[Hesburgh Lecture] Criminalizing Job Performance: Brutal Perfectionism in Early Chinese Empires (221BCE-9CE)

Abstract

Shang Yang and Han Feizi eloquently articulated the effectiveness of performance-based law and severe punishments (重刑). By evaluating performance against objectives established by law and imposing intolerable suffering for transgressions, they believed, none would dare deceive the lord or violate the law. They asserted that heavy punishments aim to eliminate the need for further punishment, thereby creating a crime-free utopia.

However, by examining both the archeologically excavated legal statutes and cases and the transmitted sources, the speaker demonstrates that when brutal instrumentalism and idealism were applied to real politics, they generated a monstrous legal system that distorted justice. The speaker argues that the Qin-Han legal system excessively punished administrative errors as crimes. Aiming to promote efficiency, performance-oriented legislation prescribed rigid, detailed, and high-standard job objectives for officials. A large number of officials, including those industriously devoted to their jobs, easily violated the law. Excessive punishments made officials guilty of administrative errors suffer the same bodily pain and economic loss as those who caused serious harm to society with intentional violence. When the punishment was neither deserved nor just, resentment arose against the law, and sympathy developed for the condemned. This prominent and unjust problem triggered continuous and heated discussions and criticism among scholars, officials, and sometimes the emperors themselves, but no efficient legal reforms ever occurred. This study aims to provide a historical case to provoke thought about the dangerous application of perfectionism in real world and to explain some historical roots of the Confucian long-standing tradition against the rule by laws.

Respondent

Prof. Ellen Zhang is the Head of Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Macau, and a Research Fellow of Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Liang Cai received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and currently serves as an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in Chinese political and intellectual history, with a focus on the Qin-Han dynasties (221 BCE - 23 CE). Dr. Cai's publications cover topics such as Confucianism, bureaucracy, law, social networks, and archaeologically excavated manuscripts. She has also collaborated with computer scientists on a digital humanities project aimed at creating structured biographical data and conducting social network analysis of early Chinese empires, particularly those in the Qin-Han period, which is considered the fountainhead of Chinese civilization.

Dr. Cai’s first book Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire contests long-standing claims that Confucianism came to prominence with the promotion of Emperor Wu in the Han dynasty. She argues that it was a witchcraft scandal in 91–87 BCE that created a political vacuum and permitted Confucians to rise to power, ultimately transforming China into a Confucian regime. Her book won the 2014 Academic Award for Excellence presented by Chinese Historians in the United States and was a finalist for the 2015 Best First Book in the History of Religions presented by the American Academy of Religion.

 

Her other selected publications appear in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Journal of the American Oriental Society. the journal of Asian studies. Dr. Cai is finishing her second book entitled Convict Politics: From Utopia to serfdom in Early China (221 BCE - 23 CE) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). This book aims to provoke further thought on utopian thinking and its dangerous application in real politics.