Hsu (1965) has shown how the aristocratic elite lineages of the Spring and Autumn times destroyed themselves in the increasing warfare of the sixth century and, as a consequence, a new form of social order and a new type of state emerged in Warring
States times. Many of the smaller states were incorporated into larger regional polities and most of these few surviving states came to be ruled by a single dominant royal family with increasing central authority. Rulers administered their states using knights (shi) who, as their paid employees, owed their loyalty to them alone, and became less reliant on the few aristocratic lineages that had survived the slaughter. Commoners came to play an increasingly important role, because the system of corvee labor depended on their contribution, and able-bodied men were obliged to serve as infantrymen. Armies became much larger in size and the main fighting force shifted from the chariots to the infantry, supplemented from the fourth century by cavalry (Yates 1999).
As a consequence of these changes and the weakening of the legal and ritual force of covenants, the methods of making war and peace likewise changed. War became a free-for-all where yesterday’s friend was tomorrow’s enemy and there was no coherent method of ensuring peace between the warring parties. States were only interested in expanding their territory and holding on to what they had seized through force of arms or deception.11 With fewer states in competition with each other, intermarriage between the royal families of different states played a much less prominent role in maintaining peaceful relations. The system of multiple-woman marriages seems to have given place to a new system where only a single principal wife was legally recognized. Therefore the opportunity for women to play an important role in interstate relations seems to have somewhat decreased. By contrast, the demand for or exchange of hostages maintained its significance as states attempted to bind each other to their interests, or at least to prevent them from interfering in their domestic and foreign policies.
As the states became larger and more centralized, and as the armies grew larger and were in the field for longer periods of time, specialized administrative expertise to manage the increased flow of business came to be developed. Most significantly, legal rules were elaborated in systems of statutes whereby the central authorities began to claim the right to punish those who committed crimes against the social order. No longer could an individual wreak vengeance for a slight he had received or to defend his honor. Even the smallest injury inflicted on someone not of the same family was to be punished by the state, not by the victim or the victim’s family, and the precise punishment for each crime was specified in the laws depending on its severity (the value of the damage inflicted) or degree (how many participants had been involved).
Regulations for combat were proclaimed, and rules for reward for meritorious service elaborated, and these were enforced in the army and written into the statutes. The general gained the legal right to enforce these laws, once he had received the command in a religious ritual in the ancestral temple: his subsequent decisions could not be countermanded even by the ruler himself. Thus, while former methods of managing conflict between states broke down at the macro-level, a new system of laws for managing violence on the field of battle and in organizing the army emerged at the micro-level. In short, increasingly larger territorial units enforced peace among the communities that they incorporated. While violence between states increased, and larger and larger numbers of men were engaged and killed on the battlefield, violence within states diminished, and eventually the state that defeated all the others, Qin, succeeded in establishing a monopoly on the use of force that all later dynasties exercised.
Furthermore, a new system of selecting the top administrative leadership of the states emerged. A small group of highly intelligent and resourceful men moved from state to state selling their services to those rulers who rewarded them the most. Frequently they were given enormous sums of money or rare treasures, or they were enfeoffed as lords with towns or territory, whose population then remitted their taxes to the lord. War and peace were negotiated between these individuals, and the most famous of them were engaged in establishing alliances between the states either to oppose the rising power of Qin in the west (the vertical alliance), or to seek to unite with Qin (the horizontal alliance). Thus the states brought in foreign talent to help them manage their interstate affairs. Many of these peripatetic statesmen held the post of prime minister in different states, and one, Zhang Yi, even held five top posts concurrently. War and peace were decided by presenting persuasive arguments to the rulers, and the only thing that mattered was the self-interest of the state or of the individual orator.
Trust between states seemed to have been completely abandoned, much to the distress of philosophers, such as the Confucians Mencius and Xunzi, who lamented the passing of the age of ritual and sought to re-establish social order by re-instituting it on a social level and advocating that permanent peace could only be achieved by a ruler who was utterly virtuous. Other philosophers, such as the Mohist Song Xing, advocated complete disarmament by all parties, whereas his fellow Mohists chose to reduce offensive warfare by becoming experts in the defense of towns and cities, and hired themselves out to whichever ruler was under attack. Others, such as the Yin-Yang specialists, considered that a ruler could only survive by harmonizing all his actions with the changing rhythms of the cosmos. Not only did he have to perform all his actions in conformity with the changing seasons, all his vestments, all his food had to be in harmony, too, and his army could only be successful if it marched out on days that were auspicious for him and inauspicious for his enemy, and when certain powerful astral deities were in the right location of the sky to further his enterprise.
Yet, despite their differences of opinions, virtually all the various philosophers of the day came to the conclusion that the only way to re-establish a permanent peace and restore social order was for a single ruler to emerge who would unite the all-underheaven in a single polity. A balance of power between equal states came to be simply inconceivable, a view also held by the numerous military theorists who flourished in this period of constant warfare, such as Sun Wu, his grandson Sun Bin, and many others. In the military treatises that have survived, there is not a single word about how to create a lasting peace between amicable neighbors. They are only concerned about the methods to be employed to utterly destroy an enemy without suffering significant damage to one’s own army or state.
The “persuasions” of the “specialists in horizontal and vertical alliances,” who were the most involved in manipulating war and peace between the rival states, are recorded in the text of the Zhanguo ce (Intrigues of the Warring States), although this is a work of literature, not an accurate rendition of actual speeches and historical reality. Nevertheless, the book allows us to observe and appreciate the flavor of these speeches of traveling persuaders and statesmen, and the methods whereby alliances were created only to be immediately broken when political circumstances changed (Crump 1970).
With the increasing violence of the late Warring States, when even the large states were subject to destruction or loss of large portions of territory resulting from defeat on the battlefield where hundreds of thousands of soldiers fought each other for months, even years on end, and where the survival of the state was often dependent on the competence of the rulers and the trustworthiness of their leading ministers, some philosophers began to develop a new doctrine on the justifications of war, “righteous warfare.” This concept was elaborated on in the Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu Buwei, a work commissioned by Lu Buwei in the late 240s for King Zheng of Qin to enhance Qin’s reputation as a viable contender for overlordship of all the states. The scholars employed by Lu created a manifesto justifying an offensive attack on other states, claiming superior morality for the punishment. A “righteous army” could seize the goods of those who acted immorally against the Way of Heaven and injured their own people, but preserved the lives and property of those who yielded, richly rewarding turncoats. its actions and justifications were to be promulgated to the defeated in a formal, ritually correct, and public manifesto (Knoblock and Riegel 2000: 185-86). But, of course, in reality, what was being justified was the destruction of all those opposed to the Qin armies.
World History
