up your hair, or wearing many layers of silk. You write stories with an Aesop of treating your parents well. You break down the legal code, and without going into too much boring detail of why it’s necessary or how it works, you work it into folklore and songs and fairy tales so that people trust it’s right with the same inherent naivety that they think wearing your clothes right lapel over left is obviously right.

That way, even if a horrible calamity happened and Han culture is near totally wiped out, legal codes are still a pain in the ass to write from scratch. Everybody borrows from whatever came before them. And so long as they use Han laws, then the incentives provided by those laws are going to bring back Han culture naturally.

If a horrible calamity happened, and the Han legal code was entirely lost, you can still piece back together what it must have been by looking at what culture exists among the people and reverse-engineering from there. And it makes it exceedingly hard to tell apart which laws are actually necessary to maintaining the function of society and everything breaks if you fuck with it, and which laws are just around to enforce culture.

Liu Che believed him, and from that day onwards, Confucianism was the only philosophy that Han rulers believed in. While nothing was done to censor the other philosophies, with no attention or support from the government, they soon died out among scholar classes.

And it worked. When Han Dynasty fell apart in 220 AD and China broke apart into the Three Kingdoms era. All three Kingdoms were completely confident and determined to overtake the other two and restore a united China. Then, in the Wei Jin period, all sixteen of the tiny nations that occupied previously Han territory were all determined to be the one to overtake the other 15 and restore a united China.

Because everyone who was born and raised in China believed, based on both the laws of their society and the folklore and songs they grew up with, in their Chinese identity. In the inherent rightness and inevitability that China will be united again and restored.

And that was true all the way until the mid 1600s. You could time travel to almost any point in China history between 150 BC and 1644 Ming Dynasty, and use the same general cultural common sense about what people consider appropriate and what they consider to be outside of the overton window, and be more or less correct.

The same wasn’t true for Rome, or so Chinese historical what-if writers say. They never enforced a Roman identity on the places they conquered. They let the locals continue to speak their local languages, worship their local gods, keep their local holidays, preserve their own cultures. The most useful parts of those cultures, they’d take and work into Roman culture. But Roman culture only ever existed in Rome itself. If Rome had established clear, long-term diplomatic contact with China, and learned the importance of a national identity from China, could it could have pulled itself back together after a collapse too?

Who knows? That’s why historical fiction is fun. Unfortunately, almost no writers I read actually cover the reverse. What’s the most important aspect that Han Dynasty China could have learned from Rome?

To be honest, I have no fucking clue. This is what I mean by saying that there’s just too much to Rome to learn in a dozen sessions of binge reading. I only have a vague idea of the direction to explore in, for now. For example, what really are Rome’s laws on commerce and protections and subsidies for the merchant class? Probably the biggest flaw of Dynastic China was its perpetual wariness and contempt towards merchants and businessmen, and its punishment of attempts at entrepreneurship. It’s the main reason that despite having a massive amount of educated population, and over half of all the money in the entire world, and being centuries ahead of Europe in science and technology, China never managed to industrialise until the 20th century.

Something else that interests me, how did Rome manage to keep the Emperor’s personal servants from having too much influence with him? At least with my last-minute binge of Roman history, I don’t see a lot of problems with, like…extremely powerful and corrupt household servants in the Imperial Palace? This is technically the specific problem that brought down the Han Dynasty—eunuch problems. And I don’t recall reading anything about the Roman Empire having a big problem with the…um…what’s the equivalent. The palace head of household? Having entirely too much influence over the Emperor, becoming amazingly corrupt, and taking total control of the court? You had influential Queens. You had influential tycoons. But I don’t recall ever reading about influential servants in Rome.

Is it more of a concept of class divide? A stronger alliance among the nobles to never give anyone in the servant class the time of day? But the thing is, when you spend every waking hour of your life with your secretary, you’re going to inevitably build a bond. It’s human nature. Even if it was just a dog, you’d get attached. When Alfred gives Batman advice, Batman is going to listen. No matter how many stories exist out there where the Butler Did It, Batman is always going to think, “But it’s Alfred. He’s different!” It’s not as though China didn’t know eunuch politicking is a big problem. But in subsequent dynasties, a real solution for this problem never came up, exactly because it’s hard for anyone to keep up their guard 24/7 around someone who’s always nice and solves all their problems.

I’m sure there’s lots of cool ideas and even stuff that Rome had that I’m not thinking of. What do you guys think is the best thing Han could’ve learned from Rome?

There’s not much of a strong thesis to this essay—there’s no greater point I am trying to make. This is more just a deep dive into the rise of Confucianism in China, why it stood out among all other philosophers, and why the government chose to primarily promote it to prominence, and why it continues to be viewed as foundational to Chinese culture to this day.

I suppose much like my concubines essay, I’ll finish off with a couple of fun facts about Confucius and his philosophy that I think is cool, but hardly ever gets talked about.

COOL FACT 1: Most people’s image of Confucius is this doddering old man who talks a lot about how you have to be nice to your parents. But actually, by historical accounts, he is a six foot six musclebro from Shandong? He was expertly trained in archery and chariot riding and was known for feats of astounding strength, like raising the drawbar on city gates with his bare hands (roughly 100 to 150kg). And from this, the Chinese internet has made up many memes about him, such as how Confucius taught that we should teach by example, and he carried a sword that he named Example. Or that he would regularly win philosophical debates by just beating the shit out of the other side with his walking stick.

COOL FACT 2: Because Confucianism was made, well, the official state philosophy, every Emperor who established a new dynasty found it necessary to gain the approval of the Kong family in order to prove their legitimacy. And in times of chaos, all the warlords and Kings would avoid harming the Kong family in order to not lose reputation with just about every scholar in China, because everyone was raised and taught on Confucius’ teachings. As a result, the Kong family is the longest running “noble” family who managed to keep their holdings and expand their influence through every Dynastic change while other noble families rose and fell with the tides of time. Even the CCP found it necessary in the 50’s to keep letting the Kong family be major landlords, in order to gain the legitimacy that their official approval would give. And while Confucius might have been a cool guy, his descendants are pretty corrupt as fuck.

COOL FACT 2.5: Every new Dynasty also found it necessary to give him cooler and cooler titles until, by the time of the Nationalist Chinese government, his title was literally The Ultimate Holiest of Ancestral Teachers. It makes me want a Confucianism based sentai show, where he evolves into slightly different variations on a giant mecha toy called the Mega Ultra Super Holy Teacher Omega 2K Electric Boogaloo.

COOL FACT 3: But in the modern day, when scientists went to run DNA tests on the Kong family descendents, the very first three people they tested all came from different paternal lines. So um. Yeah.

COOL FACT 4: You might have noticed how I said Confucius was from Shandong before. Yup, that’s my home state. Thanks to his influence, Shandong is known as one of the most conservative and sexist of Chinese states. A lot of Shandong’s stereotypes are that it’s a land where women are not allowed to eat at the table, and you still have to literally kowtow to your seniors in order to show respect.

COOL FACT 5: Making Confucianism the official state philosophy didn’t actually do much to tamper philosophical diversity in China. You just have to package every new idea using the skin of Confucianism. Sort of like how there was plenty of philosophy being done in Europe in the guise of theology. People would think of an interesting new idea, and then twist however much of Confucius’s writings they needed to, to justify that this is totally a legitimate interpretation of the Sacred Text. This is why Confucianism often gets associated with a bunch of bullshit that Confucius himself clearly never said or believed. >.> sort of like the bible.

NOT SO COOL FACT 6: I’ll finish by noting that the absolute central core of the culture that Dong Zhongshu wanted to perpetuate, the foundational principles of Confucius’ teachings, is the importance of education. The dream of every Confucian scholar is to see a world of free public education available to every man, woman, and child. Where anyone who wanted to could pursue knowledge freely. And it took 2500 years of economic development and scientific inventions and technological progress and political upheaval in order to achieve a society where that is possible. Just for the government to turn around and ban 50% of the population from high school, and 50% of the remaining population from university. It makes me genuinely really sad to think about this.