The Confucian claim that de, cultivated virtue, is what should hold a state together drew a fully worked-out rebuttal from Legalist philosophy, and Chinese political history gave the argument an unusually clear real-world test.
Han Feizi, the third-century BCE Legalist philosopher, argued explicitly against reliance on the ruler's personal virtue as the basis of order, holding that de, being internal and unverifiable, could not be relied upon at scale: most rulers are mediocre, virtue cannot be legislated, and a state depending on a virtuous ruler appearing generation after generation is built on hope rather than method. Han Feizi proposed instead a system of clear, publicly known laws applied with mechanical consistency, backed by predictable rewards and punishments, designed to produce order regardless of whether officials were personally virtuous.
The state of Qin adopted Legalist administration under statesmen including Shang Yang and Li Si, and its unification of China in 221 BCE under the First Emperor appeared, briefly, to vindicate the Legalist wager over the Confucian reliance on de. But the Qin collapsed within roughly fifteen years, undone by harsh administration and widespread rebellion, an outcome Han historians read as a decisive refutation of pure Legalism and used to justify the Han's own turn toward a hybrid system, retaining much of the Qin's administrative machinery while restoring Confucian de and ritual as its publicly professed foundation, a synthesis, sometimes described as "Confucianism on the outside, Legalism on the inside," that became the template of Chinese imperial governance for two millennia.