Liu Bang's Way of Governing the State and the People

After Liu Bang became emperor, he established the culture of the Han Dynasty. He had been saddened by Qin Shi Huang's attempt to destroy Confucian culture. When he became emperor, he could not wait to bring back the Confucian culture that Confucius had worked so hard to establish. He made the ethical views of loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, righteousness, morality and etiquette the criteria for ruling the country and improving the quality of the people, reorganised the people's customs, rewarded heroes and heroines, preached the idea of patriotism and put the people first. Liu Bang became the "first emperor to worship Confucius and the first person to respect Confucianism." Liu Bang paid homage to Confucius because he realised that in order to build a stable society, he had to "lay down the arms and cultivate the culture" and "transform" the people with literature. One of Confucius' ideas of governance was to "educate the rich while the poor are rich". Liu Bang was a great admirer of Confucius as an educator, statesman and thinker, and since Liu Bang and Confucius were both reincarnations of the Purple Star God of Wisdom, it was only natural that heroes would see eye to eye. Confucius believed that by giving teachings after affluence, the wind of benevolence and righteousness could flourish. When Liu Bang established the Han dynasty, he hoped that Confucian rituals, benevolence and morality would establish a good social climate for the Han dynasty and thus achieve the effect of governing the country and pacifying the people.

The tyrant Qin Shi Huang not only burned Confucian books but also banned learning. After Liu Bang became emperor, he began to promote learning, a great promotion of Confucianism! This was because Liu Bang deeply agreed with Confucius: live and learn until you are old. Liu Bang infused the tradition of valuing education into Han culture, and the Chinese valued education from Liu Bang. Liu Bang was the first emperor in Chinese history to worship Confucius! It has been practised for generations since then.

Liu Bang created the Han culture that sustains the spiritual pillars of the Chinese nation. Soon after Liu Bang became emperor, he began to go to great lengths to govern his country and make his people live and work in peace and contentment. From early on, Liu wanted to establish a centralised feudal dynasty with a large unified system. Because the world was divided for a long time, the society before the Qin Dynasty was a scattered and divided society with feudal lords, continuous wars, economic disparity, cultural difficulties, different social systems, different ethnic origins and different cultural mentality. The people were desperate for a unified country and a stable environment in which to live and work in peace and contentment. Although Qin Shi Huang followed the trend of history by destroying the six kingdoms and unifying the world and establishing a centralised feudal dynasty, after unifying the six kingdoms, Qin Shi Huang forgot his duty as a ruler to govern the country and pacify the people. The tyranny of the Qin emperor was so severe that the people were subjected to a society in which "the wolves were tyrannical, the thieves were brutal and the people were poor". Before the unification of the Qin Empire could be perfected and consolidated, the Dazexiang uprising of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang broke out. The aristocratic forces of Xiang Yu, who had been defeated by the six kingdoms but not destroyed, also took advantage of the opportunity to revive. All these led to the downfall of the Qin Dynasty.

Therefore, Liu Bang carefully summed up the lessons learned from the fall of the Qin Dynasty, preserved the essence of the unification of the Qin Dynasty, removed the extravagance and tyranny of the Qin kings Liu Bang, while creating a unified centralised state, paid attention to rest and recuperation, reduced taxes and thus the burden of the people, made every effort to quell domestic rebellions and maintained domestic peace and stability.

The key to Liu Bang's victory in overthrowing the Qin Dynasty was to know the right people. The fundamental reason why Liu Bang was able to enter Guanzhong first, defeat Xiang Yu, establish a state and put down the rebellion was that he was in line with the trend of historical development and the people's wishes. In addition, the key to his victory was that Liu Bang had a large pool of outstanding political and military talent, which he was able to deploy appropriately to help him formulate the right policies and effectively achieve his goals of overthrowing the Qin Dynasty, establishing the Han Dynasty, revitalising Confucian culture and governing the country.

When Liu Bang became emperor, he maintained his habit of making good use of his people.

The reason why Liu Bang was surrounded by so many talented people was because Liu Bang respected talent and was good at utilising talent resources. Liu Bang knew how to make proper use of every talent. He gave the talents around him space and opportunities to show their talents, he appointed them according to their specific talents and tried not to miss any opportunity to promote them. He even tried not to miss any opportunity to promote talents. Even when talents put forward dissuasive and critical views, Liu Bang accepted and adopted every suggestion made by them with an open mind, as long as he was right and had a point to make.

In the use of talents, Liu Bang gave opportunities to all, regardless of their high, low, noble or low status, and used them according to their talents. In other words, the title was awarded according to the size of your war achievements, and the officials were arranged according to your personal talents. Liu Bang surrounded himself with talented people from all walks of life, with different experiences and various talents. Whether it was the old aristocrats and officials of the past, or the common people, as long as they had talent, Liu Bang would value and promote these talents and let them use their talents to serve the country. For example, Zhang Liang was a descendant of Han Xiang, the old nobleman, during the Six Kingdoms, Zhang Cang used to be an imperial official of the Qin Dynasty, and Shu Sun Tong was originally a doctor of the Qin Dynasty, all of whom were upper class people in society. Liu Bang's prime minister Xiao He and Cao Sen were originally minor officials in the county government of the Qin dynasty. Wang Ling was a local magnate. The great generals Han Xin, Ying Bu, Fan Kuai, Zhou Bo, Gou Ying, Chen Ping and Xia Hou Ying came from the common people. Liu Bang surrounded himself with talents from all social classes, which fully reflects his political attitude of treating all talents equally. Liu Bang's wise political skills were evident in his use of talented people and in the great achievements they made in the creation of the Han Empire, as well as in his bold promotion and reuse of people from humble backgrounds. This is the secret of Liu Bang's ability to make the best use of talent. This is the secret of Liu Bang's ability to make the best use of his talents.