This week on Sinica, I speak with Andrew Seth Meyer, professor of history at CUNY Brooklyn College and the author of a remarkable new book from Oxford University Press, To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor. Sixteen years in the making, it’s the first proper one-volume narrative history of the Warring States in English aimed at a general reader — a gap in the field that Andy has now decisively filled. We talk about why this period — the roughly 260 years between Confucius’s death and Qin’s unification in 221 BCE — really is the deepest layer of Chinese political history that still genuinely matters, and we try together to find the line between responsible historical reasoning about modern China and the kind of lazy essentialism that reaches for Han Feizi every time Xi Jinping makes a speech. Along the way we get into the displacement of the hereditary aristocracy by the shi, the Lüshi Chunqiu as a piece of political genius, why the standard caricature of “Legalist” Qin is wrong, and what it means that the Chinese state is still, in some real sense, running on operating software written in the 4th century BCE.
8:14 – The 16-year gestation, why no general-reader Warring States book existed in English, and what made Andy think he could be the one to write it
11:06 – The romanization headaches: Wei vs. Wey, King Zhao of Qin vs. King Zhao of Yan, and the special agonies of writing about early China for an English audience
14:31 – Why he organized the book by state rather than strictly chronologically — and what that structure lets him do
18:14 – The relevance question: how to take the deep continuity of Chinese political life seriously without falling into the orientalist “eternal China” trap
25:52 – Why the Warring States is properly called a revolution: the destruction of Zhou-era hereditary aristocracy and the rise of the shi
33:15 – Fukuyama’s claim that Qin built the world’s first genuinely modern state — is “modern” the right word?
36:30 – Qin’s 38 commanderies, why the radical version lasted only 15 years, and the Han retreat: aristocracy or regional autonomy?
39:46 – Reading the Hundred Schools as embedded political actors rather than tidy textbook categories — and the Jixia Academy as ancient Brookings
44:06 – The Lüshi Chunqiu as a brilliant piece of political propaganda, and what its tripartite cosmological structure was actually arguing
52:31 – Why the cartoon-legalist version of the Qin is wrong: the 70 erudites, the Taishan stelae, and what the book-burning episode really was
57:05 – The axial age question: pattern-matching or something real?
1:00:40 – What the Warring States actually has to teach us about China in 2026: zhong guo as aspiration, not description
1:05:08 – How the Warring States is taught in China and Taiwan today, and what archaeology is doing to the field
1:08:36 – Constant self-reinvention as the real Chinese legacy, and why no plausible future China fully repudiates the CCP
Paying it forward:
Avital Rom (postdoc at Cambridge, early Chinese cultural history, editor of a forthcoming volume on disability and impairment in early China)
Liang Cai (Notre Dame, new book on Han-era jurisprudence and legal traditions)
Recommendations:
Andy: Hadestown on Broadway — and Anaïs Mitchell’s original concept album
Kaiser: To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis (audiobook especially recommended)
