From Utopia to Serfdom: Confucian Virtue, Emperor’s Law, and Bureaucratic Empires in Early China (221 BCE - 23 CE)

Whereas the spirit of law serves as the foundation of modern political thought, the mature legal empires of Qin and Han dynasties fostered a prominent intellectual tradition that distrusted the law. This book manuscript project aims to probe this puzzle. Based on digital humanities methods and archaeologically excavated legal manuscripts, I have discovered new data: a large number of officials were criminalized and then reemployed in the court and local government. I argue that the instrumental rationality of law in early imperial China aimed to maximize administrative efficiency and provide an enormous workforce of convict laborers to sustain the empire's operation. The underlying political philosophy that formed the basis for harsh and meticulous laws was not to establish absolute power or tyranny, but to construct a high-performance society and a crime-free utopia. Ironically, while early Chinese laws criminalized a large number of officials and commoners, emperors frequently issued imperial amnesties to free these criminals into commoners. I contend that the intellectual roots of imperial amnesties shared the same philosophy of a crime-free utopia, asserting that a state of great peace without any criminals was attainable and should be pursued. Emperors utilized universal amnesty as a convenient means to restore the imperfect real world back to a state of normality, a normality defined by perfectionism. However, these legal practices were unjust and cultivated an entrenched tradition with a dubious attitude toward the law, a legacy that helps to explain barriers for China to adopt democracy and celebrate the rule of law. This book project also aims to stimulate further reflection on utopian thinking and its application in real politics.