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This chapter examines Han Feizi. This text was named after Han Fei, a prolific philosopher who was executed on trumped-up charges in 233 BC. Although Han Fei is probably responsible for the lion's share of the extant Han Feizi, this does not permit readers to identify the philosophy of Han Fei himself with the philosophy (or philosophies) advanced in the Han Feizi, as though these were necessarily the same thing. The case of Han Fei and the Han Feizi is more complex because Han Fei was slippery. What Han Fei said varied with his expected audience, a point that scholarship has not always accounted for. Most of his chapters are addressed to kings; at least one, “The Difficulties of Persuasion” (“Shuinan”), is addressed to ministers; and for many chapters one can only guess at the intended audience.

This chapter focuses on the last fajia thinker, Han Feizi (c. 280–233 BCE), who was a grand synthesizer of many aspects of all classical Chinese moral-political discourse in his effort to perfect the operation of the impartialist state. His political project explicitly rejected the XQZP model by problematizing its every aspect. He sought an alternative model that provided the intellectual foundation for a system of impersonal and uniform bureaucratic machinery that could dispense reward and punishment automatically with as little interference from the ruler as possible. His goal of instituting a set of impartial, transparent, and uniform administrative and legal code and standard in governing the state, often in defiance of the interest of powerful aristocratic families, points to the principle of justice operative in his statist project. However, he could not solve the core tension between the monarch and the monarchy, dooming his project of building an impartial political order.

This chapter presents how the late Zhanguo thinkers made painstaking efforts to find a more practical solution to the inherent conflict between their ideals and gloomy reality. The answer was to limit the ruler's direct involvement in policy-making while retaining the symbolic importance of his position. The chapter examines two major late Zhanguo thinkers—Xunzi and Han Feizi—to trace the ways in which this bifurcation between the symbolic and practical aspects of the rulers' power occurred. The writings of both may be considered the apex of Zhanguo political thought. Hence, each of the two contributed decisively toward shaping the imperial political culture.

This chapter examines debates about xing dating from the third and second centuries BCE. These debates generally presented two basic orientations on human agency: “internal,” individualistic orientations, which placed faith in universal processes of bodily cultivation, promoting the development or preservation of xing or other personal, cosmic agencies as a means to individual attainment and authority; and “external” orientations, which advocated institutional methods of control and discouraged individual reliance on the powers of xing as a primary means of achieving personal and social ideals. While the former orientation proclaimed the existence of positive, innate agencies in need of cultivation and/or preservation, the latter orientation insisted on the existence and power of negative innate agencies that must be fiercely combated through institutional and social means. On the other side of the debate, there were authors of the third and second centuries BCE who explicitly condemned such overreliance on the powers of the self. Two important authors, Xunzi and Han Feizi, supported the active restraint, suppression, and avoidance of what they deemed to be negative, innate agencies associated with the self. To these thinkers, the individual was the locus for a complex interaction of dynamic and often selfish forces.

This chapter discusses the significance of the anecdote in Chinese historiography. It considers the circumstances which dictated that this would be the form to which writers gravitated in their efforts to make sense of the past and to cite it in their arguments. These circumstances left their mark on the emergent disciplines of history and philosophy, and consolidated a connection between them that would last throughout China's imperial period. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section defines the anecdote as a narrative form; notes some of its enduring features; explains the various functions to which the form was adapted; and then gives a sense of its prevalence in the surviving texts of the Warring States (480–221 BC), Qin (221–206 BC), and Western Han (202 BC–AD 8) periods. The second section examines the philosophical implications of anecdotal historical narration through an extraordinary early critique: the Nan or ‘Problematizing’ chapters of the Han Feizi. The final section addresses the models of historical development that emerged from anecdotal history and from various strategies for putting anecdotes in order, some of which long antedated Han Feizi, and some of which responded to the problems he had raised.

Works to situate Shen Dao in the early Chinese intellectual milieu and upon the philosophical landscape. The goal of this chapter is not merely to demonstrate that Shen Dao was deeply tied into the intellectual milieu of his time and addressing similar issues as his contemporaries. Rather it is to demonstrate how he actually influenced a range of early Chinese thinkers. In doing so, it focuses on Shen Dao’s place in debates about the nature and role of Heaven as well as his influence on Xunzi, Han Feizi, and the compilers of the Lüshi Chunqiu and the Huainanzi.