But Qin Shi Huang was no benevolent ruler looking out for his people. He was a staggeringly repressive tyrant who tried to standardize human thought in the same way he standardized laws, weights and measures. His followers believed that people were inherently evil and needed to live by a strict set of rules. So they burned most of the Confucian literature in the country, believing that it encouraged free thinking. In fact, the emperor made nonconformist thought a capital offense and sentenced thousands of intellectuals to years of forced labor on the Great Wall.
Sounds like a modern day tyrannical socialist government.