Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
government and for ameliorating some of the harshest Qin excesses.
As a commoner, Liu Bang had considerable instinctive sympathy for
the ordinary peasant and took measures to relieve his plight. He
reduced the agricultural tax rate from over one-half the crop to one-
fifteenth and also reduced the number of capital offenses. General
peace and prosperity characterized his reign and the reigns of his
immediate successors, and the Chinese people were finally able to rest
after centuries of turmoil and suffering. China's population exploded
between 200 and 150 B.C., and the economy grew by leaps and
bounds. A brief domestic revolt broke out in 154 B.C., but it was
quickly quelled. These were quiet and content decades.
It is possible to give Liu Bang too much credit for the positive
aspects of his reign. After all, he never faced the monumental task of
unifying China; the Qin, for all of its totalitarian excesses, had accom-
plished that. He could well afford to reduce the tax rates because he
never had to fund the enormous armies necessary for achieving
national unity. Neither did he have to break the power of the feudal
ruling class and invent an effective governmental structure and
administrative framework; credit for those belongs, once again, to the
Qin. The Han was built upon Qin foundations and took much of the
credit, and very little of the blame, for what the Qin had accomplished.
In retrospect it is quite apparent that the Qin's contributions to China
were unity and imperial order. Once this had been accomplished, the
dynasty had outlived its usefulness and was ready to be overthrown
by a fundamentally different regime. Whereas the Qin was Legalist
in its ideology, the Han eventually proclaimed its Confucian orienta-
tion. The ideological difference showed up in the different policies
pursued by the two dynasties.
Things began to shift from quiescent to active and rambunctious
again upon the succession of the Han emperor Wudi in 147 B.C. Wudi,
whose reign title means “martial emperor,” seems to have concluded,
by the middle of the second century B.C., that the Chinese people
had rested and prospered for long enough and that it was time to
shake things up a bit. Wudi, the greatest Han emperor, was also surely
one of the most important emperors in Chinese history. A strong-
willed ruler with passionately held opinions, he aggressively pursued
his program for increasing China's greatness. Internally, he wanted to
break the power of the merchants who were amassing huge fortunes.
Fearing that the merchants' enormous wealth might eventually lead
to subversive political ambition, he forbade them to purchase land
and took other steps to stop their participation in land speculation
and landlordism. He established exclusive government rights to the
