Shang Yang

While violence plays an important but relatively small part in the texts already discussed, it stands at the very centre of another work, The Book of Lord Shang. Shang Yang was a high official in the state of Qin before unifica­tion, where he won fame for many changes to government.

The Book of Lord Shang makes concrete suggestions for policies to add incentives for actions a ruler wishes to encourage, which should be waging war and growing crops. It suggests, for instance, making it so that beheading an enemy releases a soldier from paying taxes. The goal is to turn warfare from something that the common population understandably feared into something they relished as a route to privilege. This is the sort of military that

the ruler would be able to make into an effective force for preserving, strengthening and enriching his state.

The Book of Lord Shang posits an unexpected corollary to this. This text argues that when a state successfully develops its military strength, it is then more or less obliged to turn to external warfare. If not, the same strength that enables the state's army to be victorious will reverse to become internal weakness. The text thus presents an economy of violence, in which ferocity that is not spent turns to work against the state that nurtured it; external violence substitutes for internal disorder. Legal punishments, also violent, are the way for the ruler to enforce the laws. Stability - in form of the absence of violence within a state - would result from proper governance. The combi­nation of military activity, agricultural production and an effective legal system would eventually bring lasting peace and a society characterised by humaneness and concern, without killing. Indeed, Shang Yang's ideas can be understood as ultimately encouraging cooperation.^[860] Yet the ideal of a humane society was, as The Book of Lord Shang presents it, far removed from the reality of its time. That transformation would not happen without violence; hence, the text argues, ‘Kindness has its origin in force'.^[861]