His writings came into the hands of King Zheng, ruler of Qin and future First Emperor of China. According to Shiji, ‘Someone sent Han Feizi’s writings to the King of Qin. When he read them, he said, “Ah! If I could only meet the man who wrote this and come to know him, I would die without regret.”
‘Li Si replied, “These essays were written by my classmate. His name is Han Feizi.’”
At that time, Li Si had been in Qin for fourteen years and held the high post of Visiting Minister. Fearing that the brilliant Han Feizi would again overshadow him if he were also to work for the King of Qin, Li Si devised a devious plan.
Not long afterwards, at the urging of Li Si, Qin attacked Haan on a pretext. As part of the peace negotiation, Li Si insisted that his classmate Han Feizi be dispatched to Qin as the emissary representing the state of Haan. Therefore, in the year 233 BC, Han Feizi went to Qin and was presented to King Zheng.
Shiji continues: ‘The King of Haan sent Han Feizi as an emissary to Qin. Although the King of Qin was much pleased with the brilliant scholar, he dared not trust him sufficiently yet to use him.’
While in Qin, Han Feizi submitted a petition to King Zheng. In eloquent terms, he asked Qin to desist from continuing its military campaign against Haan, but to attack Zhao instead. Hearing of this, Li Si submitted a counter-petition to the King, urging him not to agree to the suggestions of Han Feizi. He suggested that he be sent as Qin’s emissary to see the King of Haan, and attempt to lure the latter to visit Qin. In one stroke, Li Si hoped to imprison the King of Haan, and place that state at the mercy of Qin.
King Zheng duly sent Li Si to Haan but the King of Haan would not grant him an interview. At great peril to himself, Li Si submitted a petition to the King of Haan in which he tried to dissuade His Majesty from granting safe passage to the army of Zhao, which was threatening to invade Qin. This was the petition in which Li Si quoted the proverb chun wang chi han (when the lips are gone, the teeth are cold). Li Si claimed that Qin’s war would become Haan’s war because Zhao would eventually invade them both.
Despite his best efforts, Li Si was still not granted an interview and returned to Qin empty handed. Shiji continues:
Soon after returning to Qin, Li Si grievously slandered his fellow student by saying to the King, ‘Han Feizi is one of the princes of the ruling House of Haan. His heart will always be with Haan and not with Qin. Such is the nature of man. If Your Majesty ignores this advice and sends him home after having detained him for such a long time, he will use what he has learned here against us and bring disaster upon us. The wisest course of action is to punish him for breaking the laws.’
King Zheng agreed and put Han Feizi in prison. Shocked and depressed, Han Feizi requested that he be allowed to see the King and plead his case in person. This was denied. At this critical juncture, Li Si sent a messenger who brought the jailed Han Feizi poisonous wine and induced him to commit suicide.
Later, the King regretted his actions and sent a man to release and pardon the scholar, but it was too late. Han Feizi was already dead.
Han Feizi died at the age of forty-seven as a result of his classmate’s envy and treachery, but his thoughts were to exert an enormous influence on the future policies of King Zheng and Li Si himself. There was, at that time, a prevalent belief that a mythical golden age had existed at some indeterminate point in the past. Although nobody had evidence that there ever really was such a ‘Garden of Eden’, all the great philosophers were in agreement that society had degenerated since that time. Indeed, Confucius was always quoting the ancient rulers and exhorting his followers to turn back and learn from that bygone era of ideal government.
Instead of following the Confucian philosophy of ‘using the past to criticise the present’, Han Feizi believed in ‘discounting the past, emphasising the present and adapting to change’. He opposed feudalism and promulgated the unification of China under a single supreme ruler. Although he believed in the rule of law and taught that the law must be constant and obeyed by everyone, he made one fatal exception: he did not include the supreme ruler.
Because the supreme ruler wrote the laws and could arbitrarily change them, the laws were designed not to serve the people, but to suit the supreme ruler himself. Due to this crucial omission, Han Feizi’s ‘rule of law’ became his deeply flawed ‘rule of the emperor’. The welfare of the ruler would always take precedence over the welfare of the people.
Eventually, the people came to regard the emperor’s laws as an instrument of terror, rather than a code of behaviour to benefit the welfare of the people. As such, the system was destined to fail.
There is no doubt that Han Feizi was a brilliant thinker. Why, then, was he not aware that in order for the rule of law to succeed, there could be no exceptions? Perhaps he was aware, but could not say so. Living under a total dictatorship such as the state of Qin during the third century BC, and advocating that the king be placed under the same rule of law as everyone else, would probably have resulted in punishment by death. If he had been the supreme ruler, would he have placed himself under the rule of law like everyone else?
It is interesting to note that more than two thousand years ago, Han Feizi was already suggesting that the law should be universal and be obeyed by everyone alike. It would be the highest method of conduct for ‘all under Heaven’.
Although Han Feizi proposed that the rule of law was for ‘all under Heaven’, everyone in China knew that this rule of law did not include the King. Since ancient times, an alternate name for a Chinese monarch was tian zi (son of Heaven). As such, a special pronoun zhen was created and used only by the king for self-designation, in place of the common pronoun wo (I). The implication was that the king was not like everyone else. Both his title and name indicated that he was special and different, even supernatural.
In the west, there has been a long-standing conviction that ‘laws make the King; the King does not make the laws’. The western Christian belief in an almighty God who was higher than the King has traditionally, by serendipity, subsumed political power under a higher framework of reference. There is no such precedence in China to provide for the sovereignty of a rule-based legal system. In China the ‘son of Heaven’ was always above the law. He was the one mandated by Heaven to rule and was therefore accountable to no one but himself.
To have a leadership that is enlightened and responsive to the wishes of the people, China needs first to adopt a set of laws that are sovereign to the power of the ruling party. Otherwise, gu zhang nan ming (clapping with one hand will produce no sound). Unfortunately, history has taught us that it is only too easy for a supreme ruler to become corrupted by unlimited power and adulation. This was the final legacy of Mao Zedong.
The majority of Chinese would probably agree that the most dominant figure in twentieth-century China was Mao Zedong. They would also draw a clear distinction between the ‘great Mao’ of his prime and the ‘tyrannical Mao’ of his declining years. Before 1949, Mao was the passionate revolutionary whose vision brought about the unification of China and elevated him to become the supreme ruler. Mao’s every word was worshipped and he gradually turned into a despot more powerful than any previous emperor.
As he grew older, Mao became increasingly megalomaniac and paranoid. Seven years after he launched the Cultural Revolution, he said, in a conversation with the Egyptian ambassador: ‘The First Emperor [King Zheng] was the most famous emperor of China. In China, there are always two opposite viewpoints. Some people support the First Emperor, others oppose him. I myself endorse him, but I am against Confucius.’
Three years before he died, Mao encouraged his wife, Jiang Qing, to set up a group of writers to denigrate Confucius and promote the Legalist school as represented by Han Feizi. Mao claimed that he, as well as the First Emperor, were both Legalists who advocated reform and opposed retrogression. As soon as he seized power at the age of twenty-one, King Zheng had eliminated the Confucian Prime Minister, Lü Buwei. From then on, according to Mao, China’s history was characterised by a series of struggles between Confucianism