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.
You are apparently simply unaware of the real size and terrain of China. There were villages in remote parts of China that were unaware of Mao's death into the early 1980s. Travel around in China for a while and you'll get the picture. Just to give you an idea, short of renting out a helicopter, there are plenty of parts of China that are more than a week away from even me, living here in NYC.
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
No, as usual you seem to think that because I disagree with the simplicity of your "grid" that I must believe the opposite. Let's put it this way: The Qin was absolutely despotic in areas that could be guessed at ("Burn Books Kill Scholars"), as well as quite despotic in areas that would seem pointless now (like bell volumes, because bells were also measurements for grain). They also completely didn't care about other things that you would think a despot would really care about. A thing to think about was that Qin Shr Huang seemed to truly believe that everything he did was necessary for the unification of China (which he accomplished). YOU (not me) might argue that by unifying a large portion of central China he actually prevented a lot more deaths due to "Barbarian" incursion by "Unfree and uncivilized" Muslims...OOPS--Did I say that? I mean "Unfree and backward people that should be killed". -TD
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