Chapter 75

The chapter takes the three standard complaints a government of the period would make about its population and returns each of them to the government, in an identical grammatical shape repeated three times.

The people are hungry because those above eat too much in taxes, which is why they are hungry. The people are hard to govern because those above act, which is why they are hard to govern. The people take death lightly because those above pursue life so thickly, which is why they take death lightly.

The repetition of the conclusion inside each sentence is not a translator's awkwardness; the construction closes on itself in the original too, and the effect is of a verdict being read out three times.

The middle item is the book's central doctrine in one clause. What makes a population ungovernable is not its ignorance, its appetites or its numbers but the fact that those above act, and the word is the same one negated throughout the text in the phrase rendered non-action.

The third is the sharpest and the least expected. A population that holds its own life cheap is usually explained by hardship or by ignorance. This chapter explains it by the intensity with which the rulers pursue their own living, which makes the connection one of contrast rather than of cause, and leaves the mechanism to the reader.

The closing line turns the argument inward: it is only one who does not make a business of living who is worthy to value life. The fault named at the top of the chapter, eating too much, is answered by a definition of what valuing life would actually be.

Very little in this book names an institution. It works with images, patterns and general terms, and where it criticises a practice it usually describes the behaviour rather than the mechanism. This chapter is the exception: it names the grain tax.

The phrase concerns the levy taken by those above, and the picture is the ordinary one of a rural economy in which the state's revenue is a share of the harvest. What the chapter says is that the share is too large and that the resulting hunger is not a misfortune but a transfer with a visible destination.

That directness places the chapter with a small group of passages where the book comes closest to social protest. Chapter fifty-three sets the immaculate court against the weed-choked fields and the empty granaries and calls the result the boastfulness of robbery. Chapter forty-six measures a government by whether its horses are hauling dung or being bred for war on the frontier. Chapter seventy-two forbids narrowing the places where people live and pressing on how they make their living.

Read together these chapters describe an economy of extraction and say so without metaphor, which is not what the book is generally remembered for.

They also complicate the common description of the text as quietist. A book that tells a sovereign his people starve because he takes too much grain is making a demand, and the demand is not that anybody withdraw from the world. Chapter fifty-seven's sage does nothing and the people transform themselves, and this chapter is what doing nothing would cost the treasury.