Gerechte Waffen und die Kunst des Strafens (Righteous Weapons and the Art of Punishment)

Höckelmann Michael

Abstract

In China, as in the West, philosophers have asked questions about how to legitimize warfare. One text, the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋, compiled around 240 B.C. in the state of Qin 秦, offers a solution in terms of “righteous weapons” (yibing 義兵), often translated as “just war” by Western scholars. But yibing doctrine differs from Western theories of bellum iustum in certain respects: First, the yibing are embedded in the calendar and its cosmology of five phases (五行wuxing), in which they, together with domestic punishments, represent the “recessive” powers of yin 陰. Second, because warfare is the natural state of human beings, which only the emergence of political authority and the imposition of punishments could curtail, the yibing were an extension of domestic penal laws and other penal practices onto the relations between the states. Third, yibing are elicited by the improper punishments of the legal ruler in an opposing state, hence yibing are a tool for a ruler to save his own people. The theory of yibing in the Lüshi chunqiu is more than propaganda legitimizing Qin’s conquest of the other six “warring states”, and constitutes a highly complex theory about law, punishment, the calendar and cosmological warfare.