THE LATE ZHOU (722–256 B.C.E.)
By the sixth century, the Zhou dynasty was beginning to falter. According to traditional sources, its beginning was glorious, starting about
1045 when King Wu (Woo) claimed the Mandate of Heaven, ousted the
wicked last king of the Shang dynasty, and established a new regime.
Finding that his kingdom was too large to govern by himself, he divided
it into smaller territories and appointed local rulers whom he allowed to
run their own lands as they saw fit, so long as they provided him with
military and financial assistance on request. Of course, the people he
trusted enough to make dukes (basically junior kings) were his relatives,
and he had a lot of them. In addition, as new territories were brought
into the Chinese cultural sphere, new states were created, and the kings
of Zhou made sure the rulers of those regions were bound to the royal
house by marriage ties and ritual oaths of allegiance. By the beginning
of the eighth century, there were some two hundred states, most fairly
small.
This system, similar to the feudalism of medieval Europe, worked well
enough for several centuries, but as kingdoms were passed from generation to generation, the ties of kinship weakened, the kings of Zhou were
no longer able to enforce order, and states began to compete with one
another for resources and for territory. “Compete” is actually a euphemism for warfare, and the later Zhou dynasty was characterized by incessant, bloody fighting as states attempted to destroy or annex each
other. At the beginning of the Spring and Autumn Era (722–481; named
for a history of the state of Lu that organized events by seasons and years),
there were still some one hundred and seventy states but by the fifth
century, unrelenting warfare had reduced their number to about forty.
The aptly named Warring States Era (403–221) started with seven major
states and ended with one when the state of Qin finally brought all of China under its control. Over the last five centuries of the Zhou dynasty,
four out of every five years saw warfare between major states.
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| Map of Zhou dynasty |
As competition became more intense, the old patterns of aristocratic
interactions were shattered. There were assassinations, murders, coups,
and even patricides, as over-eager princes killed their fathers. Noble warriors who used to regard the battle as an elegant game, an opportunity to
show off their valor and virtue (sometimes by granting concessions to
their distinguished opponents), now slaughtered each other mercilessly,
and they could even be killed by peasants armed with newly invented
crossbows (see Figure 1). Treaties could not be relied on on without an exchange of hostages, and sometimes not even then. The old ceremonies
were still used—for instance, treaties were still sealed by rulers killing a
bull and smearing its blood on their lips while swearing to the gods that
they would uphold its provisions—but no one cared for the old gods anymore (they were, after all, the patron gods and ancestors of them very much the weakened royal house of Zhou), and people began to speak of “breaking
an oath while the blood is still wet on the lips.” States lied to each other,
double-crossed each other, negotiated secret treaties, and made and dissolved alliances with dizzying speed.
Rulers who worried about preserving their states, the sacrifices to their
ancestors, and even their own lives started looking around for help. In
this way, the breakdown of the old feudal order brought a surprising degree of social mobility as clever, eloquent men wandered from state to
state, looking for a ruler who would put their ideas into practice, and
rulers welcomed anyone who could promise them some advantage over
their foes. The search for political, social, and economic stability fueled
the creation of the “hundred schools of philosophy,” and there was no
end to the proposals that these wandering debaters put forward. Some
were agriculturalists, who claimed new techniques for increasing the farm
yields crucial to supporting large armies in the field; others knew how to
construct canals; and still, others were military strategists (the most famous of these was Sunzi [or Sun Tzu, Swun-zuh], whose Art of War can
still be found today in most American bookstores). Some cosmologists promised to reveal how to harness the forces of nature, logicians who analyzed argumentation itself, and even some who suggested
that what the world really needed was more love (they did not last very
long). Among these many competing philosophies, three schools of thought stand out as particularly significant: Confucianism, Daoism, and
Legalism.
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