Han Feizi

Han Fei (Hán Fēizǐ, “Master Han Fei”) was a prince of the small state of Han in the last years of the Warring States period and the greatest theorist of Legalism (fǎjiā), the school of statecraft whose doctrines guided the state of Qin to the unification of China in 221 BCE. A student of the Confucian Xunzi, from whom he learned that human nature is selfish, he rejected Confucian rule by virtue and ritual as naïve and outdated, and argued that a ruler must govern through three instruments: law (fǎ), clear and impartial, enforced by certain rewards and punishments; technique (shù), the methods by which a ruler controls his ministers while concealing his own mind; and position or power (shì), the authority of the throne itself. His book, the Han Feizi, is the most complete and brilliant statement of Chinese political realism, often compared with Machiavelli‘s The Prince.

Life

Han Fei was born around 280 BCE into the royal family of Han, the weakest of the seven Warring States, squeezed between powerful neighbours. With Li Si, later chancellor of Qin, he studied under Xunzi. He had a stammer and could not speak persuasively, so he wrote; frustrated that the king of Han ignored his advice, he poured his “solitary indignation” into essays. According to the historian Sima Qian, the king of Qin — later the First Emperor — read “Solitary Indignation” and “The Five Vermin” and exclaimed that he would die content if he could meet their author. When Qin attacked Han in 234–233 BCE, Han sent Han Fei as an envoy. In Qin, Li Si, jealous or fearful of his rival, warned the king that Han Fei, a prince of Han, would never be loyal to Qin; Han Fei was imprisoned, and Li Si sent him poison. By the time the king relented and sent a pardon, Han Fei was dead. Twelve years later, Qin conquered all the states and established the empire, using many of his ideas.

Human nature and the failure of virtue

Han Fei began from his teacher’s view of human nature, but drew harsher conclusions. People act out of self-interest: “The carriage-maker wants people to be rich and noble; the coffin-maker wants people to die young. Not because the first is benevolent and the second cruel…” Even within the family, parents congratulate themselves on the birth of a son and kill baby girls, calculating their future advantage. Kindness cannot govern a state. “The love of parents for their children is the greatest… yet children are not always well-behaved; how then can a ruler’s love create order?” A mother’s love cannot reform a bad son; but the local official with his soldiers can.

He mocked the Confucians who held up the ancient sage-kings as models. Times change: population has grown, goods have become scarce, people compete. In the parable of the stump-watcher, a farmer of Song saw a hare run into a tree stump, break its neck and die; he put down his plough and waited by the stump for another hare, and became the laughing-stock of the state. “To want to govern the people of today by the policies of the ancient kings is to be a stump-watcher.”

Law

The foundation of order is law (fǎ): published, clear, uniform, and applied impartially to all, from nobles to commoners — “the law does not fawn on the noble”. Laws must be backed by rewards and punishments that are certain and severe, so that people obey out of self-interest: “If rewards are generous and certain, people will think lightly of danger; if punishments are heavy and certain, people will not dare to break the law.” Heavy punishments for small crimes, he argued, prevent large ones, and are ultimately kind. Law replaces the private judgment of officials and the private morality of scholars.

The two handles and the ruler’s techniques

The ruler holds “the two handles”: punishment and favour (reward). “If the ruler gives up the use of punishment and favour and lets his ministers employ them, then the people will fear the ministers and hold the ruler in contempt.” The great danger to a ruler is not foreign enemies but his own ministers, wives, relatives and favourites, who seek to manipulate him. He must control them through technique (shù): assigning offices by matching each man’s words (proposals and claims) to his deeds (results) — “form and name” (xíng míng) — and punishing any mismatch, whether failure or overachievement beyond his brief. He must conceal his likes and dislikes, so that ministers cannot flatter him: “the ruler must not reveal his desires; if he reveals them, his ministers will put on the appropriate mask.”

In this, Han Fei drew on Daoism: the ideal ruler is like the Dao, empty, still and inactive (wúwéi), while ministers act; he wrote the earliest surviving commentaries on Laozi‘s Daodejing (“Explaining Laozi”, “Illustrating Laozi”).

Power

From the Legalist Shen Dao he took the idea of position (shì): authority lies in the throne, not the person. “The flying dragon rides the clouds”; when the clouds disperse, it is no different from an earthworm. A ruler need not be a sage; an average ruler who holds his position and enforces the law can govern well, while waiting for a sage-king would mean a thousand generations of disorder.

The five vermin

In “The Five Vermin” (Wǔ dù) Han Fei named five classes who undermine the state: Confucian scholars, who praise the ancients and confuse the law; speechmakers and diplomats who serve foreign powers; swordsmen (knights-errant) who break the law with private violence; courtiers who evade military service through connections; and merchants and artisans who profit without producing. The state should honour only farmers, who feed it, and soldiers, who defend it.

The spear and the shield

His fables have entered the Chinese language. A man of Chu selling spears and shields boasted that his shields were so strong nothing could pierce them, and his spears so sharp they could pierce anything; someone asked what would happen if one of his spears struck one of his shields. The word for “contradiction” in Chinese, máodùn, means “spear-shield”. Han Fei used the story against the Confucians’ praise of both sage-kings Yao and Shun: if Yao was perfect, why did Shun need to correct anything?

Legacy

Qin’s harsh rule under the First Emperor and Li Si — the burning of the books (213 BCE), the forced labour, the brutal punishments — and its collapse within fifteen years discredited Legalism. Later dynasties officially honoured Confucianism, but in practice governed, as the saying went, “Confucian on the outside, Legalist on the inside”. In the twentieth century Mao Zedong praised the Legalists and the First Emperor during the anti-Confucius campaign of the 1970s.

In conversation

• The stump-watcher — ruling by ancient models.
• The two handles — reward and punishment.
• The spear and the shield — the origin of “contradiction”.