Shang Yang. The book of Lord Shang: apologetics of state power in early China

Translated and edited by Yuri Pines. — New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. — x, 358 p. — (Translations from the Asian classics). — eISBN 9780231542333.The most important — and least studied — texts of the formative age of Chinese philosophy and political culture, the so- Book of Lord Shang（Shang jun shu 商君書）is one of the called age of the Hundred Schools of Thought (fith–third centuries B.C.E.). The book’s importance is threefold. First, it is one of the foundational texts of early Chinese political thought, a rich repository of bold and novel — even if highly controversial — ideas about state–society relations, historical evolution, human nature, and the like. It is also the earliest surviving treatise of a major intellectual current of that age, the so-called Legalist School（fa jia 法家）。Second, this book is attributed to Shang Yang 商鞅 (a.k.a. Gongsun Yang 公孫鞅 or Lord of Shang 商君，d. 338 B.C.E.), the singularly successful political practitioner whose reforms propelled the state of Qin 秦 to supremacy in the world of the Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國，453–221 B.C.E.). Even though this attribution is not entirely correct because portions of the book were composed long after Shang Yang’s death, the Book of Lord Shang remains a major testament to the ideas of Qin reformers, the architects of the future Qin Empire (221–207 B.C.E.). Third, the book’s vision of empowering the state by establishing total control over its material and human resources had a lasting impact on Chinese statesmen. As the earliest work to advocate the policy of “enriching the state and strengthening the army”（fuguo qiangbing 富國強兵），the Book of Lord Shang became — despite its notoriety in the eyes of the majority of imperial literati — an important text for supporters of the state’s socioeconomic and military activism throughout China’s long imperial history and well into the twentieth century.