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

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)

Transcript

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica 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 Kuo, 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 subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. I know there are a ton of sub-stacks 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 221 BCE, a comfortable 2,247 years before our usual Sinica 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, you know, as some commentators have insisted, claim that you can’t understand the mind of Xi Jinping without first reading Han Feizi?

The honest answer is that there’s 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 the Mencius or the Han Feizi 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 Qin’s unification in 221 BCE, 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, you know, 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 17 centuries. It produced the displacement of hereditary aristocracy by an educated meritocratic class, the shi 士. The ancestors, really, of every Chinese scholar official, every Communist Party cadre, every Gaokao striver, it produced the entire intellectual repertoire that the Chinese state has been rummaging through ever since.

Confucian moralism, Taoist quietism, Moist universalism, legalist fiscal administrative techniques, and punitive techniques. Although, you know, 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 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 stelae the first emperor erected on the sacred mountain of Taishan in his new empire, actually invoke all the Confucian virtues — humaneness, rightness, filial piety — and entirely in conventional Confucian terms. We’re going to get into all of 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 in 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 — Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, Wei, Qin — that in my experience, virtually any educated person in China can just rattle off without hesitation. So, to talk about all of 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 Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor.

Andy did his BA at Brown in, I think, ‘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 second-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 An’s 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, 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 he’s going to be, I think, the standard for some time. Andy Meyer, welcome to Sinica at last.

Andy Seth Meyer: Wow. I’m going to have to talk through my tears. That was such a wonderful introduction. Thank you.

Kaiser: 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, you know. So, take us back to the beginning. You teach at Brooklyn College. You’d already done the Huainanzi 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 reading. What was the gap that you saw? And why do you feel like you had to be the one to fill?

Andy: That’s a good question. The gap, I mean, I think you described it quite well in your introduction, right? It’s embarrassing. 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, publish or perish, I was trying to... So I had a student, a young man who tragically died of cancer in 2015. Lovely. And I think he might have gone on for a PhD and you might be talking to him someday. But he became very passionate about early China in some of the classes that he took with me as an MA student. 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. I’ve always been very passionately, you know, I became mesmerized by the Warring States as a college student. So, as soon as somebody put that idea in front of me — why don’t you write something for general readers? Like you said, I mean, this is something general readers here in the States need. 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 there were a number of different problems. I can talk about why it took me so long if you like. I mean, I radically underestimated the challenges of doing it. 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. Right?

Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like I can guess at some of the questions. I mean, part of it is just simply the scale of what you took on. I mean, this is a period of, what? 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 multi-polar system where the action keeps shifting from court to court. I mean, I was thinking as I was reading this, can you imagine, I read C.V. Wedgwood’s book on Thirty 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, Andy. I mean, Mandarin is not doing you a lot of favors here. I mean, like you have a major state called Wei and a small state called Wey. They’re 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, you know, the first Wei gets spelled, you know, the big one, W-E-I, as it is forever. And then Wey, you know, the one that means guard, is W-E-Y, right?

Andy: Yeah. 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: Yeah. I mean, my favorite one, Andy, I don’t know if you – I mean, talk about this because you’ve got a King Zhao of Qin and you’ve got a King Zhao of Yan. 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 like 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. And thankfully, you have all the maps in there. But wow.

Andy: 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, spoiler alert, the warring states end with the state of Qin conquering the other six great states. And they undertake this purge, right, of the records of the other states.

So, 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 I wanted it to be an engaging narrative, an informative narrative, but also a verifiable narrative. Luckily, I had the guide of scholars like Yang Kuan and Qian Mu as guides. But even with their help, putting together a narrative alongside this chronology was challenging.

Kaiser: You call it a chronology, but 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.

Andy: Thank you. And, you know, that was a big challenge. You know, narrative and chronology are two separate things. 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 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.

You know, 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, well, 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 outline was still going to pose lots of challenges.

Kaiser: 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 and trade publishing, as I understand it, is that, so 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 Chinamaxxing trend toward the end there?

Andy: You know, I always had a firm faith that there’s a readership for this book out there.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Andy: You know, it may not be as big as the readership for authors like 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 they weren’t first very enthusiastic about it, but they were never satisfied that I had sort of sexed up the narrative to the point where it would be interesting enough for English language readers that they had confidence in it. So, they let me go.

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. 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