Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [40]
Even among his admirers, the First Emperor is known for his cruelty and intolerance. He prohibited philosophical debate, burning thousands of “subversive” books and forbidding any praise of the past or criticism of the present. In 212 BC, the emperor reportedly executed 460 scholars, burying them all in a single grave. Those who defied the emperor were buried alive, boiled to death, or ripped to pieces by chariots tied to their four limbs.3
The First Emperor's oppressive policies sparked widespread rebellions and at least three assassination attempts against him. Although the emperor survived these attempts, he became obsessed with finding an elixir of immortality, and he died traveling in search of it. His son was a weakling, and only fifteen years after its founding, the house of Qin was overthrown, succeeded by the Han dynasty, which would remain in power for four hundred years.
Despite the brevity of his reign, the First Emperor had laid down a powerful principle that—with only a few striking exceptions, including the Tang dynasty—would reappear throughout Chinese history: that the ruthless suppression of diversity could be required to unify China. During the Qin dynasty, it was principally intellectual diversity that was quashed. Over the next two thousand years, China's intolerance would take the form of sporadic ethnic and religious oppressions, cultural “purification,” rejection of foreigners and foreign ideas, and, most fundamentally, Chinese ethnocentrism and the assertion of Chinese cultural supremacy.
Perhaps all societies practice a degree of ethnocentrism, but special circumstances in China encouraged such attitudes to an unusual degree. Hemmed in by natural barriers, China for centuries experienced only the most limited contact with the developed civilizations of Europe, India, and the Middle East. China's neighbors were principally scattered, nomadic, and tribal. The Chinese were thus for centuries the largest unified population in the region, the most urbanized, the most literate, and consequently by far the most advanced technologically and culturally.
At the same time, the Chinese had good reason to fear their neighbors. The Chinese were far superior in numbers and technology, but the nomads had one thing that the Chinese did not: horses. The nomads alone possessed the vast grasslands necessary for grazing large numbers of specially bred horses that for centuries provided a critical military advantage. These horses, along with superb riding and archery skills derived from the hunt, allowed the northern barbarians to conduct raids into the settled lands to their south to seize the Chinese food and other goods they depended on to survive, and then to retreat into the limitless steppe. This constant threat of slaughter and pillage by mounted raiders, a problem that defied permanent solution, shaped the ancient Chinese notion of barbarism. The taint of barbarity was not limited to the steppe peoples. Some foreigners were more dangerous than others, some more civilized than others, but all non-Chinese were, to some degree, barbarians.4
Even today, in the newly “open” China, the idea of mixing with foreigners retains a hint of the unnatural and taboo for many Chinese. People of mixed racial heritage are regarded as exotic specimens. My two daughters, for example, are half Chinese. They both have brown hair, brown eyes, and vaguely Asian features, and they both speak fluent Mandarin. Yet on a trip to China as recently as 2004, everywhere they went—even in sophisticated Shanghai— my daughters drew curious local crowds, who stared, giggled, and pointed at the “two little foreigners who speak Chinese” as if they were visitors from outer space. Indeed, at the Chengdu Panda Breeding Center, while we were taking pictures of newborn giant pandas—pink, squirming, larva-like creatures that rarely survive— the Chinese tourists were taking pictures of us.
The First Emperor bequeathed