### id263996200 Qin China optimized infrastructure to support warfighting > This is explicit in how they designed the system of meritocratic ranks. Rank would be available to anyone, including peasants, based off of success in battle, with the presentation of enemy heads or ears leading to promotion. In order to properly motivate people, ranks could be passed on to children, but with a reduction in rank, quite drastic for much of the high nobility, but the exact same rank could be passed if the owner died in battle. > The opposite was also true. Failure in battle would be monitored through pervasive social surveillance: family and fellow soldiers would be punished as well, and rewards given to people who informed on others. Such surveillance was extended throughout society to ensure that people dutifully followed their tasks, with the population divided into mutually responsible blocks of families that would be expected to spy on each other and inform of any misbehavior. Punishment was varied, but often meant forced labor, in anything from building projects to industry. > > This apparently led to a ferocious army, as commented on by people from other states, with Qin soldiers fighting over enemy heads in the aftermath of victorious battles. It apparently didn't, however, lead to the type of glorified militarism seen in say, movies about Sparta: Legalist reformers thought that people would naturally be disinclined to fight, and would therefore need to be coerced into it. Evidence from excavations suggests that lower ranks were quite widespread by unification, with a quarter of the population holding ranks giving them status as low nobility. They would be granted immunity or reduced duties from corvee or conscription, lower tax rates, and as they ascended laborers of their own. There is a recorded, but probably very rare case of a slave ascending to a general. At the same time, forced labor as punishment also pervasive from agriculture to industry. > > The reforms were far more reaching than just the ranks system, and extended into agriculture, industry, and how the population was mobilized. In order to maximize agricultural output and weaken aristocrats, widespread land reform was enacted, creating freeholding households and granting land allocations directly to the peasantry, which would be responsible for both conscription as well as taxation by the state, instead of a aristocracy between the central government and the peasantry. To maximize state control of peasant households, the peasantry was divided into nuclear households and prohibited to have adult males coinhabiting, though in practice a son (generally the eldest) was allowed to live with and support his parents as they got old. > > To further increase agricultural output, large scale irrigation projects were undertaken, rewards and rank given out in some cases for high agricultural productivity, and the state pushed widespread use of iron farming implements and cultivation of wasteland. This was taken to an extreme in Qin's colonization of Sichuan, where the local elites crushed, and lacking any local aristocracy to push back, a massive irrigation project, that shapes Sichuan's geography carried out. Settlers were encouraged to move through rewards, convicts turned into settlers and forcibly relocated, and proto industrialists incentivized to open mines and foundries and so on. > > Aristocrats still existed, but were brought more firmly under state control. They were granted labor by the state according to their rank for both agriculture and household purposes, but the state maintained their primacy to this, and would have the ability to arbitrarily pull labor if they had greater demands or punish those who mistreated convicts too badly. In one case, a county had a death rate of something like 20% in forced laborers, and pretty much every important official got hauled off to trial. > > Finally, the state exercised great control over industry and merchants. Though the Book of Lord Shang is very negative towards merchants and artisans, many of the other surviving legalist works are less negative, and simply seek to ensure that the output of them is structured towards the goals of a strong state. Qin seems to have worked that way in practice. There were both large, centralized state workshops with expert artisans and large scale use of forced labor, as well as a distributed network of private factories run by industrialists under state supervision. The later can be seen in the manufacture of crossbows, where a private network of factories in a cellular manufacturing process was broadly overseen by government officials. The parts were probably not truly interchangable, but showed a much higher degree of standardization than random, and were all stamped to indicate where they came from, so defects could be traced. Mining was similar, though may have not used forced labor as it was hard to control in remote areas that mines were often located in, rather run by private enterprises under government supervision. > > This all led to a highly militarized state designed to optimize for military power. Highly productive agriculture supported large, conscript armies, which were motivated through a brilliantly designed system of rewards and punishments, and supported by a network of state supervised resource extraction and large industry. This state, in the form of Qin, would succeed in ending the Warring States, but the extreme levels of militarization would fade after Qin's collapse and into the Han. Maximizing agricultural output, manufacturing a ton of crossbows and iron farming implements, then giving them to peasant conscripts who, through success on the battlefield can ascend to the nobility, all looks very different from, say, our image of elite Spartan warriors. - [View Highlight](https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/q3bowq/sparta_wasnt_that_effective_in_war_were_there_any?__readwiseLocation=0%2F14%2F0%2F4%2F2%2F1%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F27%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F5%2F1%2F0%2F3%2F1%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F3%2F1%2F0%2F3%3A0%2C15%2F0%2F4%2F2%2F1%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F27%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F5%2F1%2F0%2F3%2F1%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F3%2F1%2F0%2F3%3A0#:~:text=This%20all%20led%20to%20a%2Cimage%20of%20elite%20Spartan%20warriors.) - [[hypermilitarized groups in history#id263996200 Qin China optimized infrastructure to support warfighting|View in Vault]]