Culmination of the strained relationship occurred during the reigns of the stereotyped, almost legendary father-and-son monarchs, Wen and Wu of Zhou. The sources endow Wen (his name signifying “accomplished” or “learned”) with the attributes of a sage-ruler. Intelligent and benevolent, Wen believed in negotiations and compromise in relations with others and in governing his own people. His remarkable character paved the way for his son Wu (his name meaning “martial’) to battle with and overwhelm the Shang. The sources praise Wu for his military successes, but Wen represented the ideal. Even at this early stage in Chinese culture, civil virtues were more highly prized than military skills. The sources, for example, extol the Zhou for their magnanimity toward their defeated enemies. Instead of adopting a military solution and extirpating the Shang royal family, the leaders of Zhou gave them land in order to permit them to continue their ancestral rituals.
Early Chinese attitudes can be discerned even more clearly in the descriptions of the Duke of Zhou, the leading cultural hero of the period. The Duke of Zhou, Wu’s brother, was first a regent and later a minister for King Cheng, his young nephew. In later accounts, he is credited with stabilizing the Zhou by enfeoffing collateral members of the royal family and other nobles who had been instrumental in the overwhelming victory over the Shang. Recognizing that the Zhou needed to reward these loyal retainers, the Duke of Zhou initiated the practice of granting them land and allowing them to govern their domains, relieving the Zhou court of a task it did not have the administrative or military capability to undertake. He is also revered for his patronage of scholars, a quintessential Chinese value in later times. He is most celebrated, however, for his promotion of the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. This view justified the Zhou usurpation of the throne because the mandate to rule offered by Heaven (Tian, who became the most important deity and superseded the Di and the wind, mountain, and other Shang deities) was not granted in perpetuity. Future rulers could lose the mandate, which would be revealed by their lack of concern for their subjects’ welfare. When rulers lost such support, their subjects had the right, if not the obligation, to depose them. The Duke of Zhou and other exponents sought to use the theory to exonerate themselves from accusations of sedition and to legitimize the new dynasty. According to the Duke of Zhou, the Shang kings had not performed the divinely ordained rituals, had scarcely concerned themselves with government, and had selected ministers with hardly any interest in public welfare. Thus, the Zhou was absolutely justified in overthrowing the discredited and disreputable Shang kings. In this view, the king’s role was essential. It is all the more ironic, then, that the Duke of Zhou took the initiative in developing a decentralized political system that eventually circumscribed the king’s authority and turned over much of the responsibility for the public welfare to the nobility. The question is: did the Zhou kings and the Duke of Zhou have any other choice in light of the technological limitations of centralized government at that time?
The early Zhou rulers devised a set of offices for the central government, but the operation of these agencies and their division of functions were vague. It is perhaps too much to expect a precise table of organization at this early stage of culture, and it is true that the Zhou distinguished between household personnel, or the inner court, and the various ministries. However, the confusion concerning these offices probably reflected the lack of true Western Zhou centralization. The scanty evidence confirms the informality of the political structure, as those close to the king (who were not an officially designated bureaucracy) often wielded power and increasingly dominated the court aristocrats. The Zhou’s financial administration was as vague as its political system. Though the land, in theory, belonged to the king, the peasants generally did not pay taxes to the court. Whatever revenue reached the court derived from the vassals whom the king enfeoffed and from taxes on commerce. This imprecise financial system initially fulfilled the Western Zhou’s revenue needs. Yet, as the court continued to decline, its reliance on so-called tribute from its vassals revealed its vulnerability because these very same retainers sought to supplant the king and were not willing to meet his revenue demands.
This decentralized system eventually offered vassals the opportunity to dominate on the local level, to garner taxes from their subjects, to administer justice, and to raise and command their own military forces. Nonetheless, some scholars have argued, on the basis of inscriptions and early texts, that the kings still maintained power during the Western Zhou and that they mandated a feudal system. Such a system was essential because the Zhou adopted a process of incorporating many non-Zhou peoples and needed help from their relatives and retainers, the feudal lords, to do so. Since definitions of “feudal” vary in the histories of “feudal” China and Europe, it may seem pointless to characterize the Zhou as “feudal” rather than as a decentralized political system with its own unique characteristics. The sparse materials on the early Zhou, in contrast to the relatively more abundant extant sources on medieval Europe, compound the difficulties of using the term “feudal.” Yet, since comparative history, on occasion, proves illuminating, a few distinctions as well as several similarities between the two ought to be mentioned.
Like the lords in medieval Europe, the kings in Zhou China played pivotal roles. The kings enfeoffed their vassals (who were relatives, retainers, or allies and numbered about a hundred or so), giving them various ritual objects of authority and entrusting them with lands over which they had considerable control. As in Europe, the ceremonies for such enfeoffment became increasingly more elaborate as the dynasty developed, but at first the kings generally did not demand an oath of allegiance. This may indicate that the kings were so confident of their retainers’ loyalty that they could not have conceived of demanding such a pledge. In the Western Zhou, these enfeoffments did not take place at the altar of the god of the soil (as in the Eastern Zhou), another indication of the lack of ceremonies or perhaps of the appointment of trustworthy retainers to positions of local authority. On the other hand, this may imply that these enfeoffments were only a formality and did not entail subservience and loyalty. The contractual obligations of European feudalism did not appear as clearly in the Zhou system. Nonetheless, once the vassal was invested, he was, in theory, obligated to provide tribute and to supply laborers and soldiers when requested to do so. Again, in theory, he served as the king’s representative to ensure peace and stability on the local level.
Some of the practices of enfeoffed vassals resembled practices in the European system but others diverged. Like their European counterparts, vassals perceived themselves to be distinctive, tended to marry among themselves, and had a code of conduct (li), which could include and did resemble chivalry. Eventually they coalesced into a real hierarchy composed of dukes (gong), marquises (hou), earls (bo), barons (zi), and vice-barons (nan). However, these vassals did not receive their titles in perpetuity. Unlike in the European feudal system, their sons did not automatically inherit their positions. Each successive inheritor of a fief needed the court’s sanction and required the king’s blessing and enfeoffment. Such investitures entailed a personal visit to the king’s court for the enfeoffment ceremonies. In other areas, family and kinship played a much more significant role in the Zhou than in medieval Europe. Kinship ties frequently superseded contractual obligations in the enfeoffment of vassals and in the lord–vassal relationship. Since family considerations were vital in Chinese culture, it seems natural that kinship would, on occasion, supplant merit in the court’s selection of officials – still another deviation from the European model of feudalism.
Despite such kinship ties, vassals often went their own ways within their local domains, partly because they controlled their own military forces. Warfare was, in theory, a gentleman’s activity throughout the Western Zhou and until the Warring States period and thus had well-defined rules of conduct. The chariot, though unwieldy and often a liability in uneven or rutted terrain, was characteristic of gentlemanly or aristocratic warfare. It did not provide a haven