Late Zhou Political, Legal (and Moral) History

When Jin (晉) was partitioned and the ruler of Qi (杞) was also challenged this led to the Warring States period but this was the end of an historical era that I must now examine. The Warring States period may be seen as a failure of the ideas men but many of the ideas persist into and greatly influence both the ancient China that came out of the Warring States period and modern China. The Warring States were in fact involved in a contention essentially of ideas that political contention had produced. But how?

An initial innovation occurred in Qi under the Prime Ministership of Guan Zhong (管仲) (in the mid 7^th Century BCE so well before the Spring and Autumn period began). For war purposes, PM Guan divided Qi into divisions of five households each. Serfdom was being eradicated in the name of promoting the loyalty of subjects and the later 7^th Century saw the ruler of Jin making formal grants of land. Appointment of administrators was one of the necessary corollaries of instability (a meritocratic method of appointment to a public service was first formally promoted especially by the Mohists (followers of Master Mo, a 5^th Century BCE political thinker) but it was really only natural and was actually a fait accompli by the 5^th Century).

A further innovation of the Spring and Autumn period was the idea of law in many of the realms. This effectively provided a ruler with a means of establishing authority over (generally) his realm by his provision of legal remedies in local events of conflict. One well established early example was the promulgation of laws in Zheng (鄭) in 543 BCE. Commerce and a degree of mass production in industry were also expanding with the instability in the Spring and Autumn period perhaps counter intuitively but produced by the efficiency and innovation that instability and its corollaries wrought. Much of the commerce was in implements of warfare, though.

All of the above ran rather counter to any idea of totalitarian rule as wealth and ideas tended to destabilise traditional roles and motivations. Crudely, the reasons scholars and meritocracy became so vital and pervasive were at first all of the military conquests. A king would conquer new territory and feel the need to divide his territory for administrative purposes due to the extra requirements of administration, taxation, etc. The divisions came to be called Xian (縣) and the chief administrators came to be called Shi (士) or Ru. We call the Shi (or Ru) knights in most English translations (Ru emphasises the scholarship more). The knights tended to be well-educated in order that they might do their quite sophisticated jobs well and so a scholarly tradition was born.

Each Xian had an educated Shi, then, but also many other educated men who missed out on becoming the local head Shi who were thus eager to become travelling scholars and teachers and prove their worth to the metropolitan or other rulers.

One well known example of a complex state of the 4^th Century BCE under the aegis of Zhou was the State of Qin (秦) under the Prime Ministership of Lord Shang (Shang Yang (商鞅)). It was divided into 31 Xian.

So Confucius (Master Kong) was one of many scholars with political ideas on offer (just as China was also ruled by many rulers). Basically he proposed that older brothers, parents and ancestors (and all other people, too) be accorded due respect as tradition dictated and did not exempt rulers from this requirement. So he was seen as and was a radical conservative harking back to tradition.

In Kong's era, the Zhou emperors were not powerful. Two of the five major states in the era (the ‘age of a hundred schools’ blossoming and contending) coincided roughly in their outlooks with two of the major developing human-as-political-animal schools of thought: Kong’s philosophy and Lord Shang's Legalism. The states were Song (宋), a remnant state of the earlier Shang (商) dynasty near Kong’s minor home state of Lu in the East (and a traditional state roughly compatible in outlook with Kong’s ideas) and the up-and-coming upstart Qin state in the West.

Kong’s radical modernizing opponents ideologically (the Legalists) had a less humanist view of rule that tended to appeal more to the Qin rulers (like Lord Shang). There were lively ethical debates but Shang came down definitely on the side of dividing his population into groups of five and ten, enslaving merchants and some craftsmen along with the unemployed, reputedly standardizing weights and measures and creating 31 Xian.

Shang was a 'law and order' ruler and didn't trust his people an inch, a wise move according to his Legalist brethren. Their ideas are usually represented today by the work of Han Fei Zi (韓非子). Conspicuous in Shang’s law book were the Draconian or Shari’ah-like punishments advocated that were Legalist heaven. A Confucian would have probably called such punishments unnecessary (not to mention overkill).

The book of the ideas of Han Fei Zi that survives suggests that people are quite simply motivated by only two drives: the drive for pleasure and the desire to avoid pain. Legalists viewed virtue as exceptional in humans (i.e. nowhere near the rule Confucians hoped it was). So Kong and his followers were seen by Legalists as idealists seeking vainly to promote (mainly) what they called benevolence among vile creatures that would rarely practice it voluntarily.

In an era before the idea of constitutional monarchy it made sense that weak or bad rulers needed to be governed in some way by laws and so Legalism sought that way. In anticipation of the inevitable unintelligent, unwise and even bad rulers (that would inevitably be produced eventually by any absolutist dynastic system) they wanted him (not likely her) to be guided by their laws. They still fell short of having constitutional ideas, however, and Kong’s ideas could perhaps be seen as possessing at least the inchoate constitutionalism they lacked.

Han addressed the wise ruler when he stressed the idea of clarity and certainty of law – a version certainly of the rule of law however imperfect in practice without actual constitutional limitations on actual regal power. Han abhorred discretionary power and complexity in law – it must contain simple rewards and punishments and no ifs, ands, buts or maybes – no exceptions - as dictated by the simple idea of human motivations that he asserted. The king was the machine operating authority that commanded obedience as of right in this mechanical legalist structure of the state as machine for dummies.

Besides those two ideas, Legalism and Confucianism, and besides the Qin and Song states, there were of course others. There were many other ideas men. I’ve already mentioned the Mohists who had ideas concerning a meritocratic public service system. Among the theorists were also military ideas men. One of the ideas concerned preferring the avoidance of actual battles in war with a putative enemy by means of intimidation. Master Sun talked about how to fight bloodless wars and Mo Zi argued against wars of aggression altogether. There were also three other major states.

Merit seemed self-evidently to trump family connections in this era of travelling ideas men and innovating rulers seeking their services. One Qi ruler even set up a kind of research institute for philosophers.

Manpower in both agriculture and warfare were equally highly valued and efficiencies in its application were especially sought for one reason – state security. The actual state of affairs for the subject was always uncertain, though, as long as one day one could have a benevolent Confucian ruler and the next a legalist one and this was the nature of a disunited China in the late Zhou Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.

Confucians actually idealised this undoubted contention, however, as their humanism is inherently optimistic if not progressive. They promoted the education of rulers as well as others (especially in their own ideas) as a progressive force. One legalist Qin ruler on the other hand organised a burning of books rather than suffer books to exist that lacked the fulsome and unqualified respect due to the ruler.

The idea of war itself also developed in the late Zhou era from the chariot-bound aristocratic and gentlemanly pursuit it was in the Spring and Autumn period to the pursuit of relatively large conscript peasant infantry armies in the more scientific and relatively total and unconventional wars of the Warring States period. The individualist art of war had thus been replaced to an extent by the more conformist science of war (and individualism had become correspondingly less favoured). The commander’s job became to mesmerise his own troops into a fighting frenzy with bells and drums and simultaneously intimidate his opponent’s. Divination as a means of predicting the results of wars also ceased to be used over these periods.