To Rule All Under Heaven: Andrew Meyer on His New Popular History of the Warring States

Summary

Sinica Podcast Summary
Episode: To Rule All Under Heaven: Andrew Meyer on His New Popular History of the Warring States (May 21, 2026)
Host: Kaiser Kuo
Guest: Andrew Seth Meyer, Professor of History, CUNY Brooklyn College
Book discussed: To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor (Oxford University Press)

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Kaiser Kuo speaks with historian Andrew Seth Meyer about his new book, To Rule All Under Heaven, the first comprehensive single-volume history of China’s Warring States period (ca. 475–221 BCE) written for a general English-language audience. The conversation explores why the Warring States era remains foundational for understanding the Chinese state and its enduring legacies, examines the intellectual and political revolutions of the period, and critiques longstanding historical simplifications—especially about the so-called "hundred schools" of thought and the nature of the Qin unification.

---

The Stakes of Ancient History for Modern China

• Continuity and Historical Relevance ([02:00–07:00])
  • Kuo notes that the Warring States period "is the moment that the basic operating system of Chinese political life was really written."
  • He asks why it is that scholars (and even the state today) continue to reach so far into antiquity for political and cultural legitimacy.
    • "When a society insists this loudly on its own deep history, the question of how that history actually shapes the present is not one that scholars just get to wave away." (Kuo, [05:00])
  • China’s continuity of script and canon, and the state’s conscious cultivation of links to antiquity, mean that ancient history is still active in the present.
  • Meyer agrees, but cautions against both overreaching for simplistic connections and dismissing ancient history’s influence altogether.

---

Writing the Book: Filling a Major Gap

• The Genesis and Challenges of the Book ([09:00–15:00])

  • Meyer was motivated by both personal events and the absence of a good, accessible Warring States history: "The book that general readers really need is a one-volume history of the Warring States."
  • The complexity and scale of the period—seven major states, shifting allegiances, a web of intellectual and political actors—posed steep narrative and organizational hurdles.
  • Linguistic hurdles abound: homophones (e.g. two states called "Wei"), rulers and states with the same names, and archeological gaps due to Qin’s later purges.

  Memorable exchange: - Kuo: "You could write a perfectly accurate sentence in which King Zhao of Qin attacks Zhao and then King Zhao of Yan comes to the aid of Zhao, or something like that. The reader has to do a lot of work here to figure out what's going on." ([13:36])

• Narrative Structure ([15:22–17:10])

  • Meyer organizes the book by state and theme rather than strict chronology to bring coherence to a highly multipolar, turbulent historical era.
    • "The task of creating a meaningful and edifying narrative required me to work outside of the strict framework of chronology." (Meyer, [15:57])
  • He aimed for a verifiable and engaging narrative, relying on both transmitted and archeological sources.

• Publishers and Audience Doubts ([17:10–19:00])

  • Trade publishers doubted the appeal of ancient Chinese history compared to Greece or Rome.
  • Oxford University Press showed confidence and supported the project, which Meyer describes as "the standard for some time."

---

On Historical "Relevance" and the Danger of Essentialism

• Pressure to be 'Relevant' and Avoiding Essentialism ([19:05–23:39])
  • Kuo observes an expectation for ancient history to explain modern China—sometimes reduced to simplistic equations like "Han Fei → Xi Jinping."
  • Meyer welcomes the relevance question if people are open to "nuanced answers," highlighting the analogy between understanding America’s roots in Christianity and Rome, and understanding China’s in the classical era.
    • "If the relationships and forces that you're positing are too simplistic, they're almost certainly wrong." (Meyer, [22:30])
  • Meyer hopes readers gain appreciation for enduring forces, but not an illusion of complete understanding: "If that's the result, then I failed." ([23:03])

---

What Made the Warring States Truly Revolutionary?

• Overthrow of the Old Order ([26:45–34:05])

  • The Warring States ended the aristocratic Zhou dynasty, whose society operated almost like a caste system rooted in hereditary status and kinship.

  • Meyer calls the period "one of the most profound revolutions in human history." The era displaced hereditary aristocrats with a new, educated, meritocratic class known as the shi.

    • "They had very, very deeply entrenched forms of hereditary status ... and the revolution of the Warring States kind of displaced that society." (Meyer, [27:40])

  • The shi evolve to become a literate, learning-based elite (the ancestors of scholar-officials, and arguably modern party cadres).

  • Mechanisms for displacement: repeated short-term victories of the warrior aristocracy were unsustainable—they needed the administrative expertise literati offered to maintain rule and state coherence.

    • "If you're a warrior aristocracy, there's a lot you can do in the short term using naked brute force." (Meyer, [31:13])

• Pen vs. Sword Dynamic

  • The central dynamic for subsequent Chinese history is the ongoing negotiation between "the holders of the monopoly on violence versus the wielders of the pen." (Kuo, [34:05])

• Modern State-Building: Was China First? ([34:05–40:22])

  • Kuo references Francis Fukuyama's claim that the Qin (and Han) created "the world's first genuinely modern state."
  • Meyer agrees that Qin's administrative innovations—centralized bureaucracy, standardized laws, population registers—preceded European equivalents by centuries but cautions not to equate "modern" with "better."
  • The Qin’s radical centralization (e.g., 38 commanderies under direct imperial authority) was unprecedented, and perhaps too abrupt—breaking down after 15 years in favor of a more balanced Han model incorporating regional autonomy and familial nobility.
    • "It's less about aristocracy as it's about this question of regional autonomy ... how much autonomy do we have to give regions in order to get them to assent to this power sharing contract?" (Meyer, [38:27])

---

Rethinking the “Hundred Schools”: Syncretism, Politics, and Patronage

• Moving Beyond Neat Categories ([40:39–47:18])

  • Meyer embeds philosophers and their schools ("masters") within the political realities of their era, showing them as advisors, rivals, and clients of specific courts.
  • The "Hundred Schools" classification is actually an imperial (later) device to tame/organize a much messier intellectual landscape.

  Memorable moment: - Kuo: "You embed the different philosophers and their disciples inside the actual political world ... It's more Brookings than Yale or something." ([41:15])

  • The Qixia Academy in Qi, for example, is likened to “a state-funded think tank rather than a philosophy department.”

• Highlight: The Lüshi Chunqiu ("Annals of the House of Lü") ([47:18–53:19])

  • Meyer sees this syncretic text—a compendium created at the Qin court—as a political project, blending all intellectual traditions and offering an ecumenical vision.
  • It challenged the myth of Qin as a purely Legalist, repressive state, showing instead its early embrace of a broad intellectual spectrum.
    • The text presented a vision closer to the later Han dynasty’s compromise system than to the caricature of Legalist tyranny.
  • The "burning of the books" episode is recontextualized as a specific, late, crisis-driven move, not a foundational policy.

  Quotable: - "On some level one can argue that the Lüshi Chunqiu ... is one of the most brilliant pieces of political propaganda ever conceived." (Meyer, [48:48])

---

The Axial Age—Coincidence or Pattern?

• Comparisons Across Civilizations ([57:52–61:12])
  • Kuo and Meyer discuss the “Axial Age”—the simultaneous flourishing of new philosophies/religions in China, India, the Levant, and Greece.
  • Meyer argues the synchronicity is partly pattern-matching, but also a result of similar societal pressures (agricultural surplus, urbanization, increased trade).
    • "There's something going on in human society on a very grand scale that really does produce a kind of axial age. Yeah, I'm buying it." (Meyer, [58:45])

---

What Has the Warring States to Teach about Modern China?

• Deeper Lessons and Contemporary Resonance ([61:30–65:45])

  • Meyer proposes that the centrality claimed in "Zhongguo" (the “Central Kingdom”) was always aspirational—a promise, not a description.
    • "Calling something zhong, central, is as much a promise as it is an assertion ... it's a project that has animated successive political programs in this society for centuries." (Meyer, [62:15])
  • The structural legacies—centralized bureaucracy, literati as regime partners/opponents, the moral-realist tension in rule—still persist in today’s PRC and CCP.
    • Kuo: "I think several of the structural features that your book describes ... are the patterns that I see that really persist." ([65:00])

• Continuity and Change ([69:27–72:13])

  • The period’s legacy is one of "constant self-reinvention and reconstruction." (Kuo, [69:27])
  • Meyer: "If you're serious about harnessing, directing change ... you have to have some sense of how does one redeem parts of the past? ... The system of China's future may look very different, but it will not be a complete abandonment of and repudiation and schism with the present." ([70:22])

---

Teaching the Warring States: US, China, Taiwan ([65:45–69:27])

• In China and Taiwan, Warring States lore and stories are deeply embedded from an early age.
• Mainland China has moved beyond the Marxist “slave vs feudal society” paradigm, and new archaeology is transforming the understanding of the period.
• In the US, few have heard of the period—motivating Meyer’s work.
  • "If you go around the United States asking people if they've heard of the Warring States, I perish to think what that number would be. 1 in 10, 1 in 20." (Meyer, [66:07])

---

Recommendations & Closing ([74:02–78:14])

• Paying it Forward & Recommendations
  • Meyer name-checks Avital Ram (cultural history of early China; disability studies) and Liang Tsai (Han dynasty legal history); both are exciting young scholars in the field.
  • Recommended play: Hadestown (Broadway musical)
  • Kuo recommends: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (sci-fi comedy)

---

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “When a society insists this loudly on its own deep history, the question of how that history actually shapes the present is not one that scholars just get to wave away.” —Kaiser Kuo ([05:00])
• “The task of creating a meaningful and edifying narrative required me to work outside of the strict framework of chronology.” —Andrew Meyer ([15:57])
• “If the relationships and forces that you're positing are too simplistic, they're almost certainly wrong.” —Andrew Meyer ([22:30])
• “The Warring States revolution puts an end to the Zhou dynasty ... it was a real success story. ... It was highly decentralized, highly sort of patrimonial and ritual kinship based ... and the revolution of the warring states kind of displaced that society.” —Andrew Meyer ([27:24–27:40])
• "I always had a firm faith that there’s a readership for this book out there ... people are interested in ancient history, they're interested in China." —Andrew Meyer ([17:38])
• “On some level ... the Lüshi Chunqiu ... is one of the most brilliant pieces of political propaganda ever conceived.” —Andrew Meyer ([48:48])
• “Zhongguo is aspirational, not descriptive.” —Andrew Meyer ([64:22])
• “If you're serious about harnessing, directing change ... you have to have some sense of how does one redeem parts of the past?...The system of China's future may look very different, but it will not be a complete abandonment of the present.” —Andrew Meyer ([70:22])

---

Summary Flow & Utility

This episode offers a sweeping, engaging look at the Warring States’ revolutionary transformation of Chinese political and intellectual life, argues for the ongoing relevance of these changes, and sets out to overturn many common misconceptions about classical Chinese history. Meyer’s approach embeds ideas within politics, explores the lived dynamism beneath the surface “continuity,” and ultimately makes a strong case for why general readers should care deeply about this era. The conversation is accessible, wise, and occasionally very funny, making it ideal for anyone interested in the roots of modern China, intellectual history, or state-formation in world history.

Transcript

[Progressive Insurance Announcer]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

[Shopify Advertiser]

What would you do if your online store converted 36% more shoppers? You could take 36% more vacation.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Another pina colada?

[Shopify Advertiser]

Yes, please open a new retail location with 36 more square feet. Fantastic. Hire 36% more help.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You're hired and you're hired.

[Shopify Advertiser]

Shopify has the world's best converting checkout up to 36% better than other e commerce platforms. What you do with those extra sales is up to you. Switch to Shopify [e-mail] setup and get a $1 trial. Shopify.com setup.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from my nearly empty, soon to be on the market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying [e-mail] I know there are a ton of substacks out there and they start to add up because there's so many good ones. But I think this one delivers serious value and I do need your help to keep doing this work. So please subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations. A confession to begin with, I'm recording this just a few hours after President Trump touched down in Beijing to kick off a summit meeting with President Xi Jinping. But I am not talking at all about that today. In fact, the book that I want to talk about is set in a period that ended in 221bce, a comfortable 2247 years before our usual cynical fare. So before I introduce my guest, let me try to justify what at first glance looks like a violent break with format here. So anyone who thinks and writes about a society faces a question that is really rarely posed but is always there, present in the background. How far back do you really need to Go. Nobody seriously argues that you can understand contemporary China without grappling with, obviously, the 20th century, the 19th, the unequal treaties, the Taipings, the self strengthening movement, all that stuff that also makes the cut without any controversy. But the further back you push, the louder the objections become, and reasonably so. We don't usually involve Xenophon to explain the modern American Senate or Alcibiades to explain Pete Hegseth. So why should anyone reach for Mencius to explain Wang Huning or, as some commentators have insisted, claim that you can't understand the mind of Xi Jinping without first reading Han Fezi? The honest answer is that there is no clean rule. Some claims of historical relevance are obviously serious and others are obviously ridiculous. And, you know, we tell them apart mostly by feel, to be honest. But there are at least two features of China's case that complicate the easy dismissal. The first is the sheer continuity of script and of canon. A literate Chinese person who's had a bit of classical Chinese can, in 2026, pick up a passage from Lamentius or the Hanfiza and read it. Not without effort, of course, not without commentary, probably, but they can read it. And that is not the relationship that most, say, Italians have with Latin or most Greeks with Plato. The second thing that I think complicates this is conscious cultivation. The Chinese state, from the very first centuries of empire down to the present, has deliberately maintained its links with antiquity. It treats those links as part of its claim to legitimacy. Xi Jinping doesn't just allude to Confucius. He actually sponsors institutes named after the sage. The party doesn't just publish white papers, it publishes editions of the classics. When a society insists this loudly on its own deep history, the question of how that history actually shapes the present is not one that scholars just get to wave away. Still, how far back? The Warring States period, the roughly 260 years between the death of Confucius and chin's unification in 221bce, is a strong candidate for the deepest layer that genuinely matters. It is, on any honest accounting, the moment that the basic operating system of Chinese political life was really written. The era produced at its end, really, especially the imperial throne, which then ran without fundamental redesign for what, 2,132 years until Emperor Puyi abdicated in 1912, it produced the centralized bureaucratic state, what Francis Fukuyama, in the Origins of Political Order, calls the world's first genuinely modern state, predating its European counterparts by something like 17th centuries. It produced the displacement of hereditary aristocracy by an educated meritocratic class, the Shi, the ancestors really of every Chinese scholar official, every Communist Party cadre, every gaokhao striver. It produced the entire intellectual repertoire that the Chinese state has been rummaging through ever since. Confucian moralism, Taoist quietism, Maoist universalism, legalist fiscal administrative techniques and punitive techniques. Although this is one of the genuinely revisionist threads in my guest's book, the famous categories of the hundred schools of thought turn out on close inspection to be much more entangled with one another and much more entangled with the actual political world of the competing courts than the tidy tidings textbook treatment suggests. The Qin court that unified the realm in 221 BCE was not the cartoon legalist regime of later caricature. It employed dozens of erudites steeped in what would later be called the Confucian classics. The stele the first emperor erected on the sacred mountain of Taishan in his new empire actually invoked all the Confucian virtues, humaneness, rightness, filial piety, and entirely in conventional Confucian terms. We're going to get into all that. The era also produced, finally, I think, a vocabulary of regional identity that is still alive in the contemporary cultural imagination. You know, Yan in Beijing Chu and the Hubei Hunan area. The Zhao surname which clusters so commonly in Shanxi. Where you meet somebody named Zhao, you can bet they've got Shanxi ancestry. You know, the whole seven state mnemonic. You know that in my experience, virtually any educated person in China can just rattle off without hesitation. So to talk about all this stuff, I am extremely glad to be joined today by Andrew Seth Meyer, professor of History at CUNY Brooklyn College and the author of a remarkable new book from Oxford University Press called To Rule All Under A History of Classical China from Confucius to the first emperor. Andy did his BA at Brown in 89 and his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard in 99, and he spent his career working primarily on the intellectual and political history of early China. Listeners may know him as co translator with John Major, Sarah Queen and Harold Roth of the magnificent huainanzi, that compendious 2nd century BCE attempt to synthesize the entire Warring States intellectual inheritance into a single book of statecraft. He's also written the Dao of the Military Liu Art of War. His new book, To Rule Under Heaven, is the product of 16 years of work and is by some considerable distance, I think the really truly the first proper one volume narrative history of the Warring States. In English, that's really aimed at a general reader. That such a book did not exist until now is frankly an embarrassment for the field. And Andy has filled the gap in a way that is going to be, I think, the standard for some time. And Andy Meyer, welcome to Seneca at last.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Thank you, Kaiser. Wow. I'm going to have to talk through my tears. That was such a wonderful introduction. Thank you.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Well, great. I mean, we're going to plunge into all the stuff that I hinted at. But first, 16 years is a long gestation period. So let's take us back to the beginning. You teach at Brooklyn College. You'd already done the Huay Nanzi book and the Liu an book, both quite specialized works. And at some point you decided what you actually wanted to write was a proper, like I said, one volume narrative history of the Warring States in English for a general reader. What was the gap that you saw and why did you feel like you had to be the one to fill it?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

You know, that's a good question. The gap. I mean, I think you described it quite well in your introduction. Right. It's embarrassing. I mean, it's. The gap was sort of obvious to everyone in the field. And I think I began to understand the reasons for the gap as I worked to try this book when I first got the contract. So my initial impulse to write the book was because I was having some trouble. I've told this story many times, so forgive me for repeating myself here, but I was having some trouble getting some of my academic work published and you know, publisher Parish, I was trying to. So I had a student, a young man, who tragically died of cancer in 2015. Lovely. Yeah. And I think he might have gone on for a PhD and you might be talking to him someday. But he, you know, he was very, he became very passionate about early China in some of the classes that he took with me as an MA student. And I don't know, I don't know how it came up. I don't know why. It was sort of indiscreet of me to say, well, I'm having some trouble publishing my academic work. He said, well, you know, I have a lot of context in the publishing industry. Why don't you try to write something for general readers? And as soon as he put that idea in my head, I thought, well, the book that general readers really need is a one volume history of the Warring States. You know, I've, I've always been very passionately, you know, I got, I became mesmerized by the Warring States as a college student. And so as soon as, as soon as somebody put that idea in front of me, oh, why don't you write something for general readers like you said? I mean, this is something general readers here in the States need. So I got the. When I first got the contract, I told my original publisher that I would. I got the contract in 2009. I told them I'd have a book for them in 2011. Yeah, that was crazy. And, you know, there were a number of different problems. I can talk about why it took me so long, if you like. I mean, it just. I radically underestimated the challenges of doing it. And then I think as I was doing it, I began to realize why we academics who were under this pressure to publish or perish, why they would shy away from this task.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I feel like I can guess at some of the questions. Part of it is just simply the scale of what you took on. This is a period of 260 years with seven major states, dozens and dozens of minor ones. There are multiple generations of rulers and ministers and these itinerant intellectuals in each of them, all operating in this truly multipolar system where the action keeps shifting from court to court. So I mean, I was thinking as I was reading this, can you imagine, I read C.V. wedgwood's book on 30 years war. That's already tough to keep all the names and all, because that is a multi state system across a long period of time. But if you can imagine that taking it and multiplying the actors by 10, the duration by nearly 10, that's what you took on. And then on top of that, I got to ask you about this because I felt your pain on every page. Eddie Mandarin is not doing you a lot of favors here. I mean, like you have a major state called Wait and a small state called Wait. These are perfect homophones, right? I mean, even down to the tone. Right. I mean, and that forces you, I guess it's been a convention for a while now into this Romanization workaround where the first wei gets spelled, the big one W E I as it is forever and then wey. The one that means guard is W e Y, right?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah. No, there are all sorts of. And part of it is writing about early China for an English speaking audience. There are all sorts of problems like that. So there are all sorts of sort of just literary technical problems.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I mean, my favorite one, Andy, I don't feel, I mean, talk about this because you've got a King Zhao of Qin and you've got a King Zhao of Yin. They're ruling at the same damn time. And right next door between them, sandwiched between them is a state called Zhao, and both of them at various points, go to war with that. So you could write a perfectly accurate sentence in which King Zhao of Qin attacks Zhao and then King Zhao of Yan comes to the aid of Zhao, or something like that. The reader has to do a lot of work here to figure out what's going on. Thankfully, you have all the maps in there, but. Wow.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah. No, it was a challenge. And I don't know, I did my best to sort of lay this out comprehensively and engagingly. And, you know, I mean, the thing about the writing about the warring states, the sources are very rich, but they're in a very vexed state because, you know, spoiler alert, the warning states end with the. The state of Chin conquering the other six great states. And they undertake this purge. Right. Of the records of the other states. So it becomes. It becomes very challenging, using the sources that we have, and it's a combination of transmitted sources and archaeologically recovered sources to reconstruct a verifiable chronology. And, you know, I wanted. I wanted it to be an engaging narrative, an informing, informative narrative, but also a verifiable narrative. And that's, you know, luckily I had the guide of scholars like Yang Kwan and Qian Mu as guides, but even with their help, putting together a narrative alongside this chronology was challenging.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You call it a chronology, but, you know, the fact is you organize the book by state rather than strictly by chronology. So you go from Qi then to Wu and Chu and Yue, and then to Jin and then Wei and then Qin and so on. It's a choice, right? Most chronological histories would kind of interleave this stuff. But what did organizing by state let you do that a strictly chronological account would have prevented? Because it's state and also theme. It's really cleverly, I think, very, very well put together.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Thank you. And, you know, that was a big challenge. You know, narrative and chronology are two separate things. Right. And so I just felt that the task of creating a meaningful and edifying narrative required me to work outside of the strict framework of chronology. If you want to. Want to sort of make sense of the history of this period, you can't work strictly chronologically. You sort of have to move the focus around in order to sort of tell a story that helps people understand what's going on in this society and why it has such durable impact on the history of China and the world. That was One of the earliest problems, because I had sort of laid out the framework of my plan when I first got the contract. So that was one of the earliest problems I had solved was, or how am I going to lay this story out? And that was, I think, what made me sort of cocky. Why I thought, oh, I'll write this book in two years. I didn't realize that sort of filling in that, that outline was still going to pose lots of challenges.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, amazing. I mean, I got to wonder whether your agent and Oxford that published it, whether they were confident that there was going to be an audience for this. Because, you know, the conventional wisdom in trade publishing, as I understand it, is that so, you know, English language readers, they will buy the Greeks and the Romans, they're not going to buy ancient China. I mean, did you have to argue for the existence of a readership? I mean, did you have to appeal to the China maxing trend toward the end?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

You know, I always. I had always had a firm faith that there's a readership for this book out there. Yeah, you know, it may not. May not be as big as the readership for authors like, you know, Donald Kagan and Adrian Goldsworthy, but, I mean, people are interested in ancient history, they're interested in China. In all honesty, the first publisher that I was with, my contract was originally, I won't name names, it was with a different publisher. And, you know, they were at first very enthusiastic about it, but they were never satisfied that I had had sort of sexed up the narrative to the point where it would be interesting enough for English language readers that they want. They had confidence in it, so they let me go. You know, that was part of what took so long, is that I was trying to sort of fashion a book that they would have confidence in publishing. And, you know, that process helped a lot in that. It helped me find the voice that ultimately is in the book now, which is much altered from where I started. But my agent never. She always had a great deal of faith in this. She was really a champion. And Oxford, from the very beginning, as soon as they gave me a contract, they expressed a great deal of confidence in the book. I don't know if even now they anticipate just how much of a readership there may be for the book, but they saw the value in it, and I have no complaints. They've really supported me.

[Kaiser Kuo]

My Twitter algorithm probably isn't a perfectly representative sample, but, you know, I do see a lot of buzz about your book, which is very encouraging. There are a lot of people, you know, and not just the hardcore history nerds who seem to be really, you know, interested in it. So I want to, I want to bring back to something I set up in the intro and post you this, this dilemma. There is enormous pressure right now on anyone working on pre modern China to make it relevant, right, to, you know, draw the line from Han Fei's the Xi Jinping from the Warring States balance of power to the US China rivalry or the multipolar world we may be entering from Confucian hierarchy to whatever we're calling the current party line on social order this week. Some of these connections are serious. Some of them just seem kind of absurd to me. So as an ancient historian, does that pressure bother you? Should you be obligated to justify your work in terms of modern relevance at all?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah, I think it's fair. I mean, okay, you know, I mean, look, I, I, I believe in the, in, you know, knowledge for knowledge sake. I don't need to have any contemporary relevance placed before me to pick up a volume about the ancient world. I just find it fascinating and mesmerizing and, and, you know, I'm just a sucker for a good story. And, and I think the, you know, the, the Warring States has so many fascinating stories, but, you know, I mean, out for everybody's tastes are different. And I think it's fair for people to say, well, why, why should we take an interest in this work? What, what, what, what is its relevance? And I think, you know, that's a fair question as long as people are open to nuanced answers. Right, that, right. You know, you know, I, I always, I like to reach for analogies to our own, you know, to the society and, and, and culture here in the United States. So, you know, could you, could anyone plausibly claim that you can understand American society and politics without knowing something about Christianity?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Of course.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Of course not. And can anybody plausibly claim that knowing something about the ancient Roman world won't help you understand Christianity? Of course not. Yeah. So there you go. It's two moves were there, right?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah, that's not a lot of hops. But you've got to navigate the line between, on the one hand, taking seriously this idea that this period in question really did shape the operating system of Chinese political life, just as Rome shaped Christianity, obviously, and Christianity then very much shapes American political life today. But you got to take that idea seriously, and your book argues that. And on the other hand, you don't want to fall into the essentialism trap. Right. You Know, the Orientalist trap, the eternal China trap. So it's, it's, it's always tough for me anyway, when I am thinking and talking about historical topics to find, you know, where historical reasoning in a responsible way ends and where bullshit begins. I mean, how do you personally navigate that line? Do you have any rules of thumb you invoke, or is it just a gut thing for you?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Well, I mean, I think the rule of thumb is perhaps if, if the, the relationships and, and, and forces that you're, that you're positing are too simplistic, they're almost certainly wrong. Yeah. And people who are making these very, very simple, you know, people. I've had people tell me things like, oh, you know, reading your book made me understand why China became communist. You know, I, I don't know. I don't. I'm happy you found it edifying, but I don't, I don't see that. No.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Wow.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

You know, in other words, that, that to me, I, I, what I hope people will come away from the book with is some appreciation for, for some of what made Chinese culture and history distinctive, some of the, the sort of very deep historical forces that have been shaping Chinese society over centuries and millennia, but not, you know, not come away with some idea that, oh, well, now I completely understand China right? Now I know how. Now I know what makes them tick, and I don't have to really think about it much anymore. If that's the result, then I failed. Right.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Well, you know, one thing I will say is that when I read, I mean, not just your book, but books generally about the Spring and Autumn period or the Warring States, or the true Han contention or the Three Kingdoms? I think a lot of our listeners who've read this material will recognize what I'm describing here. There is an unmistakable sense that it is Chinese. Even if you, say, swapped all the names for French or English ones and move the place names to familiar European geography, I think you could still tell, I don't know if that's your sense too. And if that is your sense, what does that actually mean? Is it that there's in fact something kind of essential in this material that endures? Or is it the kind of deliberate cultivation of these stories by later generations of Chinese, by intellectuals, by the state, by ordinary people that's kind of shaped the texts themselves and how we read the categories that we read into them so that we're somehow recognizing this long shadow not of something intrinsic to the period itself, but of the cultivation of that thing that somebody thought was intrinsic to the period. I don't know if that made any sense.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

No, that made perfect sense to me. And I'll take the typical pain in the ass academic off ramp and say these two processes you're describing, they're both at work at once. There is something, there is something essential that, that, that come. You know, it would be, it would be foolish to deny that. You know, how is it that we have this, this society that we think of as a single nation state, one among 190 some odd nation states, and yet one in every five people on earth live there? Yeah, like that's, you know, and yet its national identity is somehow mutually fungible with 189 plus other identically constructed polities. Ostensibly, that's just a, you know, so that, that's, that's a, that's, that's the result of a historical process that goes way back. Right. And then I, I would argue, like you say, you know, begins the, the, the potential for that kind of political formation really begins in the warring states. So the, the one has to acknowledge that at the same time, one is foolish if one, if one does acknowledge that, to then leap to the assumption that, oh, well, now I understand everything I need to know. Because within that process, within the, within the road that takes us from the Warring States to the People's Republic of China, there's an infinite variety of possibilities and there's all kinds of wrangling and all sorts of reinventions and renegotiations. And you know, we're not talking about a society that is any less dynamic than, than, than the society to be found in any of the other 190 some odd countries on earth. Right, that's right.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So I mean, let's get into to those things. He said, you know, that the distinct shape owes a lot to processes during the Warring States period. You talk about it as a period of revolution. That, that's a loaded word in China studies. People reach for it pretty carelessly and get their hands slapped for it. You use it very deliberately and very sensually. You call the Warring states one of the most profound revolutions in human history. So Andy, I want to spell out what you mean here. What was the order that the warring states actually overthrew and what did the period replace it with? I mean, I hinted at this already

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

in the intro, but I mean, the, the, the Warring States revolution puts an end to the Zhou Dynasty. And you know, the Zhou dynasty, they, they kind of die hard, right? They, they, they peter out.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, with a whimper.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Well, and they, part of the reason they die hard is that they, in the ancient world, they were a real success story. And they had set up this, this kind of ancient social formation that people in their own time, especially in the founding generations of the Zhou, they had an enormous mystique. They found people found it very appealing and non cynic sinitic peoples living on the periphery of this Zhou society were attracted to it and wanted to join it. You know, it's sort of the way you see the Romans wanting to sort of adopt much of the cultural forms of ancient Greece and things like that. And that society was highly aristocratic. They, they believed it was. They had very, very deeply entrenched forms of, you know, hereditary status and social position. Almost, you know, beyond class, it almost kind of operated as a form of caste. They almost had a kind of caste system dividing people of different birth status. It was highly decentralized, highly sort of patrimonial and ritual kinship based in the way that power worked. And the revolution of the warring states kind of displaced that society, retained elements of it. One of the big tricks of the warring states revolution is that many of the legates of that revolution claim to be continuing the legacy of the Zhou. Right. Which is a, which is a neat trick.

[Kaiser Kuo]

The central claim of Confucianism.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah, Right. Confucius is one of the, you know, and his latter day followers, they're all sort of products of the warring state revolution. And yet. Right. They, they claim to be carrying the banner of the Joe, but the world that they help create is one vastly transformed from the Joe. You know, like you said, these deeply entrenched forms of hereditary status, they're virtually wiped out, which is just remarkable to have happen at that. It really doesn't. The social, that social revolution isn't really complete until about 206, 203. So it takes a little bit longer than the warring states even. Right. But still remarkable for it to happen that early in the history of this society, the emergence of displacing these patrimonial forms of, you know, where the state is basically considered sort of the heirloom of a particular family, it becomes this kind of bureaucratized meritocratic form. That's a remarkable transformation. Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

And truly revolutionary. That is a revolution that is a systemic change that's thorough ago.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So I mean, this displacement of this hereditary aristocracy by the Shi, you know, these educated, meritocratic class who, you know, in the long run become our familiar scholar officials and arguably, you know, become the party cadre that we know so well that, that Strikes me as one of the. Probably the most consequential parts of the revolution, as you've just said. But it's also, you know, one that's not, not well appreciated, I think by general readers. How did this hereditary warrior class get displaced by people whose status came from learning what was. I mean, what were the mechanisms? I mean, this is all explained well in your book, but this is, I think, something that my listeners would want the kind of TLDR version.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah. I mean if you're going to really, if you're going to really boil it down and simplify it, you know, in certain respects it sort of. It rests or boils down to this whole conundrum about conquering the realm on horseback. But can you rule it on horseback? Right, sure. So if you're a warrior aristocracy, there's a lot you can do in the short term using naked brute force.

[Kaiser Kuo]

That quote, by the way, is attributed to Yelu Chusai from, you know, the, the time of the Mongol conquest of North China. So it's a little bit, you know, it's a 1500 years later, but no big deal.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

But, but you know, I mean, thematically. Right. In other words, that, that.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

You can, you can. I mean, I sort of end the first chapter of the book this way that if you look at one of the, one of the first big success stories of this emergent sort of redefinition of the. Sure, right. Because the shur sort of evolve over the course of the Warring States. Like you say, to become a central characteristic of shi status in imperial times is literacy. They had, you have to be able to read and write. That's not really true at the beginning of the Warring States. It's something that Confucius and his disciples are sort of militating for. They want this status to be contingent on learning. And the biggest success, success story among Confucius disciples is this figured Zywa. Right. He becomes, he becomes prime minister of one of the most powerful states. Right.

[Kaiser Kuo]

And co. Prime minister.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Co Prime Minister. Well that's, there's the rub. And there's rub. The warrior, the warrior aristocracy. You know, they, they, they dispatch him quite handily but you know, then they're then left holding the bag. Right. All right. They've won this short term victory over these, these upstart literati. But now. Right. And they're, and they're faced, they're, they're. They're facing a world of other hostile warrior aristocrats. How do you hold on to the power that you've just seized and in the end, that dynamic of how do we make the power that was one through force sustainable, how do we create a world in which force isn't really the necessary mechanism of power, where power can be shared and it can operate without violence. That problem is really what confronts all of the political leaders of this, of this era. And it ends, it ends with a sort of a seat at the table being institutionalized for literati, you know.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah. And I think that becomes sort of the central dynamic. I mean, that's how I've sort of always understood the engine of Chinese history thereafter becomes kind of the relationship between these literati elites, between the pen and the sword, as it were, between, you know, the holders of the monopoly on violence versus the wielders of the pen. That's kind of been one of my kind of mental models all the way along in the book the Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama. And he did write other things besides the End of History and the Last man. And some of them are great. This book, I would argue, is really great. Anyway, Fukuyama argues that, you know, what the Qin built and the Han sort of perfected, and as you say, what its predecessors had been building for a couple of centuries before Qin actually pulled it off was the world's first genuinely modern state. It predates its European equivalents by something like 17 centuries. The fiscal administrative apparatus, this whole business of running the state, as you were talking about, which brutes on horses swinging, accidents they're not so good at, the centrally appointed magistrates, the standardized laws, the system of corve labor, the population registers, all of this stuff. This is all modern administrative stuff. First of all, is the word modern the right word? Do you buy that kind of Fukuyama claim? Does that word maybe smuggle in too much other baggage? Or should we understand what happened during the Warring States as an instance of sort of modern bureaucratic administrative state building?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

You know, I think modern, modern, one can throw that term around and one can use that category as one is. As long as one tries and is clear that you try not to use it in a normative sense, modern is not necessarily better. Right, right. Modern is just different. And in that respect, you know, I think it's fair. Right. Because what, what you see happening in the, in the, at the end of the warring states, in the Qin, in the Han, is the institutionalization of, of principles of governance that spread and, you know, become a kind of global norm in what we think of as the quote unquote, modern era. If we think of modern as being, you know, a period that. That happened sometime after the 15th century. Right. Prior to the 15th century. If you're looking for places in the world where these. These patterns of bureaucratic governance and the fiscal administrative state, well, they're largely concentrated in East Asia. Yeah, yeah. But that they begin to spread to the rest of the world, you know, in the 15th century, and they become kind of hegemonic now. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why I think it's so. It's so important to sort of lay this history out to people is that, you know, understanding what happened in China in this era helps us understand the situation we're living in now. Not just in China, but everywhere.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right? Yeah, absolutely. With tax revenue. So there's a related question I want to push on. In the epilogue to your book, you describe Qin's division of the realm into these 38 Commanderies. They're each under centrally appointed officials. And as you describe it, it's so unprecedented, it's almost to be inconceivable. It's certainly more centralized than anything of the individual warring states. They had never even attempted that within their states. Not even Tin had. But what does it tell us that the most radical version of this fiscal administrative state only lasted 15 years, while its successor, the Han, it dials that back. It keeps a lot of the sort of feudal domains going. The aristocratic great houses get to be. I mean, there is still a nobility that endures longer. Was China simply not ready for something as radically sort of aristocratized as what Qin had in mind?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

That's an excellent question. To me, the transition you're talking about, the move from Qin to Han, it's less about aristocracy because the ruling houses of these feudal domains in the. In the Han by, I think, before, within the first decade of the Han, every one of those feudal houses is headed up by a member of the imperial clan. So they're all members of the Liu and the Liu. You know, they're kind of ersatz aristocrats. Everybody knows they're descended from farmers. Right? Right. So, I mean, there's a kind of notion of aristocracy there. And concepts of aristocracy continue to have a shelf life through really all the way down almost to the present day. Right. But, you know, I think that the. The division of the. Of the Han into these. Because the Han decides they, they. They neatly split the imperial domain in half. The. The western half is. Follows the. The administrative pattern of the Chin divided up into the centrally administrative district. The eastern half is divided between these Princely domains. And to me that's less about aristocracy as it's about this question of regional autonomy. How much autonomy do we have to give regions in order to get them to ascent to this power sharing contract? How much autonomy do we have to give the elites and the common people of the different regions of the. Of the realm in order to get them to buy into the, the empire as a proposition? And you know, this is a, this is a problem that leaders in, in the various iterations of China have been deep grappling with for.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Very much to this.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah, very much to this day. And, and you know, and this is one of the things that, where you see the dynamism of Chinese society because different generations of Chinese leadership have institutionalized different solutions to these problems. Right,

[Kaiser Kuo]

fascinating. I want to single something out for praise that you do in the book, that it's how you treat philosophy in the book. And I'll say this before I ask this question because I think it's really important. The standard textbook treatment of the hundred schools of thought presents them as essentially separable from politics. They're all about politics, I suppose. But here's a chapter on Confucianism, here's a chapter on mosm, here's a chapter on legalism, here's a chapter on Taoism. And oh, by the way, all of this is happening during a period of immense political fragmentation. But you do something really different in your approach. And we talked about this before and I really love this. You embed the different philosophers and their disciples inside the actual political world that they are operating in. Competing for patronage, advising specific courts, jockeying with rival schools for influence with specific rulers. You talk about this remarkable institution, the Qixia Academy. It's like this state funded think tank rather than a philosophy department. It's more Brookings than Yale or something. What did you want readers to understand about the hundred schools that the textbook treatment fails to convey?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

That's a great question. I mean, I think in part I feel like this is just an expression of my own intellectual sort of proclivity in that I've never considered. I'm interested in philosophy and I respect what philosophers do.

[Kaiser Kuo]

That's what got you into the warring states in the first place, as I understand it.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah, well, it was reading the works of what we call philosophers. I prefer calling them masters, you know, using, using their own term, but you can call them philosopher. I mean, Debbie, to me I think that all philosophers are become more interesting when you put them into the social and political context in which they lived. Totally agree and that you could do the same thing for Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and all of the hell, you know, that, that I would, I would prefer to read what I'm doing with these figures in China. I, I prefer to read, and there are scholars in, in the European and American Academy who do this, but I prefer to read books who do the same thing with the, the figures of, of Greece and Rome as I'm doing with these figures in, in China. That, to me, that's just, that, that's just a more interesting story. And, and maybe it's, that makes me an intellectual philistine, I don't know. But, but I'm, I'm just innately a historian, right? I, I, I believe that we, we as human beings, we're embedded, right? We're embedded in a certain social and political and economic context. And our thought is interesting. What we, what we, how, how we perceive our situation and, you know, the values and what we can imagine is very important to understanding the ways in which we participate in changing our, our mattress. I'm not one of these people who's like, oh, every, everything anybody thinks can be predicted by what their economics are. I don't believe that. But at the same time, you know, I feel like knowing the concrete context in which someone lives makes everything about their, their expressed thoughts so much more fascinating. And that's just, that's part of why what I, what I went about doing, you know, this whole thing about the hundred schools of thought. I can't claim credit for this, but the paradigm has been shifting for a couple of decades in the European and American Academy. Most scholars who work on early Chinese intellectual history are trying to get away from thinking about these schools. The schools, they're sort of an artifact of the imperial period. It's a way of domesticating and taming this very volatile, very, very subversive body of thought, right? You take it and you, you put them into these neat cubbyholes. Oh, there are, there were these discrete schools. It was a lot messier than that at the time.

[Kaiser Kuo]

And I, yeah, and that comes across in your work and maybe in, in no better way than in the really kind of syncretic and synthetic texts that you, you draw. So I want to talk about one particular text that you spend a wonderful amount of time unpacking because, you know, I think it's where this embedded reading of the hundred schools pays off most powerfully and because, you know, it leads directly to the next question that I want to ask you. So this is, of course, we're talking about the. The annals of the House of Liu, which is unveiled in the Qin capital of Shenyang in 241 BC, 20 years before the unification. And I'd like you Andy, to walk our listeners through what's actually going on with this text because I think your reading of it is genuinely refreshing. And some of us, I mean, not me fortunately, we were actually taught either to ignore it or dismiss it as, you know, as kind of merely derivative and too eclectic. And I think as you're talking about this new scholarship that understands these discourses on the Dao as more in dialogue with one another and there was a lot of sort of blurring between them, you make the case that it's not derivative, it's not eclectic. The structure itself is the argument. There's these three sections that correspond to Heaven, Earth and man, that kind of classic tripartite division. And then within these 12 records, within these 12 books map onto the months of the year with the teachings of different masters slotted into the seasons that match the themes they're talking about Yang Zhu and the kind of longevity teachings are in the spring, the season of birth and the creation of life, the kind of Laozhuang tradition, the so called Taoists, as the season turns to growth. And then Confucius text had a very text based learning for the mature man at the height of summer. Right. And then the military teachings of Master sun in the autumn, the season of death, of warfare, of execution. Right. It's really great because you know, when I was a graduate student, I was working with this guy, Don Harper. I don't know if you've come across him.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I know, Dom. I've got a history with Don.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I'll have to hear about this. I'll have to hear about this. But he had me reading this. What we believe was this Huanglao Daoist text from the Han, from the Ma Wangdui tombs, really, really fascinating stuff. But it has that whole same kind of correlative cosmology that's super baked into it. Anyway, the whole thing is just a working demonstration that the apparently incompatible schools are actually fragments of a single recovered kind of way of high antiquity, as you argue. And the political message is pretty unmistakable for Qin, which is Chin is going to be ecumenical in its deployment, its employment of these literati. None of you have anything to fear. And this is the exact opposite of the dogmatic legalism, because this is the thing we all are kind of taught or we were taught that Chin comes to power basically because of its embrace. It's Full throated endorsement of the legalist doctrines, right? I mean, of Xiangyang and Han Fei later. But this, this really blows a big hole in that. I think it's kind of wonderful. So, I mean, use this moment maybe to riff a little bit on what, what you were trying to show by, by focusing so much on the Liu Shi Chengqiu.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I, I've had a romance. I've had a love affair with the Liu Xia Qingqiu since. I don't know, I spent some time in Taiwan. I went, I went. After graduating college, I went back to Taiwan mainly to study classical Chinese for a couple of years. And it was around, it was 1989, 1990, and I, I ran, I went out and bought a copy of the Luci Chunchy and I would just sort of sit in Sifu Jiaji and sort of devour the text. And I, I, you know, I've, I've, I've really been mesmerized by it ever since. And yeah, I mean, I think that this is one of the, the, the, the sort of, the bad effects of this, this hundred schools model, right? If, if, if everything, if everything from the warring States has to. It's not authentic unless it can flip it can fit into that hundred schools model, well, then you have to throw the Luci Shinto out, right? Because it doesn't really fit. You know, they're blending different schools in, in these wild and interesting ways. And yeah, I mean, I think that on some level one can argue that the Lucia Chincho, the man who sponsors it, Liu bei, you know, it's really, it's one of the, it's one of the most brilliant pieces of political propaganda ever, ever conceived. Right.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Liu Bei's story itself is just fascinating.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

His story is this merchant and just

[Kaiser Kuo]

like cozies up to a son of. Well, I mean, it's a complicated story, very large endowments. And so it's a crazy story. It's also one of the most fun things. In the car ride just now, I was telling my wife this whole story and she just said, no, this is yesher. This is wild history. This is crazy. And I said, no, no, no, no. This is actually in the records of the grand historian. I mean, the cartwheel and all. It's all in there.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

No, Liu Boi's whole story is stranger than fiction. And he's one of the most remarkable figures I think, in human history. And he was just really a kind of political genius. And this text that he put his name to, it's really remarkable. One can make the argument that, the vision that he lays out, because he's basically facing the rest of the six Eastern states and he's saying, okay, and he's, and especially he's talking. He's sort of, he's making an end run past the political elites, past the aristocratic rulers of those states, going directly to these, sure, these literati. But he's also got a message for the rulers, which is, look, if you guys, this is our blueprint for what the new order is going to look like. And if you read this carefully, you'll see everybody's got a place.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

And, and I think that one of the, one of the messages of the text is that, yeah, you know, the six states, they don't. They can persist. They can. That if you guys submit to us, we'll find a way of allowing you to survive. There's in, in a sense, Lubawe almost anticipates the Han dynasty because if, if, if, if the, if the blueprint of the Lucio Chunch had been sort of implemented, if it had been acted upon, you know, you would have, you would have ended up with a sort of political, political terrain that looked a lot like what the Han come up with, where part of the, part of the empire is divided into these administrative districts, but part of them are still under the control of these hereditary houses. So to a certain extent, one can say that Chincho Huangdi, the first emperor, he sort of repudiates the, the, the, the Lucia Chunqiu. You know, he, he moves away because he, he, he does decide not to implement that plan. But other aspects of the plan he, he did implement, which is that if you look at the, the ear, the first couple of, you know, the first decade or more of his rule, you know, it is. He does promote this very diverse intellectual milieu. Right. And like you said, I mean, I'm craving this from Martin Kern. But if you look at those stele inscriptions that he puts up and he devotes. This is an enormous state enterprise. You know, going to all of these different places in the empire and putting up these stele, you know, they, they express the same kind of ecumenical vision that one. One finds in the Lucia Chinchio. That's the same sort of intellectual openness. It's not in any way sort of dogmatically draconian.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You know, it all breaks that out because, you know, this is the most maybe remarkable claim that the book makes. And yeah, I know it's not just you saying this, but you've said it very clearly. And this is going to be read by a lot of people. So maybe it's worth it for us to take some time to unpack this. You know, you point at, you know, that there were 70 erudites that were housed at imperial expense. And they do represent a whole gamut of political thinking. Right. We talked about the kind of conventional moral vocabulary of the mountain stele. What about something like, really familiar to most people, the burning of the books. Right. You talk about it in a very different context than most people probably imagine it in Qin. Most people, I imagine, think that this is something that Qin Shi Huang did immediately upon unification, that he immediately decided, I'm going to burn all the books. I'm going to bury the scholars. But you see it as a later, and it is historically later, contingent response to a specific political quarrel rather than like a legalist program that was executed from, from the start. So why does that mistaken picture have such staying power? I mean, the easy question, answer, I suppose would be because the Confucians wrote history. But, but what's lost? Would we reach immediately for, you know, Han fades as shorthand for the contemporary Chinese state?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah, I mean, I think that what's lost is that, you know, the Chin, they, when they come to power, they're faced with some of the same kind of problems and conundrums that will, that, that every subsequent imperial system is going to have to grapple with, which is how do we share power with these literati, with this educated class? They understand that they have to be given a seat at the table. And they do. Like you say, there are these robust institutions put into place, this college of erudites that have profound access to the emperor. They're having these drinking parties with the most powerful men in the world. They're having these open debates with him. Everything's hunky dory until the whole question of aristocracy comes up. Right? And there's this one debate in which one of these erudites comes forward and he's one suspect. So who knows, he may have been in the pay of one of one of Qin Shi Huangdi's kinsmen or one of the powerful courtiers. And he says, no, you know, we, we've made a mistake by eliminating the feudal domains. You know, we should, we should go back. We should, we should redivide the empire. He's in effect, arguing for the, the vision of the Lucia Chuncho. But, you know, he's, he's, he, he's asking to turn back the clock in a very radical way. Right? And that sets off a very, you Know, a very rancorous response. Right. Like, it's, I think it, it's, to me, that's one of the, the clearest proofs that this social revolution really was very radical because just the suggestion that you would bring back some of the material bases of this aristocracy, the aristocracy is still around, they've all just sort of been put on the public dole. But just the suggestion that you would give them their own territorial bases again is enough to kind of set off this, almost a kind of palace coup. Right. I mean, you know, and it really, it helps bring down the dynasty in the end. But, you know, if you assume that, oh, well, it was this, it was this legalistic regime from the get go, you sort of, you're missing out on some of the real important ways in which this system is evolving at its origins. Right. This was a question that needed to be worked through. And unfortunately, you know, for the chin was working through, it cost them, cost them their dynasty. Right. But you know, caricaturizing them as this, this kind of fecklessly draconian regime, that's, that it's just not plausible. Right. What, why, if that were the case,

[Kaiser Kuo]

would the, the Han go on to, you know, basically pattern everything on?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Exactly, exactly.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. That's the argument you make, Andy. Carl Diaspers had a term for the striking fact that something seems to happen across multiple unconnected civilizations roughly simultaneously. Right. You had classical Greece, Vedic India, the Hebrew prophets, and of course classical China and then the rough alignment of Rome and Han. He calls it the Axial Age. Right. Coincidence? I don't know. I mean, convergent responses to similar pressures like, and, you know, finally we got an agricultural surplus, we're building cities, the, the old sacral kingship order is breaking down. Or, or are we as, as historians sometimes just pattern matching across cases that aren't actually that synchronous? Where, where do you come down on, on the whole question of the Axial Age?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I, I'm going to take another academic cop out. It's. Both of your alternatives are true, right? Yeah, I'm sure that we're pattern matching. You know, that's the way human consciousness works and that's the way academics work, but at the same time, there is this remarkable synchronicity, right? I mean, yeah, you've got figures like, you know, the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. I mean, you know, even the prophet Zoroaster. I mean, they all fall within a few centuries of one another. And you know, I think that what's probably true is that, you know, across this broad terrain, there are similar kinds of demographic and economic and sort of social developments taking place. You know, like you say, you know, there's an agricultural surplus. It's, it's. I think it's a combination. It's not just agricultural surplus. If you look at what's going on in all of these societies, all of them, and I think this, this is simply a product of, of increased population density. More trade is becoming possible, and as more trade becomes possible, trade becomes more and more kind of crucial to the way these societies produce and distribute wealth. And that has all kinds of disruptive consequences that compel people to, you know, come up with new solutions to, to some old problems, some new problems. So I, I don't think it's, it's, it's entirely a coincidence. Right. There's, there's something going on in, in, in human society on a, on a very grand scale that really does produce a kind of, a kind of axial age. Yeah, I'm buying it.

[Kaiser Kuo]

All right. Yeah. I cannot help but marvel at it, too. And it's, it's been something. That's. It sort of got me very early on, probably in junior high when I made this realization. And I've never puzzled through it enough. But has anyone written on this, I wonder, is there.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Well, other than Carl, besides Carl Jasper. Other than Carl Jasper's. There's a book in my own field, and I'm going to forget the author's name now, called Chinese Society in the Axial Age or Confucian Ethics in the Axial Age.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right, right, right.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I've come across that in which the author places the emergence of Confucianism, and he argues very sort of robustly for the salience and the coherence of this category. You know, that's the one, the one book that leaps to mind.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Okay, okay, I'll check that out. Let's circle back to that kind of dilemma I started with. I mean, knowing what you know about this period and, you know more than anyone, having spent, you know, what, 16 years writing about it and even more time studying it and teaching it, what do you think the Warring States actually has to teach us about China in 2026? I mean, not the lazy version, not what we've already talked about, method. That was the lazy version. But what's the serious version of that? If you had to sort of give the modern salience elevator pitch, what would you highlight?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I gave some thought to this. I anticipated this question coming up.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah, you had to. I was a Ferris show guy asking you your book on the war.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

And I'm going to do this, I'm going to sort of take a little bit of a strange route out of this question. But you know, we call China. The name that we use for China in Chinese is Zhengguo, right? And you know, people in Europe and America, if you give the literal translation of that, what is Zhongguo, the Central Kingdom. And there's all kinds of, of misconceptions one can spin from that, right? It's, it's an inward looking ethnocentric society. I think if you look at the Warring States, the exact opposite becomes true, right? That, right. That the calling, calling something zhong central, right. It's as much a promise, right, as, as it is an assertion, right. If you look at what the Lucha Chuncheo is doing, they're trying to turn Qin into the Central Kingdom, right? And how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to show you where the center is. We're going to show you how we make things hang together. Right? And it's that kind of project that has animated successive political programs in this society for centuries. This idea that we're going to, we're going to show you how to make things hang together. We're going to show you where the center is. Have you read this Three Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, of course.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I mean, you can almost read that trilogy as a kind of modern Liu Shi Chunqi. Because Liu Shi Chin is doing, is saying, all right, how do we, how do we find the center? Well, right, we pose this, this, this greater cosmos. I can show you where the earth becomes the center of that cosmos and China becomes the center of the earth, right? But, but we're going to, we're going to make it the center, right? It's not that it is the center, just intuitively essentially it's something that, that, that requires human agency, right? And I think that that's a tradition that, that, that has deep roots going all the way back to the warring States.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So Junguo is aspirational, not descriptive.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Exactly. And, and, and, and it, and it, and it's, it's a promise that hinges on this idea that, you know, our society, our political system, it's going to be what we make it, right? And it's going to require our active participation, our active agency. You know, I think people.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I'll forward you the emails I inevitably get that argue that Zhongguo actually referred to the central states and they were just the states of the immediate, you know, traditional Zhou realm. The states like Song, in the very center.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yes, yes.

[Kaiser Kuo]

But, hey, like I said, I'll forward those to you. You can. You can respond to them, to those explained guys. Yeah. I think several of the structural features that your book describes, you know, the centralized fiscal administrative state, the management of this educated class that is simultaneously the regime's instrument and its potential opposition. I think the moral pretensions of rulers who are also fiscal military operators. These are the patterns that I see that really persist. Right. I feel like the party today, the Communist Party of China, is still governing through institutions whose root logic is kind of laid down all the way back in the 4th century BCE.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

No, that's absolutely true.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Andy, I got a couple more questions for you. One is how the period is taught today. How is the Warring States actually taught in Chinese public education in Chinese universities in Taiwan? I mean, are there divergences? And how does the way that it's taught compare to how you teach it at Brooklyn College?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Well, I think the biggest difference is that it's taught much more intensively in that if you go around the United States asking people if they've heard of the Warring States, I perish to think what that number would be. 1 in 10, 1 in 20. Part of the reason I wrote the book is I would like to up that ratio. I would like more people to be aware that this is an important watershed in human history. Of course, everyone in China and Taiwan has heard of the Warring States. It's so deeply woven into the. When I was learning Chinese in Taiwan, I bought this set of books for young adults called Wujiejie Zhong. Older Sister Wu Tells Stories About History. And the first three or four volumes were all histories drawn from the Warring States. Right. And they're great. They're great stories. And so, you know, this is. You know, people are literally getting some of these stories at their mother's knee, right? And they. They just sort of inform people's sort of cultural awareness in a. In a much more robust way. You know, on. On mainland China, there's been this sort of, should we understand the war, this debate over should the Warring States be understood as the early slave period versus the, you know, or the late slave society versus the early feudal society? That. That kind of thing. I think. I think the PRC is moving out of that paradigm and beginning to talk in more sort of flexible terms about how we. How we can understand the history of this period. You know, the whole understanding of the Warring States is being revolutionized by archaeology. And there's so much exciting archaeology about this period going on, that's really, really quite thrilling. And, you know, Taiwan, as Taiwan and mainland China kind of move closer together economically and culturally, I think that there used to be a much bigger divergence in the way the Warring States was understood in Taiwan versus in mainland China. I think that gap is narrowing as the gap in so many different cultural realms is narrowing. You know, since. Since relations, cross strait relations have eased. You know, when I, When I first moved to Taiwan, the first question everyone would ask me, I live. I lived in Taiwan for the first time in 1987. Have you been to mainland China? Because no one in Taiwan could travel in mainland China, right? They were. And they were all, they were all desper. Curious and unfortunately, my. I had an instructor at Brown who insisted I had to go to Taiwan first. So I had it. I had to disappoint everyone. You know, I know I haven't. I haven't yet been to mainland China, but now, you know, nobody asked you that in Taiwan. Everyone.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right, because they've all been.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

They've all been. So.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Andy, last question. Your book ends with this line that the Warring States legacy is one of constant self reinvention and reconstruction. That what the period must fundamentally bequeathed was a capacity to respond to, to direct and to harness change. And that's a very different reading from the one we usually get, which presents Chinese civilization as fundamentally about continuity, about stability, about the deep. Dao. Your reading is obviously the one that I lean toward. But if what's durable about China is the dynamism, what does that mean for how we should be reading what's happening in China right now? Another way of asking the relevance question. If the constant is change, then how do we understand China today?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

That's a good question. I mean, I think that one of the sort of durable patterns that comes out of the Warring States, if you're, if you're serious about dealing with change, if you're serious about harnessing, directing change, you know, change poses a problem to any society, but change is constantly happening all the time. This is sort of the, the great insight of the postmodern theorists, right? The one constant is change. And, you know, I think, I think that Chinese theorists under. They intuited this very early on. This is sort of a theme of warring states discourse. The one constant is change. And if you're going to seriously confront and engage change, well, you have to have some sense of how, how does one redeem parts of the past, Right? We. We can't. We can't really march into the future by abandoning the past. That's just not really something that human beings are capable of. Right. So, you know, I think it's. Chinese society is so dynamic that it, and anyone's a fool who tells you that they can predict where China is going next. But I would predict that you're never going to see a China that completely repudiates the legacy of the ccp, for example. It's too deeply woven into the history of this society. So the legacy of the CCP may be radically transformed. The system of China's future may look very different than it does today, but it will not be a complete abandonment of and repudiation and schism with the present. It just won't. That's just not how. That's not really how. It's not really how any human society operates. But the sort of cultural forces militating against that kind of thing are very, very powerful.

[Kaiser Kuo]

That's how I've answered when people have asked me why the Party today doesn't repudiate Mao. I mean, there are load bearing walls in Chinese life and the Party has certainly become one of them at this point. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think the fun thing about being an intellectual historian is just to be constantly sort of looking at that tension between continuity and change, between what remains and what doesn't. I mean, to constantly be puzzling through this. You know, the blindingly obvious fact that history has a ton of gravitational force and resonance and at the same time the fact that the equally blindingly obvious fact that China has shown itself capable of near instantaneous reinvention. Both these things are true at once.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yes.

[Kaiser Kuo]

But I just want to tell you that your book was so wonderful. I'm so, so glad that, that, that you reached out and that I was able to, to read it in a timely way. I'm recommending it to everyone I come across and I hope that sales are going well.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Well, thank you. You are the reader I imagined as I worked for 16 years. Right. My.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Oh, I'm really glad to hear it. I'm really glad to hear it. Well, yeah, I just enjoyed it thoroughly from page one. It's so readable and your writing style is just very engaging. Very much enjoyed it. So thanks, Annie. Let's move on now to the part of the show that I call paying it forward. If you've got a name check you want to give to a young colleague, maybe somebody there at CUNY Brooklyn College, or someone else you've worked with, somebody else maybe in the world of ancient China, who You are for us.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Times are hard in academia. Can I name two names?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Absolutely.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

All right. I have to name my friend and colleague, Avital Ram. She's currently on a postdoc at Cambridge, but she does early Chinese cultural history, does really exciting work. She edited a conference volume that's about to come out in paperback about disability and impairment in early China. And she does music. She does really fascinating work on early China. And another. Another person who I only met recently. Her name is Liang Tsai. She's at Notre Dame, and she gave the keynote speech at this meeting called the Southeastern Roundtable on Early China, the Southeast Early China Roundtable, which was held at the Elling Ide Center. Have you ever been to the Elling Ide Center?

[Kaiser Kuo]

No, I've not. I've not.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

You should check it out. You would. You would dig that place. It's.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Where is it?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

It's in Sarasota, Florida. And it's. It was. Elling Ayed was a sort of. He was a scholar of. Of Tang poetry and. But he was also the scion of a very wealthy family, and he bequeathed his family's estate. They've established it as a center of Chinese and environmental studies and.

[Kaiser Kuo]

How very interesting.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

It's really fascinating, and it's beautiful. And he's got a gorgeous library of rare Chinese and Japanese books.

[Kaiser Kuo]

But I'll have to scheme on a way to get down there.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah, you would dig it. So the Southeast Early China Roundtable was held there. Liancai gave the keynote address. She has a new book about Han era sort of jurisprudence and legal traditions. Really fascinating. It's gonna be. It's very provocative. I think it's gonna. So you should check her out and check out her work.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, I just thought of. You know, I'm sure she's already done it, but in Abtel Ram's book on disability and impairment in early China, there's that wonderful Trongzi story about the. The disfigured guy, you know?

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, there are a lot of. There are a lot of cripples and. And people who are impaired. People missing. Yeah, missing feet or hunchbacks. They're all over the Zhuangzi. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. Zhuangzi plays an outsized role in that. I'm waiting. My. My. My copy's in the mail.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Okay, well, great. Great. I hope that the work of both Abtel Rahm and Liang Tai get some attention out of this. What about a recommendation, Andy? If you come across a book or a piece of music, something that you want to recommend to the Readers, you know, I. Listeners.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I love Broadway.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Me too.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I'm about. I can't. I'm about to see a new Broadway show called the Lost Boys, which is based on this, this, the Kiefer Sutherland film of the 80s, which is a guilty pleasure of mine. I can't recommend it because I haven't seen it yet. But the last Broadway play I saw, which I recommend to everyone, is Hadestown.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You know, my brother was a producer on that.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Oh, really?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, I've seen it four, three times now.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

I've seen it twice and it brought me to tears both times. So, I mean, the reason I'm thinking about it is because. Because I saw it for the second time a couple months ago. The soundtrack for those of you who can't make it to New York.

[Kaiser Kuo]

The Unbelievable.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

Unbelievable. Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

The keyboard player of my band is also a huge fan. He's Chinese, he's never even been to the States, but he actually is a Broadway writer, producer for Chinese musical and he's a huge fan of Hadestown. We get together and my friends are, you know, my other guys, they're all metal heads looking at us bizarrely as we're, you know, listening to these, this trombone opening riff and

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

the whole. So I listened to. I've listened to the soundtrack over and over. It's really great.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Have you, have you ever listened to

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

the original Anais Mitchell's original concept album? Yes.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Mitchell. Yeah, the Anais Mitchell concept album is fabulous. I mean, in some, some of these songs, I actually like them better just played with the acoustic guitar in one voice. They're great. So check that out. All right, I've got an excellent recommendation here. I had the pleasure of meeting up with a young man named Isaac Herzog when I was in, not to be mistaken with former Israeli Prime Minister Isaac. He's a budding young China scholar. He works on a project on development finance and reached out and wanted to have breakfast. I'm really glad I did because among other things, he recommended to me a really fun book book called to say Nothing of the Dog or How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump At Last by Connie Willis. It's from the late 90s. She's a SCI fi writer, some renowned. But this is sci fi ish. There's a lot of time travel in it. I mean, time travel figures mainly into it, but it's really set into the time travel destination of Victorian England. And it's great. It's sort of a sci fi comedy of manners and it's very, very, very funny, which is something you don't often find in science fiction writing. I had a marvelous time. The audiobook of it is what I would recommend because it's masterfully read. The guy who does the I forget his name right now, but he's just such a skilled actor. Does all the voices just so, so, so terrifically well. So it's called, to say nothing of the dog or how we found the Bishop's bird stump at last. And thank you Isaac for recommending to them. I really enjoyed it. Hey Andy, what a fun time talking to you man. I have to give you one more piece of praise. Somehow you avoided using the pun he was only Joe King. I kept wanting that to come up because you have all these impotent Joe Kings and

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

yeah, oh man, that's amazing because I usually can't resist a good pun and that's a good one.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You seem like the kind of guy who can't resist a pun, so more props to you for that. Really looking forward to what you write next and to talking to you again, man. And I hope to meet you in person one of these days.

[Andrew Seth Meyer]

That'd be great.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You've been listening to the Sineka Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Gua. Support the show through [e-mail] where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Or email [e-mail] if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin, Madison's center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show again this year and for educating my daughter who just graduated week. Huge thanks to my guest, Andrew Seth Meyer. Great to meet you Andy. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care. Of

[Progressive Insurance Announcer]

this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Discover Top Rated Stays Loved by guests Guests rated highest by real guests through authentic reviews VRBO Book a vacation rental Loved by guests.