The Many Legacies of the First Emperor (II)
By Sam Meston
An 18th century portrait of Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of the Qin Dynasty. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)
This article is part 2 of a two part series. It contains major spoilers for the film Hero (2002).
Modern reassessments of the Emperor’s legacy first appeared in the early 20th century. The infamous ‘Century of Humiliation’ had seen China’s precipitous decline from the ‘Middle Kingdom’ to the ‘sick man of Asia’, and caused a deep soul-searching in Chinese society, manifesting in revolutionary intellectual campaigns such as the May Fourth movement. This was during the fragmented ‘warlord period’ in the wake of the imperial system’s collapse, characterised by violent jostling for power between military ‘cliques’. The parallels were not lost on scholars of the time, who witnessed the perils of fragmentation and yearned for their own unifier. Supporters of the KMT found that figure in Chiang Kai-shek. Historians such as Ma Feibai began writing revisionist biographies of Qin Shi Huang, praising him for uniting the nation (paralleled with Chiang’s Northern Expedition) and repelling the barbarians (paralleled with resistance against the Japanese invasion).
However, the rehabilitation of the Emperor would eventually be spearheaded by Chiang’s sworn enemy, Mao Zedong. Early PRC histories, tasked with reframing Chinese history in terms of class struggle, nevertheless corroborated the traditional narrative by casting the Emperor as a class enemy and the downfall of the Qin as a peasant uprising against the oppressor. But with the declaration of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, Mao himself was compared to Qin Shi Huang for his persecution of intellectuals. He embraced the comparison, boasting:
“He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive... You revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.
When you berate us for imitating his despotism, we are happy to agree! Your mistake was that you did not say so enough.”
A sympathetic biography by Hong Shidi gained the Chairman’s approval and was published by the state press. In it, the Emperor is depicted as a far-sighted revolutionary who, much like Mao, strove to overthrow an ossified, elitist society and forge a new China. Likewise, the downfall of the dynasty is attributed to hidden revisionist elements in the court who seized power after his death - the very fear of which caused Mao to initiate the Cultural Revolution in his own time.
Mao’s cult of personality and purges of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution drew comparisons with the First Emperor, which he readily embraced. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)
In post-Mao China, different takes on the Emperor have emerged from Chinese cinema, notably by the iconic Fifth Generation directors Zhou Xiaowen, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Zhou’s The Emperor’s Shadow (1996) has King Zheng summoning a childhood friend, famed musician Gao Jianli, as a court musician, with their reunion leading to a philosophical conflict over the ruler’s methods. Chen’s The Emperor and the Assassin (1998) depicts him in his youth as an idealist who wishes to unite the land to bring peace, but trauma and betrayal transform him into the familiar tyrant. Zhang’s Hero (2002) takes an inverse approach, setting him up as a tyrant for whom the protagonists bear righteous grievances, and then stunning the audience with the assassin’s last minute refusal to complete his mission. It is revealed that the protagonist, ‘Nameless’ (based on Jing Ke), was convinced by his accomplice Broken Sword to spare the king, using only two characters: 天下 Tian xia (All Under Heaven, a traditional name for China). The future Emperor suddenly becomes an enlightened despot, a sage of cosmic perspective who wishes only to bring peace and unity, grateful beyond measure to be understood by his would-be assassin. Zhang leaves us with this message: through discarding his personal grievances and sacrificing himself to the ‘tyrant’ for the greater good, Nameless truly becomes the Hero.
A potent lesson of history is that man cannot be remade in an instant. China has always answered to a prime authority, that is, the immense weight of its past. Traditional Chinese culture has proved resilient and dynamic, surviving every assassination attempt to date. The First Emperor’s ambition to bury and burn the old society failed catastrophically and gave way to a revival of said society under the banner of the Han. The Emperor and his dynasty died young, but the system he designed survived by being better adapted to the society it governed. The Han can be seen as a dialectical synthesis of the Zhou culture and its norms, and the omnipotent Legalist state, a synthesis that would set the fundamental nature of China as we know it. So it was that Mao, in his bold attempt to create a new ‘proletarian culture’, caused ‘New China’ to cannibalise itself, thus giving way for its negation - that is, the necessary betrayal of Mao’s system and all that is evoked by the name ‘Deng Xiaoping’. Today, Xi Jinping sees no issue embracing the seemingly opposed facets of Chinese thought, regularly quoting both Confucius and the Legalist thinker Han Fei (the “Chinese Machiavelli”, much admired by the First Emperor). Meanwhile, the tourism attracted by the Emperor’s Terracotta Army brings in millions in revenue to China every year. The Emperor, even being condemned to the eternal sentence of historical pariah, achieved the most lasting victory of all, in that his enemies inherited what he bestowed upon the world - the very existence of China as a unified polity. And in that sense, the First Emperor has gained the immortality he always wanted.