213 BCE, the eighth year after the founding of the Qin empire.
At a banquet in the Xianyang Palace, the court scholar Chunyu Yue urged Qin Shi Huang to restore the feudal enfeoffment system of the Zhou dynasty, arguing that no state could long endure without modeling itself on the ancients. Chancellor Li Si, observing that these scholars harbored dissent in their hearts while airing criticism in the streets—using the classics of antiquity to attack the present government—proposed that the people be ordered to surrender the writings of the Hundred Schools of Thought. These, together with the historical records of every state save the Records of Qin, were to be burned, leaving only practical works on medicine, divination, and farming. Anyone wishing to study law would have to take the officials themselves as their teachers.
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Qin Shi Huang: A brilliant scheme, Chancellor Li. Approved. I hereby decree—
Xiang Shaolong: Hold, Your Majesty! Burning the books and burying the scholars—this must not be done.
Li Si: Insolence, Xiang Shaolong! You dare shield these scholars and flout the security of Great Qin?
Xiang Shaolong: Not so, Your Majesty. Bookshops and seditious writings should of course be stamped out, and scholars who spout nothing but twisted nonsense scarcely deserve to live. And yet—publishing an explicit blacklist that names the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of Documents, and the rest is no wise strategy.
Qin Shi Huang: Outrageous! I want the rabble to know precisely which books may not be sold, may not be kept, may not be read.
Xiang Shaolong: Your Majesty—in the year 1559, the Roman Curia issued the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Prohibited Books, and kept updating it right up until 1966, when it was finally abolished. Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Galileo’s Dialogue, even the works of Hugo and Balzac all appeared on it at one time or another. On this history, I most strongly recommend Your Majesty read the Penglai manga artist Uoto’s Orb: On the Movements of the Earth.
Qin Shi Huang: So the foreigners of later ages took their lessons from me after all.
Xiang Shaolong: And yet the Index only stamped those books with an official seal of fascination, igniting fierce curiosity in the people. As Gutenberg’s movable-type printing spread, the very books on the list became required reading. The rabble, being uncultured, had no interest in Hugo to begin with—but turn him into forbidden fruit, and suddenly everyone is itching for a taste. Later ages would call this social phenomenon the Streisand Effect.
Qin Shi Huang: Strei… sand… a-fect?
Xiang Shaolong: Just so, Your Majesty. The Streisand Effect. In the year 2003, the famed American film star Barbra Streisand discovered that the website of the “California Coastal Records Project” carried an aerial photograph looking down on her mansion. She sued the photographer for violating her privacy, demanding 50 million dollars in damages and the photo’s removal. The result: a photograph that had been downloaded just six times—two of those by her own lawyer—was suddenly gawked at by more than 420,000 people.
Li Si: Even so, Great Qin can simply behead every last one of those gawkers!
Xiang Shaolong: I have a plan, Your Majesty—cheaper than beheading, and more effective by far.
Qin Shi Huang: Tell me at once—what marvelous technology from your era can burn books and bury scholars with such efficiency?
Xiang Shaolong: Your Majesty, that technology is precisely… fear.
Qin Shi Huang: Easily done. Qin is a technological superpower, and one with soft power besides—we export vast quantities of fear every single day.
Xiang Shaolong: Having learned from the lessons of medieval Europe, the great powers of the twentieth century made their censorship more sophisticated—built upon three Fs.
Li Si: General Xiang dares utter the F-word before His Majesty? What is the penalty for such a crime?
Xiang Shaolong: I would never, Your Majesty! The three Fs were proposed by the American political scientist Margaret Roberts in her 2018 book Censored: Distraction and Diversion in China’s Mainstream Media. They are Fear, Friction, and Flooding.
Qin Shi Huang: Meaning?
Xiang Shaolong: Only a gentleman would publish a list of banned books. The more effective method is to issue an edict decreeing, “Any who sell books endangering the security of Great Qin shall be beheaded”—while pointedly never announcing which books those are. In this way the court keeps the moral high ground, while bookshops and scholars, desperate to save their own necks, are left to draw their own red lines and censor themselves, living in daily dread of never knowing when they might step on a mine.
Qin Shi Huang: You dare imply I am no gentleman?
Xiang Shaolong: Your Majesty is the Son of Heaven—naturally you transcend the petty gentlemen of this world.
Qin Shi Huang: Mm. That’s more like it.
Li Si: And what has friction to do with books?
Xiang Shaolong: It means raising the friction of obtaining them. We need only work behind a black box, quietly pulling sensitive books from the libraries of Great Qin. Even if the court historians notice, we need never admit the list exists—we simply say the books are “being reorganized.” Your Majesty may even appear wonderfully magnanimous, announcing to the world that anyone interested is perfectly free to go and buy the books at a shop.
Li Si: The shops, fearing for their lives, won’t dare sell them, so the people naturally can’t buy them. Letting the fire born of “friction” burn the books in the dark—what an ingenious scheme, General Xiang.
Qin Shi Huang: Splendid! And the final stroke—I have it: surely we drown the scholars with the floodwaters of the Yellow River!
Xiang Shaolong: Your Majesty is brilliant! Even in a drought, Great Qin can use the people’s own tax money to publish mountains of official books and gazettes, drowning the people in garbage information. While the masses are busy reading gossip and drivel, and the scholars are busy sifting truth from falsehood in the heaps of informational refuse, they’ll have no strength left to ponder those writings of the Hundred Schools that endanger the security of Great Qin.
Qin Shi Huang: Excellent! I hereby decree: Any who sell books endangering the security of Great Qin shall be beheaded! And as for what counts as “endangering”—that shall be left to the officials to decide, at their discretion, at any time.
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And so Xiang Shaolong upgraded the burning of the books and the burying of the scholars, and successfully helped the state of Qin shackle the minds of its people—for a thousand autumns and ten thousand generations.
p.s. This story is purely fictional. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
p.p.s. Achievement unlocked: “Writer of Fiction.”
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