THE WARRING STATES PERIOD (453-221)
Perhaps the most basic of these changes concerned how wars were fought. During the Spring and Autumn years, battles were conducted by small groups of chariot-driven patricians. Managing a two-wheeled vehicle over the often uncharted terrain of a battlefield while wielding bow and arrow or sword to deadly effect required years of training, and the number of men who were qualified to lead armies in this way was very limited. Each chariot was accompanied by a group of infantrymen, by rule seventy-two, but usually far fewer, probably closer to ten. Thus a large army in the field, with over a thousand chariots, might consist of a total of ten or twenty thousand soldiers. With the population of the major states numbering several million at this time, such a force could be raised with relative ease by the lords of such states.
During the Warring States period, the situation was very different. One reason why the armies of Wu and Yue had been so effective during the period 506-476 was that they did not employ chariot warfare. The uneven country of the south, split by rivers everywhere, made chariot warfare impractical, and Wu and Yue chose instead to raise massive armies of infantry. Infantry armies moved as rapidly as traditional ones – after all, the infantrymen that accompanied chariots limited the mobility of the whole – and they could be used much more flexibly than armies tied to chariot riding patricians. Horseback command, rather than chariot command, also gave patrician officers more freedom of movement.
The northern states learned the lessons of the period of Wu-Yue hegemony. The chariot was largely discarded, and instead of concentrating on the size and training of their elite officer corps, patrician lords cultivated huge armies of peasant infantrymen. During the Warring States years, the overall population of China grew rapidly, spurred by great strides in agricultural technology – the raw material for massive armies was there. Traditional state structures were not conducive to the raising of such numbers of men, however. To achieve the military ends that became increasingly vital to the survival of the state, the patrician lords and their advisors engineered fundamental changes in the structure of the state itself. Three of these changes stand out: 1) the altered relationship between the peasant and the lord; 2) revisions in political administration that increased centralized control to the disadvantage of the patrician class; 3) a sharp rise in social mobility occasioned by the need for true expertise in the management of large armies and growing, centralized states
The altered relationship between ruler and people is also reflected in the restructuring of administration which occurred in many states. The degree of change varied widely from state to state: among the major states, Chu was probably least touched by them, while Qin was unquestionably the most fundamentally transformed. The nature of the changes also differed among states, but there was a common thread. In virtually all cases, state administration was restructured so that lands and cities were divided into centrally designated units and control over these units was directly determined by the ruler and his close advisors, rather than becoming the hereditary prerogatives of patrician clans. Thus the peasants and city-dwelling commoners fell increasingly under the control of the ruler’s court, and the regional patrician clans more and more found themselves excluded from access to real power. The increased control that the lord exercised aided him in the task of maintaining the state’s readiness in war and coherence in diplomatic policy
Finally, the fast-growing need for skilled men able to administer the vastly more complex military and political demands of the Warring States period created a lively demand for men of intellectual talent. Whereas the most prized skills of the Spring and Autumn period had been the charioteering skills and ritualized etiquette of the patrician born – abilities that could be drilled into any young man – the Warring States prized the ability to devise clever and original strategies of war, or of economic and diplomatic policy. Raw intelligence and learning which was often derived through study of books or with an expert teacher were now the qualities most prized; whatever their virtues of bravery, bearing, and clan loyalty, the patrician class held no monopoly on intelligence, and, in time, little advantage with regard to learning as well. Consequently, the Warring States was a time of sharply increasing social mobility. Positions of power gradually shifted into the hands of men of wit, many of whom were of low birth or sons of very junior branches of the shi class.
Along with changes in agricultural technology and commerce, these factors made the Warring States both the bloodiest and most dynamic era of Chinese history.
As in our section of the Spring and Autumn era, we will divide our survey of the Warring States era into a number of periods. However, the chaotic political situation of the Warring States era does not lend itself readily to simple periodization, and in this section, the latter two of our four periods overlap substantially – they are distinguished less by their dates than by the themes we will draw from them. Likewise, largely because there exists no Warring States literary equivalent to the Zuo's commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals, the period is not as rich in extended narrative accounts. For this reason, there are fewer of these here, and they are confined to the latter part of the narrative.
These are the section divisions of the narratives that follow:
Period I: Structures of Social Mobility 453-380
Period II: Reforms in Qin 360-338
Period III: The Horizontal and Vertical Alliances 320-256
Period IV: The Great Ministerial Lords of the Third Century 300-230
Epilogue: The Final Conquest of the Qin
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