Han Fei

Han Fei, also known as Han Feizi, "Master Han Fei", was a prince of the state of Han and the most important theorist of the Chinese school later called Legalism. Writing in the last decades before the unification of China, he argued that a ruler should govern not through virtue but through clear laws, strict rewards and punishments, and techniques for controlling his ministers. His ideas were admired by the king of Qin who became Qin Shi Huang, yet Han Fei died in a Qin prison in 233 BCE.

Han Fei was born around 280 BCE into the ruling family of Han, a small and weak state in central China, squeezed between powerful neighbours, above all the rising state of Qin to its west. Unlike most philosophers of his time, who were scholars seeking employment, he was an aristocrat. According to the historian Sima Qian, writing about a century and a half later, he had a stammer and spoke poorly, but wrote brilliantly.

Sima Qian also records that Han Fei studied, together with Li Si, under the Confucian philosopher Xunzi. Some modern scholars doubt this, since the Han Feizi shows little direct trace of Xunzi's teaching, but Xunzi's view that human nature is bad and must be controlled by external standards fits Han Fei's outlook. Watching Han decline, Han Fei repeatedly sent memorials to its king urging reform, but they were ignored. He then wrote the essays that made his name, with titles such as "Solitary Indignation", "The Five Vermin" and "The Difficulties of Persuasion".

Han Fei's writings reached King Zheng of Qin, the future First Emperor, who is said to have exclaimed that he could die without regret if he could meet their author. In 234 or 233 BCE Han sent Han Fei to Qin as an envoy. At the Qin court he urged the king to spare Han and attack other states first. Li Si, now a senior Qin minister and perhaps jealous of his former fellow student, argued that a prince of Han would always serve Han and could not be trusted; released, he would be dangerous. Han Fei was imprisoned, and Li Si sent him poison, with which he took his own life before the king, who had changed his mind, could pardon him. Another early text gives a different version, in which the Qin king ordered his execution after a quarrel with a Qin diplomat. Several scholars think Sima Qian's account is dramatised, but agree that Han Fei died in Qin in 233 BCE. Twelve years later Qin completed its wars of unification; Han was the first state it conquered, in 230 BCE.

The Han Feizi, a collection of 55 chapters of which most are traditionally ascribed to him, though some were probably written by others, draws together the ideas of earlier statesmen and thinkers. From Shang Yang, the reforming minister who had made Qin strong in the fourth century BCE, Han Fei took the emphasis on fa, "law" or "standards": laws must be public, clear and applied equally to all, with no exception for the nobility. From Shen Buhai, a minister of Han, he took shu, "technique", the methods by which a ruler appoints, checks and controls officials. From Shen Dao he took shi, "positional power", the idea that a ruler's authority comes from his position, not from his personal virtue.

At the heart of his system are the "two handles", reward and punishment. People, Han Fei argued, act from self-interest; they love profit and fear harm. A ruler who controls both rewards and punishments can direct their behaviour as he wishes. Officials must be held strictly to their words: a minister who proposes a task is judged by whether the result exactly matches what he promised, and is punished for doing either less or more.

Han Fei was intensely suspicious of ministers, relatives, wives and favourites, all of whom, he thought, had reasons to wish the ruler weak or dead. The ruler should hide his likes and dislikes, keep his intentions secret and stay still while others act, an adaptation of the Daoist idea of wu wei. Two chapters of the Han Feizi interpret passages of the Daodejing attributed to Laozi, giving Daoist language a political meaning.

Han Fei rejected the Confucian view, held by Confucius and Mencius, that rulers should govern through moral example and benevolence. Times change, he argued; the methods of the ancient sage kings suited a sparsely populated world, not the crowded, competitive states of his age. In one famous parable a farmer sees a hare break its neck against a tree stump, and then sits by the stump waiting for another, becoming the laughing stock of the state. Rulers who imitate antiquity, he said, are like him.

In "The Five Vermin" he named the groups that weaken a state: scholars who praise the ancients and confuse the law, wandering speech-makers, private swordsmen, those who dodge military service through connections, and merchants and artisans who profit without producing. A strong state, he argued, depends on farmers and soldiers.

Qin under Li Si governed largely along Legalist lines, and the speed of its collapse after the First Emperor's death in 210 BCE left Legalism with a dark reputation. The Han dynasty, which succeeded the Qin dynasty, officially adopted Confucianism, and Han Fei was condemned for centuries as a teacher of cruelty. Yet historians agree that the institutions of imperial China, its centralised bureaucracy, written law codes and evaluation of officials, owed much to Legalist ideas, often described as a Confucian surface over a Legalist core.

Han Fei has often been compared to Machiavelli for his unsentimental view of power. In the twentieth century he was reassessed in China; during the Cultural Revolution's campaigns of the 1970s, Mao Zedong's government praised the Legalists as progressive opponents of Confucianism. Today he is read as one of the sharpest political thinkers in Chinese philosophy.