Even Legalism is not free from Confucian influence. The Chinese term for law is fa-lu. The word fa means method. The word lu means standard. In other words, law is a methodical standard for behavior in society. A musical instrument with resonant tubes which form the basis of musical scales is also called lu, the Chinese equivalent of the tuning fork. In law, the word lu implies a standard scale for measuring social behavior of civilized men. The first comprehensive code of law in China had been compiled by the Origin Qin Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi r. 246-210 B.C.), unifier of China. Mao admired the Qin dynasty as Confucius admired the ancient Zhou dynasty. Known as Qin Code (Qin Lu), it was a political instrument as well as a legal one. It was the legislative manifestation of a Legalist political vision. It aimed at instituting uniform rules for prescribing appropriate social behavior in a newly-unified social order. It sought to substitute fragmented traditional local practices, left from the ancient regime of privileged aristocratic lineages. It tried to dismantle Confucian exemptions accorded to special relationships based on social hierarchies and clan connections. The pervasive growth of new institutions in the unifying Qin dynasty (221-207 B.C.) had been the result of objective needs of a rising civilization. Among these new institutions was a unified legal system of impartial rewards and punishments according to well-promulgated and clearly defined codes of prescribed behavior. The law was enforced through the practice of lianzuo (linked seats), a form of social control by imposing criminal liability on the perpetrator's clan members, associates and friends. Qin culture heralded the emergence of a professional shidafu (literati-bureaucracy) based on meritocracy. It also introduced an uniform system of weights, measures, monetary instruments and it established standard trade practices for the smooth operation of an unified economic system for the whole empire. The effect of Qin Legalist governance on Chinese political culture had been profound and comprehensive. Chinese civilization during Qin time took a great step forward toward forging an unified nation and culture, but in the process lost much of the richness of its ancient, local traditions and rendered much details of its fragmented past incomprehensible to posterity. Universality and standardization, ingredients of progress, are mortal enemies of particularity and variety, components of tradition.
In the first half of Han dynasty (B.C. 206-220 A.D.), the Han imperial government adopted the Legalist policies of the Qin dynasty (221-207 B.C.) it had replaced. It systemically expanded its power over tribal guizus (aristocrats) by wholesale adaptation of Legalist political structure from the brief (fifteen years) but consequential reign of the preceding Qin dynasty. Gradually, with persistent advice from Confucian ministers, in obsessive quest for dependable political loyalty to the Han dynastic house, Legalist policies of equal justice for all were abandoned in favor of Confucian tendencies of formalized exemptions from law, cemented with special relationships (guanxi) based on social positions and kinship. The Tang Code (Tanglu) promulgated in 624 institutionalized this corrupt Confucian trend by codifying it. It would lay the foundation for a heirarchal social structure that would generate a political culture that even in modern time would resist the proposition that all men are created equal. Elaborately varied degrees of punishment are accorded by the Tang Code to the same crime committed by persons of different social positions, just as Confucian rites ascribe varying lengths of mourning periods to the survivors of the deceased of various social ranks. According to Confucian logic, if the treatment for death, the most universal of fates, is not socially equal, why should it be for the treatment for crime? William Blake (1757-1827), born twenty-three centuries after Confucius (551-479 B.C.), would epitomize the problem of legal fairness in search for true justice, by his famous pronouncement: "One law for the lion and the ox is oppression."
Confucian values, because they have been designed to preserve the existing feudal system, unavoidably would run into conflict with contemporary ideas reflective of new emerging social conditions. It is in the context of its inherent hostility toward progress and its penchant for obsolete nostalgia that Confucian values, rather than feudalism itself, become culturally oppressive and socially damaging. When Chinese revolutionaries throughout history, and particularly in the late 18th and early 19th century, rebelled against the cultural oppression of reactionary Confucianism, they would simplistically and conveniently link it synonymously with political feudalism. These revolutionaries would succeed in dismantling the formal governmental structure of political feudalism because it was the more visible target. Their success had been due also to the terminal decadence of the decrepit governmental machinery of dying dynasties, such as the ruling house of the 3-century-old, dying Qing dynasty (1583-1911). Unfortunately, these triumphant revolutionaries would remain largely ineffective in re-molding Confucian dominance in feudal culture, even among the progressive intelligentsia. Almost a century after the fall of the feudal Qing dynasty house in 1911, after countless movements of reform and revolution, ranging from moderate democratic liberalism to extremist Bolshevik radicalism, China would have yet to find an workable alternative to the feudal political culture that would be intrinsically sympathetic to its social traditions. Chinese revolutions, including the modern revolution that would begin in 1911, through its various metamorphosis over the span of almost 4 millennia, in overthrowing successive political regimes of transplanted feudalism, would repeatedly kill successive infected patients in the form of virulent governments. But they would fail repeatedly to sterilize the infectious virus of Confucianism (Ru Jia) in its feudal political culture. The modern destruction of political feudalism would produce administrative chaos and social instability in China until the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. But Confucianism (Ru Jia) would still appear alive and well as cultural feudalism, even under Communist rule, and within the Communist Party!. It would continue to instill its victims with an instinctive hostility towards new ideas, especially if they are of foreign origin. Confucianism would adhere to an ideological rigidity that would amount to blindness to objective problem-solving. Almost a century of recurring cycles of modernization movements, either Nationalist or Marxist, would not manage even a slight dent in the all-controlling precepts of Confucianism in the Chinese mind. In fact, in 1928, when the Chinese Communist Party would attempt to introduce a soviet system of government by elected councils in areas of northern China under its control, many peasants earnestly thought a new "Soviet" dynasty was being founded by a new Emperor by the name of "So Viet". During the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution of 1966, the debate between Confucianism (Ru Jia) and Legalism (Fa Jia) would be resurrected as allegorical dialogue for contemporary political struggle. Legalist concepts such as equal justice under law for all and no man being above the law, are considered by Confucians as aberrations of social morals and as corruption of good governance. On the eve of the 21st century, Confucianism would remain alive and well under both governments on Chinese soil on either side of the Taiwan Strait, regardless of political economic ideology. Modern China would still be a society in search of an emperor figure and a country governed by feudal relationships, but devoid of a compatible political vehicle that would turn these tenacious, traditional social instincts towards constructive purposes, instead of allowing them to manifest themselves as practices of corruption. General Douglas MacArthur would present post-war Japan, which has been seminally influenced by Chinese culture for 14 centuries, with the greatest gift a victor in war has ever presented the vanquished: the retention of her secularized Emperor, despite the Japanese Emperor's less-than-benign role in planning the war and in condoning war crimes. Thus General MacArthur, in preserving a traditional cultural milieu in which democratic political processes could be adopted without the danger of a socio-cultural vacuum, would lay the socio-political foundation for Japan as a post-war economic power. Of the 3 great revolutions in modern history: the French, the Chinese and the Russian, each would overthrow feudal monarchial systems to introduce idealized democratic alternatives that would have difficulty holding the country together without periods of terror. The French and Russian Revolutions would both make the fundamental and tragic error of revolutionary regicide and would suffer decades of social and political dislocation as a result, with little if any socio-political benefit in return. In France, it would not even prevent eventual restoration imposed externally by foreign victors. The Chinese revolution in 1911 would not be plagued by regicide, but it would prematurely dismantle political feudalism before it would have a chance to develop a workable alternative, plunging the country into decades of warlordism. Worse still, it would leave largely undisturbed a Confucian culture while it would demolish its political vehicle. The result would be that 8 decades after the fall the last dynastic house, the culture-bound nation would still be groping for an appropriate and workable political system, regardless of ideology. Mao Zedong would understand this problem and would try to combat it by launching the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in 1966. But, even after a decade of enormous social upheaval, tragic personal sufferings, fundamental economic dislocation and unparalleled diplomatic isolation, the Cultural Revolution would achieve little except serious damage to the nation's physical and socio-economic infrastructure, to the prestige of the Party, not to mention the loss of popular support, and total bankruptcy of revolutionary zeal among even loyal party cadres.
It would be unrealistic to expect the revival of imperial monarchy in modern China. Once a political institution is overthrown, all the king's men cannot put it together again. Nor would it be desirable. Yet, the modern political system in China, despite its revolutionary clothing and radical rhetoric, would be still fundamentally feudal, both in the manner in which power is distributed and in its administrative structure. When it comes to succession politics, a process more orderly than heriditary feudal tradition of primogeniture would have yet to be developed in the Chinese political system in modern time. There is now a Marxist feudalism in China, if not in name, surely in practice.
Henry C.K. Liu