Notions of Just War

When he conquered the last rival state in 221 bce, the First Emperor of Qin issued an edict to justify his military campaigns in which he claimed that the extermination of the six states was incurred by their own misdeeds, such as betraying the alliance with Qin, violating the accords with Qin, severing diplomatic relations with Qin, and even plotting to assassinate him, all of which had left him with no alternative but to resort to violence.

Ground-breaking as the creation of the empire might be, the notion of a righteous army was nothing new.¹¹ Though the establishment of the empire was largely through brute force, the Qin court still sought to justify its conquest. A ‘righteous army' was, in fact, an old tradition that could be traced back at least to the late eleventh century bce when the Zhou people were said to have invented the concept of ‘Heaven's Mandate' (tian ming) to explain why their benevolent ruler(s) could replace, even by force, the evil last ruler of the Shang as the overlord of the Chinese realm. The essence of the theory was that the righteousness of the ruler would entitle him to the mandate of heaven and the duty to carry out punitive campaigns, and there­fore bring peace and order to the realm under heaven. Thereafter this theory constituted the backbone of Chinese political ideology explaining the trans­ference of sovereignty and defining the legitimate use of violence.^{[542] [543] [544]} The speeches purportedly made by early Zhou rulers about employing the con­cept to justify their military campaigns were collected in Chinese classics that were studied by almost all educated men in pre-modern times and were frequently cited throughout Chinese history.

In the Warring States period, faced with the intensification of war and its disastrous social impact, political philosophers such as Mencius and Xunzi advocated that the appropriateness and righteousness of employing military force should be judged in terms of the people's welfare, and the ruler who made the well-being of the people a top priority would gain the wide and wholehearted support of the people, which could be translated into invinci­ble military power.1⁴ This might sound impractical for contemporary rulers, but its rhetorical function served as a useful tool of political propaganda.

The First Emperor, though long denounced as a tyrant in Chinese history, made serious efforts to publicise the righteousness of his conquest. Alongside the aforementioned edict, he left stele inscriptions that plainly reveal such an intention. During a series of imperial tours to the newly conquered east he and his entourage had stelae erected and inscribed to praise his remarkable achievements.^[545] Three themes are clear and consistent from these monu­ments: that the Qin rulers upheld the righteous principle and exterminated the six misbehaving states; that through the conquest the emperor used a war to end all wars, and his subjects would enjoy everlasting peace and order; and that the emperor had attained the unprecedented achievement of unifying all under heaven and would grant his subjects stability and prosperity.^[546] Although the First Emperor and his courtiers did not realise the rosy picture they painted, the rhetorical power of the words inscribed on stone outlasted the Qin dynasty. The Qin rulers not only promoted the principle of the righteous army passed down from the preceding age but also theoretically strengthened it by realising the ideal of a unified empire. Thereafter, ‘in the name of the empire' gave the ruler - the emperor in particular - a perfect pretext for launching just war.1^[547]

Unlike the short-lived Qin, the Former Han lasted for over two centuries; together with the Later Han, which claimed itself as a continuation of the Former and ruled for another two centuries, the two Han dynasties lasted for four hundred years, and this long reign indisputably encouraged and fostered the ideal of unified empire.

In the years following the abdication of the Later Han's last sovereign in 220 ce, two of the Three Kingdoms publicly proclaimed their regimes to be the only legitimate successor of the Han and vowed to reunify the empire. The ripe fruit of the struggle of the Three Kingdoms, however, was picked by the late-coming Western Jin, which also claimed reunification as the right­eous cause of its conquest and its success as evidence of its entitlement to the mandate ofheaven. The Western Jin's reunification proved to be ephemeral, but the ideal did not fade. Both the so-called barbarian kingdoms in the north and the Eastern Jin, with its successive regimes in the south, frequently used reunification as a legitimate cause for waging war. The southern dynasties launched northern expeditions in the name of recovering the north, whereas the foreign rulers of the northern states embraced the ideal of a unified empire and made attempts to conquer the south. One salient example in the north was the renowned Battle of Fei River in 383 ce, in which a foreign dynast who had recently put the north under his single rule launched the largest military campaign ever seen by contemporaries against the Eastern Jin, aiming to realise reunification. Although he met with a fiasco of a battle, it did not deter other northern rulers from pursuing the same ideal and waging wars of reunification.^[549]

Two other notions for justifying war were also derived from the precedent set by the Han. Given the long reign of this empire, the continuation and restoration of its rule became a strong cause for the legitimate use of military violence. Liu Xiu, as mentioned above, made use of his distant imperial kinship and claimed his founding of a new dynasty - the Later Han - as a restoration of the Han empire.

The Han empire as an imperial paradigm also greatly strengthened the identity of Han culture. During the long political disunion from the third to the seventh centuries ce, preserving Han culture provided another just cause of war for the Eastern Jin and the succeeding southern dynasties, which claimed themselves the inheritors and protectors of Han culture, against the barbarian regimes occupying north China. Such a claim was always inter­twined with the ideal of unified empire and gradually transcended ethnic boundaries. As a consequence, some foreign rulers in the north publicly embraced the ideal of a unified empire and the cultural identity of the Han. The oft-cited example is Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei (r. 471-99 ce), who tried to justify himself as the legitimate ruler of China by introdu­cing reforms that championed Han culture and launching southern cam­paigns for reunification. Regardless of Emperor Xiaowen's failure in conquering the south, fighting for a unified empire based on Han culture still assumed a core position in pre-modern Chinese notions of just war.