This is the transcript of episode 01 of my podcast Reasoned Talk (议正言辞). Listen on Xiaoyuzhou or Apple Podcasts . The episode is in Chinese; this transcript has been translated into English.

Introduction

On February 5, 2020, during the COVID-19 outbreak, Wuhan’s first temporary hospital opened. In a photograph taken almost by accident by a Hubei Daily reporter, a young man lay on a hospital bed reading Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. The image went viral, and the book became a bestseller in China. It was as though the pressure of the pandemic had prompted people to pay closer attention to political order and state-building.

Francis Fukuyama is a Japanese American writer. He is best known for the controversial “end of history” thesis: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western liberal democracy had become the endpoint of humanity’s political development. Beyond that claim, however, Fukuyama has written extensively for general readers about politics and economics. He has a substantial following in China, and The Origins of Political Order is among his most influential books there.

The book’s basic argument is not complicated. Fukuyama maintains that a stable political order rests on three elements: state power, the rule of law, and accountable government. Political orders emerge and develop through the interaction of these three forces. State power can command obedience and protect people from external threats. The rule of law and accountable government, meanwhile, constrain that power, demand openness, and make the state answerable to the wishes of its people.

Fukuyama offers several examples. Afghanistan before 2021 held regular elections, yet the state was so weak that the central government could not govern much of the country. Russia has a powerful state and formal elections, but its rulers are not constrained by law. Singapore combines a strong state with a strong legal order, but in Fukuyama’s view its mechanisms of political accountability remain underdeveloped. None achieves a genuine balance among all three elements. If even one is missing, a political order may eventually decline.

State Power: Why China Built a Modern State So Early

The second part of The Origins of Political Order approaches the subject largely through China. Fukuyama argues that China was the first civilization to construct what we would recognize as a modern state. By 221 BCE, when the Qin dynasty was established, China had created a state in the sense defined by Max Weber—more than eighteen centuries before Europe did. Weber described the modern state as a political organization that successfully claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of force within a defined territory. The Qin plainly possessed those characteristics.

For Fukuyama, the principal force behind China’s early state formation was war. The Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods were marked by continuous conflict on an ever-increasing scale. Some scholars estimate that more than a thousand battles took place, and that the Battle of Changping alone produced more than six hundred thousand casualties. Those figures may be exaggerated, but they still convey a level of warfare far more intense than that of contemporary Europe.

By the late Warring States period, territorial annexation had become the central purpose of war. The number of competing states fell from more than twenty to the seven commonly known as the “Seven Warring States.” Each pursued reforms with a simple objective: expand state power and tighten control over the population. Reform focused on the military, taxation, population registration, and bureaucracy. Governments strengthened their grasp over domestic affairs to sustain the enormous cost of war, while also curbing aristocratic families and local powers that stood in the way of centralization. The most consequential example was Shang Yang’s reform of Qin, which laid the foundations for its eventual conquest of the other six states.

In 221 BCE, Qin destroyed its rivals and established a state that, in Fukuyama’s terms, was modern. Over the next two millennia, clans and local powers periodically pushed back, but an impersonal system—one based less on kinship and status than on a systematic, technical bureaucracy—became deeply embedded in Chinese civilization. By the Ming and Qing dynasties, Chinese state power had reached its height, yet the country still did not make a transition to modern democracy.

Fukuyama argues that Europe did not follow early China’s path, and did not produce a Weberian modern state until the seventeenth century, because religious institutions and aristocratic power were too strong to permit such concentrated state authority. China, conversely, failed to develop effective checks on state power precisely because religious and aristocratic forces were comparatively weak.

The Rule of Law Is More Than Written Law

In Fukuyama’s account, the rule of law consists of abstract principles that people broadly recognize as legitimate. Their authority usually has a transcendent source: religion, custom, or human reason. This differs from law in the ordinary sense. Positive law is made by rulers; the rule of law is a social consensus with a claim to stand above the current government. It therefore limits what a government may enact.

If the question is merely whether a government had written laws, China developed them very early. The first Chinese code with an emerging systematic structure is traditionally attributed to Li Kui, a minister of the state of Wei during the Warring States period. The text of his Canon of Laws has been lost, but later references describe six sections: Theft, Robbery, Imprisonment, Arrest, Miscellaneous Provisions, and General Provisions. The first five addressed different categories of legal relations; the sixth set out principles applicable across the others, somewhat like the general part of a modern code.

By the Qin dynasty, the legal system had become more developed. Qin written law took five principal forms:

  • Statutes: the main body of Qin law, laying down rules in criminal, civil, and other matters;
  • Orders: commands issued by the emperor and officials to supplement or refine the statutes;
  • Questions and Answers on Law: explanations of provisions and legal terminology in question-and-answer form;
  • Models for Sealing and Investigation: rules governing adjudication, judicial procedure, and official documents;
  • Court Precedents: examples drawn from earlier cases.

China therefore possessed a sophisticated legal system at an early date. But in Fukuyama’s framework, those rules were extensions and instruments of state power, not the rule of law itself. To find a legal tradition with a more universal and transcendent claim, we must turn to Europe.

Modern legality inherited much from Roman law, but the inheritance was not continuous. As the Roman Empire declined, Roman law gradually gave way to Germanic custom and Christian canon law. In medieval Europe, the law of the Catholic Church represented divine authority and became a body of principles in which people widely believed. For a long period, it also constrained secular power. That was one reason Europe took so long to produce a modern centralized state.

Roman law did not disappear entirely. Although many original Roman legal texts were lost, the sixth-century compilation now known as the Corpus Juris Civilis preserved central Roman concepts and principles. Commissioned by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, it became the foundation for the later revival of Roman law.

That revival was made possible in large part by the emergence of Europe’s early universities. Relatively independent of secular rulers, these institutions occupied a space between the state and the Church and nurtured elements of a modern political order. In the late eleventh century, the University of Bologna arose within the world of the Holy Roman Empire. It is widely regarded as the oldest modern university and developed Europe’s earliest sustained law-school tradition. It would become the intellectual center of the Roman-law revival.

Through law schools and legal scholarship, knowledge of Justinian’s compilation spread across Europe. The first generation of scholars, known as the Glossators, reconstructed Roman doctrine and tried to recover the meaning of the texts. Later thinkers looked further. Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued that law must be tested by human reason and measured against more universal standards of truth. He encouraged jurists not merely to copy existing rules, but to examine their sources and search for a more universal natural law.

The new universities trained jurists and lawyers who could interpret classical texts and apply specialized legal knowledge. Secular rulers and Church authorities increasingly depended on their expertise, particularly in matters of commercial agreement and property. In the process, lawyers developed a collective professional interest and resisted intrusion by political actors and untrained outsiders.

A shared legal corpus, an independent legal profession, and relatively autonomous judicial institutions together made the Roman-law revival possible. They turned law into a force that political authorities in Europe could not ignore. Fukuyama’s conclusion is that Europe eventually took a path different from that of other civilizations: state power, the rule of law, and accountable government constrained one another, and none could dominate completely. That balance was crucial to the emergence of modern democracy in Europe.

Conclusion

Starting from The Origins of Political Order, we have examined the relationship between state-building and the rule of law. Comparing China and Europe helps explain why, within Fukuyama’s framework, their political development followed such different paths.

Fukuyama is an important contemporary thinker and a characteristic voice of neoliberal thought. Many of his theories remain open to criticism and debate. That is no reason not to understand them and learn from the questions they raise.

Key Figures

  • Qin Shi Huang: Beginning with the unification of the six states and the commandery-county system, he represents China’s early centralized state.
  • Shang Yang: A major architect of Qin Legalist institutions, linking state mobilization, punishment, and administrative order.
  • Justinian I: Oversaw the compilation of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the textual basis for the later revival of Roman law.
  • Francis Fukuyama: Explains political order through state capacity, the rule of law, and accountable government.

Key Cases and Concepts

  • Qin law: The early empire’s capacity to govern through written rules, administrative hierarchy, and punishment.
  • Revival of Roman law: Medieval Europe’s rediscovery, teaching, and use of Roman law, which helped form a professional legal community.
  • University of Bologna: A major center for Roman-law scholarship and legal education.
  • Natural law: A universal legal principle above the ruler’s command, offering intellectual resources for limiting power.
  • State-building, rule of law, and accountability: The three lines used in this episode to read modern political order.