Shang Yang

Shang Yang the Chinese statesman and legalist reformer of the fourth century BC (c. 390-338 BC), minister of the state of Qin, whose sweeping reforms of law, land, taxation and military organisation turned a backward frontier state into the most formidable power of the age and helped to prepare the way for the unification of China.

Rise in Qin

Shang Yang, whose original family name was Gongsun and whose personal name was Yang, was a native of the state of Wei and a descendant of its ruling house. He studied the art of government and served under a minister of Wei, who on his deathbed recommended him to the ruler as a man fit to lead the state; the ruler ignored the advice, and Shang Yang, seeing no prospect at home, travelled west to the state of Qin.

In Qin he obtained an audience with Duke Xiao and, according to the historian Sima Qian, presented his ideas in stages: first a programme of government by virtue, then one of royal power, and finally the doctrine of the hegemon that the duke found congenial. Impressed, the duke appointed him to high office, and in 356 BC he began the reforms that made his name.

He governed Qin for about two decades, holding the post of chief minister and directing the transformation of the state. He was accused of arrogance toward the nobility and of harshness toward the people, but he retained the confidence of the duke until the duke's death. Deprived of his protector, he was accused of plotting, defeated in battle and put to death in 338 BC, his body dismembered as a punishment.

What he had built outlived him. The institutions he created were maintained, and a century later the ruler of Qin, drawing on the strength that Shang Yang had given the state, conquered all the other domains and proclaimed himself the first emperor of a unified China in 221 BC.

The Reforms

The reforms of Shang Yang touched almost every aspect of Qin life. He divided the population into groups and made them mutually responsible for reporting offences, so that the failure of one household to denounce the crime of another would expose the whole group to punishment. He made the law uniform and public, so that everyone knew the penalties attached to each act.

He reorganised the land by abolishing the older system of communal fields and recognising the private ownership and sale of land, and he encouraged agriculture by rewarding those who produced large harvests and penalising those who were idle. He also taxed grain and labour in ways designed to increase the productivity of the soil and the revenue of the state.

In the army he replaced the older levies of the aristocracy with a system in which military rank and reward depended on the number of enemy heads taken, opening promotion to commoners and binding their interests to the success of the campaigns. The officer class became a meritocracy of the battlefield, disciplined and ruthless.

He also standardised weights and measures and reorganised the administration into counties under appointed officials rather than hereditary lords, centralising power in the ruler and reducing the influence of the old noble houses. Together these measures turned Qin into an efficient military machine and a centralised bureaucratic state.

Law and the Legalist Programme

Shang Yang held that clear, impartial law is the foundation of a strong state. The law must be published so that all may know it, applied without distinction to noble and commoner alike, and enforced by reliable rewards and punishments. He famously secured the people's trust by erecting a pole at the market gate and offering a reward to anyone who moved it, and when a man stepped forward he paid him as promised, proving that his decrees would be honoured.

He taught that severe sanctions were the truest mercy, because they deterred crime and so saved lives. A ruler who punished resolutely would have few occasions to punish at all; a ruler who was lenient would bring disorder on his people. This paradox, harsh as it seems, was the core of his argument that the state must hold the exclusive power of reward and punishment.

Like Han Fei after him, he rejected the Confucian appeal to virtue and ritual as the basis of government. Praise of the worthy and the learned, he thought, distracted the people from agriculture and war and created factions that weakened the state. The good government was one in which the useful occupations were encouraged and the useless suppressed.

The Book of Lord Shang

The ideas attributed to Shang Yang are preserved in the Book of Lord Shang, a work in twenty-six chapters on law, agriculture and warfare. Like many ancient Chinese texts it is composite, and scholars believe that some chapters were written by Shang Yang and his immediate followers while others were added by later hands of the legalist school.

Its chapters on agriculture and war argue that these two activities are the state's true sources of strength, and its essays on law defend the public and uniform application of statutes. Some chapters describe in detail the methods of land use, taxation and census-taking that the government of Qin employed.

The book is notable for its sustained argument that a state's power can be engineered by policy rather than won by fortune or virtue. It treats the population as a resource to be organised, the nobility as a rival to be checked, and the law as an instrument to be calibrated for maximum effect. This cold and systematic approach made it one of the most influential texts of the legalist tradition.

Influence and Legacy

The reforms of Shang Yang helped to make Qin the dominant power of the fourth and third centuries BC and supplied much of the administrative machinery of the empire that followed. The system of counties, the standardised measures, the registration of households and the reliance on law all became part of the government of imperial China, whatever its official ideology.

His reputation, however, remained dark. Confucian writers regarded him as the archetype of the cruel and self-serving minister, and the harshness of the Qin state was laid partly at his door. The historian Sima Qian, though he recorded his achievements, condemned his methods and presented his death as a judgement upon a man who had ruled by fear.

Modern historians take a more measured view. They recognise that the measures he introduced were drastic but effective, and that his ideas about incentive, law and administrative organisation were among the most original contributions of the classical age. Shang Yang remains a central figure in the study of Chinese statecraft and of the legalist tradition.

See also

• Legalism
• Han Fei
• Qin dynasty
• Duke Xiao of Qin