In 213 BC, at a party held by Qin Shihuang, Chunyu Yue publicly opposed Qin Shihuang’s system of prefectures and counties. He believed that the reason why the Shang and Zhou dynasties had been passed down for thousands of years was because of the enfeoffment system. A large number of children, nobles, and heroes are princes and assist the royal family. However, the county system is now implemented without enfeoffing princes, which is not conducive to the governance of the country.
Li Si, the prime minister at the time, refuted Chunyu Yue's view, "The five emperors will not be reunited, and the three generations will not attack each other. Each of them will govern according to its own rule. It is not the opposite, as time changes." Li Si believed that the method of governing the country should be based on the national conditions. To be sure, the Shang and Zhou dynasties implemented the feudal system because the princes were fighting and could not unify. But now that the world is unified, power should be concentrated in the hands of the rulers. The people only need to work hard, and those with lofty ideals only need to learn the laws and regulations of governing the country. It is not an attempt to use the private knowledge of the predecessors to disrupt the current government. So Li Si suggested to Qin Shihuang that all books except those written by Qin historians should be burned, and all books that were not orthodox should be destroyed. However, books on medicine, divination, agriculture, etc. are not destroyed. Therefore, the result of this dispute between the feudal system and the prefecture and county system was that Li Si wrote to Qin Shihuang and put forward his proposal of "burning books" based on "supporting the prefecture and county system".
After Qin Shihuang unified the world, he formulated many national policies, such as writing with the same text, chariots with the same track, unifying weights and measures, etc. In the short term, the purpose of the book-burning discussion is to allow Qin Shihuang to once again achieve ideological unification after territorial unification, and to eliminate the possible separation of people's hearts caused by the different positions or even conflicts of hundreds of schools of thought. ?Disadvantages consolidated the centralized rule of the Qin Dynasty.
In the long run, although the act of "burning books" greatly damaged the culture before the Qin Dynasty, from the beginning of the Qin Dynasty, China's unified status continued to be consolidated, and the people's ideological reached unprecedented unity. In this land of China, although it has experienced the changes of dynasties and historical changes, the situation of "divided must be reunited" has been unfolding. The situation of great unification cannot be broken no matter what. Looking at the European continent, it is precisely because there is no unified Culture has divided countless small countries on a small landmass.