Warring States

The Warring States period is conventionally dated from 475 BCE, when the nominal authority of the Zhou royal house had already collapsed into the rule of a shrinking number of increasingly powerful regional states, to 221 BCE, when the state of Qin completed its conquest of its six remaining rivals and its ruler took the title First Emperor. Seven major states, Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei, fought an escalating series of wars using large conscript infantry armies, iron weapons and new administrative techniques that replaced the older aristocratic chariot warfare of the earlier Spring and Autumn period, while the Zhou kings themselves retained only ritual prestige and no effective power.

Qin's eventual victory owed much to the Legalist reforms of the statesman Shang Yang, adopted in the fourth century BCE, which replaced hereditary privilege with a system of military rank earned through service and harsh, uniformly applied law, giving Qin an administrative and military efficiency its rivals could not match. The period's warfare and political theorizing about how to govern effectively and hold a state together under pressure are inseparable from its philosophical output, since most of the era's major thinkers were also, in one way or another, advisers or critics addressing rulers on exactly that question. The Cambridge History of Ancient China, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy, remains the standard scholarly reference for the period's political history.

Chinese tradition remembers the Warring States as the age of the Hundred Schools of Thought, when philosophical and religious argument flourished precisely because no single authority could suppress it. Confucius himself died in 479 BCE, just before the period's conventional start, but his teachings were carried forward and reshaped by Warring States successors: Mencius argued that human nature is fundamentally good and that a ruler's legitimacy depends on the people's welfare, while Xunzi took the opposite view, that human nature is inclined toward disorder and must be actively corrected through ritual and education, a disagreement that structured Confucian thought for the rest of Chinese history.

Alongside Confucianism, Daoism took shape in this period through texts attributed to Laozi and, more securely, through Zhuangzi, whose writings favored spontaneous accord with the natural way, or Dao, over the effortful ritual self-cultivation Confucians recommended. Mozi founded a rival school, Mohism, arguing for impartial care toward all people regardless of family ties, against the graded affections of Confucian ethics, while Legalist thinkers such as Han Feizi treated strict law and state power, not moral cultivation, as the only reliable foundation for order. This philosophical ferment ended, in effect, with the Qin unification, whose Legalist state briefly suppressed rival schools outright, but the period's texts, above all the Analects, the Mencius, the Zhuangzi and the Han Feizi, remained foundational to Chinese religious and ethical thought for the following two millennia.