Feudal fragmentation: how a unified ideal broke into warring states

Lesson A ended with a problem. The Zhou people had destroyed the Shang and needed a reason why they had the right to rule. Their answer was the Mandate of Heaven: Heaven gave power to a ruler who was virtuous, and took it away from a ruler who was not. This lesson asks a harder question. What happened to that idea over the next eight hundred years? The Zhou built a political order on kinship and ritual, and for a time it worked. Then it decayed, and the states that once served the Zhou king fought each other for survival. In 221 BCE one of them, Qin, conquered all the others. The story is about how a unified ideal broke into warring states, and why the Mandate survived even as the Zhou house lost all real power. Begin with the system the Zhou built. After the conquest, which tradition dates to about 1046 BCE, the Zhou had a practical problem. They were a small people who had defeated a large and wealthy state. They could not govern the whole Yellow River plain from their home base in the west. So the Zhou kings, with the help of the Duke of Zhou, who acted as regent for the young King Cheng, placed relatives and allies as rulers in regional centers. A regent is a person who rules on behalf of a king who is too young or unable to rule. Each ruler built a walled town and governed the land around it. The arrangement is usually called fengjian. That word is often translated as "feudalism." Feudalism is a term historians first used for medieval Europe, where lords held land from kings in return for military service. Many historians of China are cautious about using it. Zhou lords were not bound mainly by contracts. They were bound by kinship, by ritual, and by their rank within a family hierarchy. So "feudalism" is a convenient label, but it can mislead. What held the system together? Three things. The first was kinship. Later texts describe a system called zongfa, the rules of descent. In it, the senior line of a family held the main ancestral temple, and junior lines branched off beneath it. The Zhou king stood at the top as head of the senior line. Lords were his younger relatives, or the relatives of his wives. Historians debate how rigidly this system worked in the early period. The detailed descriptions come from texts written much later, and they may present an orderly ideal rather than a messy reality. The second thing was ritual. Ritual means formal ceremonies with fixed rules, such as sacrifices to ancestors, feasts, and the exchange of gifts. Through ritual, lords showed their rank and their loyalty. The third was the king's prestige, backed by the Mandate. The king was the Son of Heaven, and he was the only person who could grant legitimate rank. We can see this system in action because of bronze inscriptions. These are texts cast or engraved on ritual bronze vessels, usually made to honor ancestors. Many record an investiture ceremony. An investiture is a ceremony in which a ruler formally grants a person office, land, or rank. A typical inscription says that the king summoned a man to the court, praised his ancestors, gave him a title and gifts, and ordered him to serve loyally. The man then cast a bronze vessel to record the honor and to use in offerings to his ancestors. These inscriptions are primary sources, made at the time by the people involved. They are very valuable. But they have limits. They were written by those who received favors, so they stress loyalty and royal generosity. They do not tell us much about quarrels or failures. Now the weakness. The system depended on blood ties, and blood ties thin with time. A lord in the first generation was the king's brother or nephew. Five or six generations later, his descendants were distant cousins. The bond of family feeling that made a lord obey became a formal bond only. Meanwhile each lord had a real territory, real farmers, and a real army. Over generations, each regional state built its own officials, its own temples, and its own interests. The center depended on goodwill. The regions held the land and the people. This is a key point for thinking like a historian. The Zhou order was not destroyed by a single blow. It was undermined by its own design, because it spread power outward and then relied on sentiment to keep the pieces together. Trouble at the center came in the ninth century BCE. The Zhou kings faced military pressure from peoples on their borders, and they also faced quarrels at court. According to Chinese tradition, King Li was so disliked that his subjects drove him into exile around 841 BCE. For the next years, until about 828, the state was run by a regency called the Gonghe. The name may mean "joint harmony," though some traditional accounts say it was named for a man, the Lord of Gong. This is not certain. What matters is the date. The year 841 is the first year in Chinese tradition that can be fixed firmly, and all earlier dates are less secure. We should remember this when we read about earlier events: even the basic calendar of early China is partly reconstructed. A king who could be expelled by his own people was not the all-powerful figure that the bronze inscriptions suggest. The decisive shock came in 771 BCE. King You ruled from the capital Haojing, in the west near modern Xi'an. According to the traditional accounts, found in the historian Sima Qian's Shiji, in the Bamboo Annals, and in the Guoyu, King You favored a consort named Bao Si and tried to replace his heir with her son. The displaced queen's father, the Marquis of Shen, then allied with a people called the Quanrong, who lived to the west and are often described as nomads or semi-nomads. They attacked and sacked Haojing, and King You was killed. A famous story adds a dramatic detail. King You supposedly lit the warning beacon fires to amuse Bao Si, who liked to see the lords rush to his aid. Later, when real enemies came, the lords ignored the fires, and the king was left alone. Scholars treat this story with real skepticism. It looks like a moral tale, written later to show how a foolish ruler destroyed himself over a woman. Notice how the story fits the logic of the Mandate. A king who lacked virtue lost Heaven's favor. Whether or not the beacons ever burned, the story tells us how later Chinese writers wanted to explain the fall. Sima Qian himself deserves a word, because we depend on him so much. He was a court historian of the Han dynasty who finished his great work, the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, around 100 BCE. That is about six hundred to seven hundred years after the events of 771. He used older texts, some now lost, and he often tried to compare accounts. But he wrote under the Han, with Han views of what a good or bad ruler should be. So when we read his account of the early Zhou, we are reading a later reconstruction. Recent finds help. Excavated bamboo manuscripts, such as the Qinghua slips, which include a text called the Xinian, give a different account of the move east than the traditional one. They suggest, for instance, that the royal succession and the court's relocation were more complicated than later writers said. Historians are still working out what this means. The honest position is that the broad outline of 771 is accepted, but many details are uncertain. After the disaster, the court moved east to Luoyi, near modern Luoyang, in 770 BCE under King Ping. This move marks the start of the Eastern Zhou. Historians divide Zhou history into two parts. The Western Zhou, from about 1046 to 771, was based in the west. The Eastern Zhou, from 770 to 256, was based in the east, and it is itself divided into the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period. A period here simply means a span of time that historians treat as a unit because it shares certain features. The Eastern Zhou kings survived, but they were much weaker. They had lost their home territory, their revenue, and much of their army. They now depended on stronger lords, such as those of Zheng, Jin, and Qin, to protect them. In theory they were still the Sons of Heaven. In practice they were respected figures of ritual who held a small territory and could not command anyone. This is a vital moment in the history of the Mandate. The king no longer had power, but the idea that only the Zhou king could grant legitimacy was still alive. For centuries, lords continued to claim they acted in the king's name. Legitimacy outlived power. This is one reason the Mandate became so durable: it was a belief about who deserved to rule, and beliefs can last longer than armies. The first part of the Eastern Zhou is called the Spring and Autumn period, traditionally dated from 770 to 476 BCE. The name comes from the Chunqiu, or Spring and Autumn Annals. This is a very terse chronicle of the state of Lu, covering the years 722 to 481. It records events year by year in brief entries, such as a ruler's death, a meeting of lords, an eclipse, or a battle. The Zuozhuan, a long narrative commentary that was added later, fills in the stories behind the entries: speeches, plots, and debates. The Zuozhuan is our richest source for the period, but it too was shaped by later editors, and some of its speeches were probably written or polished long after the events. The key political invention of this period was the hegemon, called ba in Chinese. A hegemon was a powerful lord who claimed to defend the Zhou king and to protect the weaker states from invaders and from each other. The idea was a clever compromise. The king could no longer defend order. So a strong lord did it in his name. The first traditional hegemon was Duke Huan of Qi, who ruled in the seventh century BCE and was advised by a famous minister, Guan Zhong. Qi was a large state on the eastern coast, rich in salt and fish. Duke Huan called meetings of lords, made covenants with them, and led armies against threats to the Zhou world. A covenant, meng in Chinese, was a solemn agreement sworn before spirits, often sealed by a ritual involving the blood of a sacrificed animal. Such oaths show how much this world still relied on religion to hold promises in place. Other hegemons followed, though the traditional lists vary. Duke Wen of Jin, Duke Mu of Qin, and King Zhuang of Chu are often named. Notice that the lists disagree. This is because "hegemon" was never an official office. It was a role that later writers gave to certain rulers, and different writers chose different people. Notice also that Chu, in the south, and later Wu and Yue, in the southeast, were regarded by northern states as partly outsiders. Their rulers used royal titles, calling themselves king, which the Zhou world reserved for the Zhou ruler alone. This tells us something. The Zhou cultural world was growing larger than the Zhou political world. New peoples were joining it, adopting its writing and rituals, but they did not feel bound by its rules about who could be king. War in this period still followed conventions. Armies were small and led by aristocrats who fought from chariots. There were rules of etiquette that strongly shaped how battles were fought. The Zuozhuan tells a famous story about Duke Xiang of Song, who in 638 BCE refused to attack the army of Chu while it was crossing a river, because it would be unchivalrous to strike an enemy not yet ready. Song was defeated, and the duke was wounded. The story was later used as an example of foolish, outdated honor. It shows that in this age, a code of aristocratic behavior still mattered, but also that the code was starting to look dangerous. Even so, states were absorbing each other. At the start of the Spring and Autumn period there were well over a hundred polities, though the exact number is unknown. By the end only a handful of large states and a few small survivors remained. Strong states swallowed weak neighbors, and they turned conquered towns into territories under their own control. Here we see the first sign of a major change. A ruler who conquered a town did not always give it as a fief to a relative. Sometimes he placed an appointed official in charge, who could be removed. This was the seed of a new kind of government. Within each state, a second fragmentation was taking place. The same logic that had weakened the Zhou king now weakened the rulers of the states. Noble lineages that descended from earlier dukes became powerful ministerial families, and they overshadowed the rulers they served. In Lu, the home state of Confucius, three families descended from Duke Huan controlled the state. They are known as the Three Huan families. They held real power, while the Duke of Lu was a figurehead. In Jin, which was one of the strongest states, six great ministerial houses competed for control. In Qi, a family called Tian, also known as Chen, slowly gained popular support and displaced the ruling house. The pattern is clear. Power moved from the Zhou king to the regional lords, and then from the lords to their own great families. Each step followed the same pattern, because each step depended on kinship loyalty that faded as time passed, while real control of land and soldiers stayed with local holders. Two events are used as markers for the move into the next age. The first is in Jin. In 453 BCE, three of the great families, Han, Zhao, and Wei, joined together and destroyed a fourth, the Zhi family, and in effect divided Jin among themselves. Then, in 403 BCE, the Zhou king formally recognized the three as lords of their own states. This is a remarkable moment. The king, who in theory was the source of all legitimate rank, gave his approval to men who had taken power by force. He had no real choice, but his approval was still valued. It shows that the old language of legitimacy remained important even to those who broke its rules. The great historian Sima Guang, who lived in the eleventh century CE, so about fourteen hundred years later, began his huge history, the Zizhi tongjian, exactly at this point. He did so because he believed that recognizing the three families was the moment the ritual order collapsed. For him, when the king approved a usurper, he destroyed the principle that kept society in order. A usurper is a person who takes power without the right to do so. Notice that this is a judgment by a later moralist and not a neutral fact. Others might say the order had been failing long before. The second marker is in Qi. In 386 BCE the Tian family was recognized as the legitimate rulers of Qi, replacing the old ruling line, which had been descended from the founders appointed by the Zhou. Again, a family that had taken power was given formal approval. When exactly the Warring States period begins is debated. Some historians date it to 475 BCE, which follows the end of the Spring and Autumn Annals' coverage in the traditional sense. Others prefer 453, the division of Jin. Others choose 403, the king's recognition of the three families. None is correct in an absolute sense. Each is a convention, a choice about which change matters most. The disagreement reminds us that periods are tools used by historians, and that real change is gradual. The name "Warring States" comes from a text called the Zhanguo ce, or Strategies of the Warring States. It was compiled in the Han dynasty by a scholar named Liu Xiang, who gathered older materials about the speeches and schemes of wandering advisers. These advisers traveled from court to court offering plans to rulers. Many of the stories are lively and clever, but they read like entertainment, and historians doubt many of the details. Still, the text gives us a vivid picture of an age when states were bargaining, forming alliances, and betraying each other. What changed? Historians offer several causes, and it is worth taking them one at a time, since the interaction between them is the real answer. The first is technology. Iron came into wide use in China in the middle of the first millennium BCE. Iron tools, such as plow tips and hoes, were stronger and cheaper than bronze ones. Together with ox-drawn plows, they let farmers clear more land and grow more food. More food meant more people, and more people meant more taxpayers and more soldiers. States that could count and tax their farmers became stronger than states whose power rested on the loyalty of a few aristocrats. The second cause is commerce. Trade in salt, iron, cloth, and grain grew. Some merchants became very rich. Coins appeared in various shapes, including spades and knives made of bronze. A new kind of wealth existed that did not depend on being born into a noble lineage. This weakened the old assumption that rank and wealth went together. The third cause is the change in warfare. In the early period, fighting was dominated by aristocrats in chariots, supported by foot soldiers who counted for little. Over time, armies grew much larger and were made up of ordinary conscripted farmers armed with iron weapons and, in time, crossbows. A conscript is a person forced by the state to serve in the army. Later, cavalry became important too, especially in the north, where states were in contact with horse-riding peoples. A chariot warrior needed years of training and expensive equipment. A peasant infantryman needed little. So the military value of the old aristocrat declined, and states learned to draw soldiers from the whole population. This changed who was important in the state. It also made war much deadlier. Traditional sources give huge numbers for the dead. One famous figure says that in 260 BCE the state of Qin killed 400,000 soldiers of Zhao after the battle of Changping. Historians think such numbers are likely to be exaggerated. We cannot be sure of the real figure. But even if the number is wrong, the battle shows the scale of war in the period: it was no longer a ritualized contest, but a struggle to destroy a rival state. The fourth cause is a change in who ran the state. Rulers needed skilled men to collect taxes, raise armies, and keep records. They began to hire ministers and officials for their ability, not their birth. A bureaucracy is a system of government run by appointed officials who follow rules and are paid by the state. Early bureaucracies appear in this age. Alongside this, many states replaced hereditary fiefs with administrative districts called xian, usually translated as counties, and jun, commanderies. A commandery was a larger district, often on a frontier, governed by an official sent from the capital. Unlike a fief, a county or commandery could not be inherited. The ruler could remove the governor. This one change was extremely important. It meant that the ruler could control the land directly. The old system had weakened the center by giving land away. The new system kept land under the center. These causes combine into one story. Iron and plows produced more people and food. Larger populations allowed bigger armies. Bigger armies required officials to organize them. Officials, if loyal to the ruler and not to a noble family, made the ruler more powerful. The states that adopted these changes most thoroughly grew strongest. The others were conquered. Competition therefore acted like a filter. States that did not reform disappeared. The clearest example of reform is Qin under Shang Yang. Qin was a state in the far west, in the old Zhou homeland. Northern states had sometimes treated it as a half-barbarian place. Around 356 BCE, Lord Shang, whose personal name was Yang, began a series of reforms at the invitation of Duke Xiao of Qin. According to tradition, he organized households into groups that were jointly responsible for each other's crimes, set up a system of household registration, rewarded soldiers with rank for killing enemies, and cut the privileges of nobles who had no military merit. He also encouraged farming and set up counties run by officials. Rank no longer depended on birth alone, but on service to the state. The Book of Lord Shang is a text that sets out these ideas, but historians doubt that Shang Yang wrote all of it. It is probably a collection that grew over time. Historians also debate how much of the reform program was really Shang Yang's own work, and how much of it was developed by later Qin rulers and credited to him. Even so, the direction is clear. Qin built a society in which farmers and soldiers served the state directly. Other states reformed too. Tradition credits Li Kui with reforms in Wei in the early fourth century BCE, but this is much less well documented, and some scholars wonder how much we know. Still, the general pattern appears everywhere. Around the same time, the language of kingship changed. From roughly 344 to 334 BCE, rulers of major states began to take the title king, wang. Until then, wang had belonged only to the Zhou ruler, although Chu, Wu, and Yue had used it earlier on their own terms. When rulers such as those of Wei, Qi, and later Qin did the same, they directly claimed the status that Zhou alone had held. Later some even tried to rise higher, using the idea of a universal kingship over all the world. The old Mandate had said there could be only one Son of Heaven. Now many men claimed that the Mandate was theirs. The Zhou house itself continued in a tiny territory around Luoyi until Qin finally extinguished it in 256 BCE. By then it had ruled in name for about eight hundred years. An age of such disorder demanded explanation, and thinkers tried to provide it. Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BCE, during the late Spring and Autumn period. He came from Lu, where he saw the Three Huan families overshadow their duke. He looked back to what he saw as a golden age of the early Zhou, when ritual was proper and rulers were moral. His teaching was that order comes from moral cultivation. A ruler who is truly good will inspire loyalty, and a society where people practice ritual and respect their roles will hold together. Our main source for his ideas is the Analects, a collection of sayings compiled by his followers after his death. It is not a book he wrote himself, so we should always remember that the Confucius we read is partly shaped by his students. Others disagreed. Mozi, who lived after Confucius, taught that people should practice impartial care, meaning equal concern for everyone and not special loyalty to family. He opposed aggressive war and argued that rituals and lavish funerals wasted resources. Mencius, a follower of the Confucian tradition who lived in the fourth century BCE, taught that human nature is basically good, and that rulers should care for their people. Xunzi, in the third century BCE, disagreed with Mencius and held that human nature is flawed and needs to be shaped through education and ritual. Daoist writers, such as those behind the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, questioned whether human schemes could produce order at all, and advised withdrawing from ambition and following the natural course of things. The Legalists, such as Han Fei, argued that rulers should rely on clear laws, firm rewards and punishments, and administrative technique, not on the goodness of men. Han Fei, who died in 233 BCE, wrote in the Han Feizi that a wise ruler should not depend on rare virtuous men, because most people respond to incentives. A Legalist is a thinker who stresses law, state power, and control over officials. These thinkers differed about methods, but they shared a basic worry: how to restore order to a broken world. Some looked to moral cultivation, some to impartial care, some to law and administration. The name "Hundred Schools" is often used for them, but it is a later label, and it may suggest a neater division of schools than really existed. Many thinkers borrowed from each other. How did these ideas change the Mandate? Mencius gives the most famous answer. He said that a ruler who is cruel and does not care for his people is no longer truly a king. When a king of the Shang or Zhou was killed for being a tyrant, he said, it was not murder of a ruler, but the killing of a mere fellow. So Mencius turned the Mandate into a principle that justifies removing bad rulers. This is a bold argument. But it was not the only reading. Rulers of the competing states wanted the Mandate for themselves, and they used the idea to claim they could unify all the world. The end came quickly. Qin had been strengthened by the reforms, by an agricultural base in the Wei River valley, and by conquests such as that of Shu and Ba, in modern Sichuan, in 316 BCE. Those lands gave Qin more grain and more manpower, and a strong position behind mountains and river valleys that were hard to attack. Then, under a young king named Ying Zheng, Qin defeated its rivals one by one. Han fell in 230 BCE, Zhao in 228, Wei in 225, Chu in 223, Yan in 222, and Qi in 221. In that last year, Ying Zheng took a new title, Shi Huangdi, which means First Emperor. He abolished the old system of fiefs and divided the empire into commanderies run by appointed officials. The Zhou model of kinship rule was gone, and a bureaucratic empire had taken its place. Why did Qin win? Historians disagree. Some stress its institutions: the reforms that gave it a disciplined army and efficient tax collection. Others point to geography, because Qin's heartland was protected by mountains and the Yellow River, and it had access to rich farmland. Still others stress contingency, meaning the role of chance, such as the quality of particular generals, the mistakes of rivals, and the timing of certain battles. Most historians think several factors worked together. The honest answer is that Qin was strong for many reasons, and that its victory was not simply fated. Qin's triumph is an irony. The Mandate of Heaven had been invented to justify one dynasty's power. The Zhou order built on kinship fragmented because the ties of blood grew weak. Yet in the end, the idea that a single ruler should hold all the world under Heaven survived, and even strengthened. The warring states each wanted to be that ruler. When Qin won, it did not abandon the ideal of unity. It fulfilled the ideal in a new form, by replacing family ties with law and officials. That leads to the next question. The First Emperor built a state of great power. But could a state built on force and strict law last? And how would later dynasties use the Mandate to explain why Qin fell so quickly? That is where we go next.