-- James A. Donald:
Pol Pot's Cambodia was, like Ch'in dynasty china, decentralized in that they had twenty thousand separate killing fields, but was, like Ch'in dynasty china, highly centralized in that the man digging a ditch dug it along a line drawn by a man far away who had never seen the ground that was being dug.
Tyler Durden
Well, this was difficult given that there were probably a good number of Qin Shr Huang's 'subjects' that didn't even know they were subjects until well after Qin Shr Huang died.
That seems improbable: Qin had a cult of personality, in which every single person subject to his control had to participate. A subject of Qin, like a subject of Mao, was more aware of Qin, than he was of his mother and father. The proposition that the chinese emperors ruled with a light hand is historical revisionism. Some of them ruled with a moderately heavy hand, some of them with an extremely heavy hand, and Qin was as heavy as it gets.
However, the nature, reasons, and byproducts of any particular instance of despotism very hugely...trying to pack them all into one simplistic grid is a formula for.
I did not pack them in to one simplistic grid - I said that legalism was much the same thing as communism/nazism, whereas Confucianism is a mixture of that, and also of rule by social conservatives. The rule of Qin was very similar to commie nazi rule. The rule of Qianlong was substantially different. Both were despots, but Qianlong was no totalitarian. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG k6s+2bFmGHKlU9v6wCbmGCo+6m4eAEfjtEfJ3b3W 4EcgDCvx/77or2uD2Vhx/20HURcJ8XVeRylOk8puI