Law and Punishment

The final sentences from the excerpts of Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires is rather large:

Law existed as a means to preserve order and garner the resources needed to maintain imperial apparatus, and elites, whether Confucian or Communist, have always decided matters of life and death. The system has worked for over two thousand years. But the human costs are high indeed."

What does this mean exactly?

It seems that the empires of both Rome and China are emotionless judges who make decisions only in terms of imperial apparatus and societal elites. Their “controlling” patterns of history were “standard for maintaining order and adjudicating disputes.” They both lacked a lack of discretion for laws, serving only the “needs of justice.” China’s emperors do not have laws that are truly “identified” with any emperor—laws were “timeless, universal products.” And although both wavered on the death penalty, their laws provided deadly consequences for their subjects. Treason, for both empires was a difficult subject. The definition was blurred, and in Rome, some emperors were rather lenient about it. Torture varied for punishment, but to obtain “truth,” torture was “deemed justifiable.” Overall, it is summarized that “Chinese state builders carefully…managed their convict laborers while later Roman emperors squandered them.”

Does this mean that China handled its law(s) better than China? Or did China manage their bureaucracy better than the Roman Empire? Or is that even the question?
Unfortunately, this bit of reading seemed difficult. But even through the reading of the third chapter, I am not even sure that I feel confident to answer the focus question. Author Karen Turner states that her focus is on "how to justify the state's right to punish elites whose support was necessary for political survival and commoners whose compliance and labor sustained the institutional apparatus."
Can this sort of punishment ever be justifiable in terms of Rome and China's patterns of history, law and discretion, emperors, critics, deadly consequences, treason, bodily harm, economies of punishment, and legacies? Morally, I would argue no. But politically, economically, and militarily in terms of empire building, I would say yes. Depending on the circumstance, such torture and bodily harm may not be necessary. But without those actions, the empires may have failed long before their time. So is it a moral question or do morals (when building and sustaining an empire) go out the window?