Analyse how Qin Shi Huang unified the warring states and built a centralised imperial system

What this dot point is asking

China selected as the Section A and B civilisation gives a striking case study in state-building. By the third century BCE the Zhou kings were powerless and the land was divided among warring states locked in constant war. The state of Qin, on the western frontier, grew strong through reforms begun by the official Shang Yang in the fourth century BCE, who imposed Legalist government: strict laws, rewards and punishments, registration of households, and promotion by military merit rather than birth. This turned Qin into an efficient war machine.

Between 230 and 221 BCE King Zheng of Qin conquered the remaining six states one by one. Having united the realm, he declared himself Qin Shi Huang, meaning First Emperor, claiming his dynasty would last ten thousand generations. He and his chief minister Li Si then dismantled the old feudal order. The empire was divided into commanderies and counties run by appointed, salaried officials answerable to the centre, not by hereditary lords. This bureaucratic model shaped Chinese government for two thousand years.

Control extended to thought. Following Li Si's advice, the regime is said to have ordered the burning of books that praised the past or criticised the present, sparing only practical works on medicine, agriculture and divination. Later tradition adds the burying alive of scholars. The First Emperor also launched enormous forced-labour projects: linking earlier walls into an early version of the Great Wall against the northern Xiongnu, building a network of roads and canals, and constructing his vast tomb complex near Xianyang.

That tomb gave the modern world its most famous Qin source. The terracotta army, discovered in 1974, is an underground force of thousands of life-sized clay soldiers, horses and chariots guarding the unexcavated burial mound. As archaeological evidence it shows the scale of the emperor's power, the organisation of his armies and the sophistication of mass production, even though it cannot by itself tell us his motives.

The empire proved brittle. The burdens of taxation, conscription and labour bred resentment, and the system depended too heavily on one man. When Qin Shi Huang died in 210 BCE, supposedly while seeking an elixir of immortality, a succession crisis followed. Rebellion spread, and by 206 BCE the dynasty had fallen, soon replaced by the Han, who kept the centralised structure but softened it with Confucian ideas.

For a TASC inquiry, China shows how to build an argument from very different kinds of evidence. The literary record in Sima Qian is rich but later and biased; the archaeology of the tomb, the walls and the standardised coins is contemporary but mute on motive. Weighing the two lets you assess both the achievement and the cost of the first Chinese empire, and judge why a state strong enough to unify China could not outlive its founder.