The modern Chinese translation of ‘violence' is the word baoli, combining the characters bao, literally ‘fierce, sudden or drastic', and li, literally ‘force, strength or power'.
But while it is certainly a modern expression - it was introduced from the Japanese usage of Chinese characters1 - the exercising of brute force to hurt or destroy persons or things so as to realise certain aims has absolutely not been strange to the Chinese people since remote antiquity.
Bao and li, though used separately, are commonly seen in ancient Chinese texts since the Bronze Age to describe various behaviours that can be regarded as violent.Violence was not considered intrinsically bad, though was always regarded as inferior to civil virtues, in ancient China. Whether a given act of violence was good or bad depended on who was using it against whom and for what purpose. From the point of view of the state - to borrow the Weberian definition - violence was legitimate when it was sanctioned with the pretext of maintaining peace and stability and upholding certain moral principles; otherwise it was illegitimate or illicit. For those who were against the state, this definition would certainly be reversed. Violence happened in different ways and on various scales. The largest and most devastating was undoubtedly war, but violence was also practised in forms of law enforcement, religious rituals, games, banditry, revenge, domestic violence, murder and so on. Since it is not possible to cover all such forms of violence in one chapter, in what follows I will focus mainly on warfare, which not only had a widespread impact on people and society but also always overlapped with other categories of violence.[531] [532]
This chapter aims to give an analytical overview of the perceptions and practices of violence vis-à-vis warfare in early imperial China, a period spanning the last quarter of the third century bce to the late sixth century ce. China in this period experienced the emergence of early empires and then nearly four centuries of political disunity (roughly from the early 200s to the late 500s), witnessed different attempts by states to exercise and restrain violence, and weathered external and domestic warfare of varying intensities.
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