Mengzi lived about fifty years later and found employment at the court of Wei, but he too is otherwise an obscure figure. Devoted to the memory of Confucius, he fleshed out the Master’s utterances into a detailed programme for reform: emulate the mythical Five Emperors and the Three Dynasties (Xia, Shang and Zhou), urged Mengzi; respect Heaven’s Mandate, reduce punishments and taxes, and reinstate the ‘well-field’ system of landholding; in an age of greed and violence only a ruler who abjured oppression, who cultivated virtue and consulted the welfare of the people, would be sure to triumph; likewise for society as a whole – morality would prevail if human nature was allowed to realise its basic goodness. All of which, while reassuring, made little impression on zhongguo’s power-crazed warlords. Only later would it win for Mengzi the title of ‘second sage’ in the great Confucian tradition and later still the Latinisation of his name into ‘Mencius’ by Rome’s almost-approving missionaries.
Of far more influence, and decisive for the triumph of centralised government in the state of Qin, was a school of thought known as ‘legalism’. Later histories credit, or more usually condemn, one Shang Yang, minister of Qin from 356 BC, for erecting the draconian framework of the first ‘legalist’ state, although it would be left to others to provide a theoretical basis for it. Like Chu in the south, Qin in the far north-west was peripheral to the ‘central states’ and was habitually disparaged by them as non-Xia. It had expanded into the valley of the River Wei, once the Western Zhou heartland, but its roots lay farther west and its population included large numbers of pastoral Rong. Problems of integration and defence kept Qin on the sidelines until Shang Yang, after learning his trade in Wei state, interested Qin’s duke in a programme of radical restructuring. The ‘county’ system of direct administration was introduced, weights and measures standardised, trade heavily taxed, agriculture encouraged with irrigation and colonisation schemes, and the entire population registered, individually taxed and universally conscripted. ‘Mobilising the masses’ was not a twentieth-century innovation.
The carrot in all this was an elaborate system of rankings, each with privileges and emoluments, by which the individual might advance according to a fixed tariff; in battle, for instance, decapitating one of the enemy brought automatic promotion by one rank. But more effective than the carrot was the stick, which took the form of a legal code enjoining ferocious and indiscriminate punishments for even minor derelictions. Households were grouped together in fives or tens, each group being mutually responsible for reporting any indiscretion by its members; failing an informant, the whole group was mutually liable for the prescribed punishment. In battle this translated into a punitive esprit de corps. Serving members of the same household group were expected to arrest any comrade who fled, to deliver a fixed quota of enemy heads, and to suffer collective punishment if they failed on either count. Shang Yang was himself a capable general and may have led some of these conscript units (or perhaps ‘neighbourhood militias’) when Qin forces scored a decisive victory over the state of Wei in 341 BC. Sixteen years later Qin’s duke assumed the title of ‘king’. But by then Shang Yang, following the death of his patron, had fallen foul of his own penal code and been condemned to an ignominious extinction, being ‘torn apart by carriages’.27
In practice it may have been that not all these measures were Shang Yang’s. Some may have been awarded him posthumously by the backdating beloved of historians. And they may not have been as harsh as they are portrayed; discrediting Qin and its policies would be a priority of the subsequent Han dynasty, during whose long ascendancy Qin’s history would be compiled. The reforms were nevertheless sensationally effective. Besides again ravaging Wei state, in 316 BC Qin’s forces swept south over the Qinling mountains into Sichuan and thus, as will be seen, secured a vast new source of cereals and manpower plus some important strategic leverage over Chu. During the last century of the ‘Warring States’ (c. 320–220 BC) Qin was more than a match for any of its rivals. It largely dictated the ever shifting pattern of alliances and it initiated about forty of the sixty ‘great power wars’ recorded for the period.
Visiting Xianyang, Qin’s new capital, in c. 263 BC the philosopher Xunzi was both impressed and appalled – impressed by the decorum and the quiet sense of purpose, appalled by the lack of scholarship and the plight of the people; they were ‘terrorised by authority, embittered by hardship, cajoled by rewards and cowed by punishments’. In fact the whole state seemed to be ‘living in constant terror and apprehension lest the rest of the world should someday unite and strike it down’.28 Xunzi wanted nothing to do with the place, and having previously directed the Jixia, an intellectual academy in the state of Qi, he hastened on to a more congenial post in Zhao, then one in Chu, so completing a circuit of four of the main power contenders. It was deeply ironic that it would be Han Fei, one of Xunzi’s disciples, who would eventually provide legalism with an intellectually respectable rationale, and another, Li Si, who as the First Emperor’s chief minister would become legalism’s most notorious practitioner.
At about the same time as Xunzi’s visit to Xianyang, Qin abandoned the traditional policy of alliances and adopted one of unilateral expansion through naked aggression. ‘Attack not only their territory but also their people,’ advised Qin’s then chief minister, for as Xunzi had put it, ‘the ruler is just the boat but the people are the water’. Enemy forces must be not only defeated but annihilated so that their state lost the capacity to fight back. ‘Here’, intones the Cambridge History of Ancient China, ‘we find enunciated as policy the mass slaughters of the third century BC.’
The slaughters were made more feasible by important advances in weaponry and military organisation. In the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period, military capacity had been assessed in terms of horse-drawn chariots. Besides usually three passengers – commander, archer/bodyguard and charioteer – each of the two-wheeled chariots was accompanied by a complement of about seventy infantrymen armed with lances, who ran alongside and did most of the fighting. The chariot was a speedy prestige conveyance for ‘feudal’ lords and provided a vantage and rallying point for the troops, but it often got stuck in the mud and was liable to overturn on rough terrain.
As centralisation increasingly relieved subordinate lineages of their fiefs and autonomy, most states supplemented these ‘feudal’ levies of chariots and runners by recruiting bodies of professional infantrymen that rapidly grew into standing armies. Disciplined and drilled, clad in armour and helmets of leather, and equipped with swords and halberds, the new model armies were more than a match for the chariot-chasing levies even before the introduction of forged iron and the deadly crossbow.
These important innovations seem to have originated early in the fourth century BC and in the south, where Wu was famed for its blades and where Chu graves have yielded some of the earliest examples of the metal triggers used for firing crossbows. Never far behind any technological innovation, scholarly treatises provide evidence of warfare being elevated into an art. A shi called Sun Bin, also from the south, is credited with the first text in which the crossbow is described as ‘the decisive element in combat’.29 Sun Bin also mentions cavalry, a novelty in that the art of fighting from horseback was as yet little understood. A famous discussion on the merits of trousers over skirts that took place in the state of Zhao in 307 BC seems to mark the adoption of the nomadic practice of sitting astride horses rather than being drawn along behind them in chariots. But cavalry were used largely for reconnaisance and their numbers were small. Mozi, that stickler for non-aggression, manages under the rubric of self-defence to reveal the development of a much more sophisticated level of siege warfare, including the use of wheeled ladders for wall-scaling and smoke-bellows to counter tunnellers. Cities had long been fortified, but it was in the