Merits and Demerits of Building the Great Wall

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The large scale construction of the Great Wall ordered by Emperor Qin Shihuang was an important event in the Chinese history，influencing the later feudal dynasties greatly in managing state and military affairs.The comments on this event varied a lot in the two thousand years，praising or demoting，and they could be concluded into two points:on one side the point is that a sovereign country should set up defenses and prepare for the war.At that time，if Emperor Qin Shihuang had not made up his mind to construct the GreatWall，it would have been hard to protect thesecurity of the Qin Dynasty（221 BC-206 BC）and ensure its stability and development.

Building the Great Wall guaranteed the safety of the agricultural production area inside the Great Wall as well.And the measures of moving the people to the border area and cultivating the lands in the north accelerated the development of the border area and cemented the frontier defense. This earliest “Ten-thousand-li Great Wall”had great military effect, forcing the Xiongnu people to retreat to the northwest and not to plunder and harass the south for several decades. Inside the Great Wall, the society was stable and the population expanded, and the agricultural economy also developed stably and fast. However, on the other hand, there are also many people criticizing Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Great Wall construction, saying that the emperor was ruthless and the Great Wall construction only wasted man power and money.

The first centralized feudal dynasty in China was doomed soon after the death of Emperor Qin Shihuang, and the Qin Shihuang Great Wallwhich cost large amounts of man power and money was also deserted accordingly. However, the centralization of the state power created by the Qin dynasty (221BC-206 BC) was adopted by all the later feudal dynasties. The deserted Qin Shi-huang Great Wall also influenced the basic ideas of defense of the later dynasties all the time. The political system of the Qin dynasty (221 BC-206 BC), the series of measures of making reality of the common law, the com-mon system of written characters, weights and measurements, as well as building the Great Wall and the straight path, all had enormous influence on the politics, economy and military affairs of the later dynasties. After the Qin dynasty (221 BC-206 BC) was doomed, the method of ruling the country with inhuman means was even more utilized and further developed in the later dynasties. The Qin dynasty(221 BC-206 BC) in fact established a very solid basis for the development of the feudal society in the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). It was just inheriting the series of political reform measures of the Qin dynasty(221 BC-206 BC) that made the state apparatus of the Western Han dynasty (206 BC-25 AD) quickly start to function well.