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CHAPTER 9 “Full Bellies, Empty Hearts” The title of this chapter comes from the third paragraph of the Laozi: If you do not elevate the worthy, the people will not contend. If you do not esteem goods that are difficult to attain, there will be no thieves among the people. If you do not display desires, the people will not be calamitous. Therefore the orderly rule of the sage is to empty their hearts and fill their bellies,to weaken their will and strengthen their bones.He constantly causes the people be without knowledge and without desires; causes the knowledgeable to dare not [acting]. He does not act and that is all; hence everything is ruled in an orderly fashion.1 This statement serves as a useful departure point for a discussion of how peopleoriented thought was actualized in the Warring States period. In Chapter 8 I demonstrated the ubiquity of the catchphrase “ruling for the people” from the Western Zhou through Chunqiu political discourse; below I shall analyze its impact on Zhanguo thought.What were the actual implications of this slogan? How was a ruler supposed to fulfill his obligations toward the ruled? Which demands of “the people” had to be addressed?The quoted passage suggests that the people deserved economic well-being but were supposed to be removed from political processes.Was this view representative? And if so, what were the reasons behind the opposition to having the people participate in politics? And how does this opposition correlate with the imperative to care for the people? Tillers and Soldiers In Chapter 8 we saw that people-oriented thought derived primarily from the peculiar conditions of theWestern Zhou and Chunqiu polities, the very smallness of which encouraged a degree of communal cohesiveness and allowed intervention of the lower strata in political processes. By the Zhanguo period, however, this situation had changed considerably. Large, territorially integrated and centralized states replaced the tiny polities of the Chunqiu age; massive 198 conscript armies diminished the former military importance of capital dwellers ; and increasing domestic stability obliterated the capital dwellers’ role as kingmakers.In sharp distinction to both the preceding Chunqiu period and the subsequent imperial age, the Warring States period did not witness large-scale political action by commoners; even the very term guo ren, so prominent in the Zuo zhuan, almost disappears from Zhanguo texts.2 We might have expected that these conditions would diminish interest in the people’s political potential, but this did not happen.As I shall demonstrate, Zhanguo thinkers continuously reiterated the importance of the people for the polity,perpetuating the peopleoriented tendencies of the preceding age. First it may be useful to briefly outline the reasons for the ongoing concern for “the people” in the Zhanguo age.Three major developments may explain this. Most important was the appearance of mass infantry armies based on nearly universal conscription, which turned most of a state’s male population into soldiers. Henceforth, the need to discipline these peasant conscripts and prevent their desertion became a major concern of statesmen and generals, and no thinker could ignore this issue. Proposals on how to enhance the conscripts ’ willingness to fight varied considerably. Some thinkers, like Mengzi and Xunzi, or authors of certain military texts, such as the Wuzi 吳子 and Wei Liaozi 尉繚子, believed that only a benevolent ruler who cared for the people ’s livelihood would imbue them with martial spirit; a military manuscript fromYinqueshan 銀雀山, Shandong, for instance, recommends that the ruler “love the people as a newborn baby.”3 Others, like the Shang jun shu authors, believed that the people could be persuaded to fight only if their individual interests and fears were addressed: high rewards for good soldiers and heavy punishments for deserters would turn cowards into brave fighters.Yet another view, most explicitly present in the Sunzi bingfa 孫子兵法, treats the problem as primarily military and tactical: the soldiers should be placed in “fatal terrain ,” “from where there is nowhere to go”—and only then they will fight to death.4 Whatever their precise recommendations, different thinkers came to the unanimous realization that in an age of mass armies, one would not succeed militarily without paying due attention to the masses of conscripts, before and during the battle. A second reason for the increasing concern with the people’s affairs was economic.The widespread introduction of iron tools during the fourth century BCE (if not earlier) revolutionized Zhanguo agriculture, improving cultivation capabilities, increasing yields, and making it possible to turn...

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