Han Fei

Han Fei is the systematic culmination of Legalist political philosophy and one of the most consequential thinkers of Warring States China. Born around 280 BC into the royal house of the small state of Han, he watched his homeland decay under pressure from the rising Qin.

He studied under Xunzi alongside Li Si, who would become Qin's chancellor. Xunzi held that human nature is bad and must be reformed by ritual. Han Fei kept the dark anthropology but moved decisively beyond ritual to the cold mechanics of fa (codified law), shu (technique of personnel management) and shi (positional authority).

Fa came from Shang Yang, shu from Shen Buhai, shi from Shen Dao. Han Fei's originality lay in integrating all three into one doctrine. The sovereign issues laws, deploys techniques to read his ministers, and preserves the position from which authority flows. The Han Feizi, in fifty-five chapters, develops this triad in detail.

A stutter denied him the oral path of the rhetor; he wrote relentlessly. His texts reached the King of Qin, the future First Emperor, who is said to have exclaimed that he could die without regret if only he could meet this man. In 233 BC he was sent to Qin as an envoy. His classmate Li Si, fearing displacement, slandered him, had him jailed and forced him to take his own life by poison.

Twelve years later, in 221 BC, Qin used his ideas to unify China for the first time. Its centralised state, commandery system, codified law and bureaucracy were a near-literal implementation of his design. Qin collapsed within fifteen years of the First Emperor's death, but every dynasty afterwards governed under what is sometimes called Confucian on the surface, Legalist underneath — a pattern that ran for two thousand years.

He is often compared to Machiavelli, with whom he shares the cold study of power. Han Fei is the earlier and more comprehensive. Mao Zedong rated him highly, and his quiet influence on contemporary Chinese political culture is widely noted.