Han Feizi
韓非子 (Han Feizi)
A ruler who governs through personal virtue or trusted ministers will be deceived and overthrown, so lasting order requires impersonal law applied without exception, clear rewards and punishments, and techniques that let a ruler control his officials without needing to trust any of them.
- law (fa) applied uniformly regardless of rank
- technique (shu) for covert control of officials
- positional power (shi) over personal virtue
- blueprint for the Qin unification of China
The most systematic statement of Legalist statecraft, written by a prince of the State of Han who studied under the Confucian Xunzi but rejected his teacher's faith in ritual and moral cultivation as a basis for order. Han Fei synthesizes earlier Legalist strands, Shang Yang's emphasis on strict law (fa), Shen Buhai's techniques of covert bureaucratic control (shu), and Shen Dao's positional power (shi), into a single theory: a ruler need not be wise or good, only disciplined in applying uniform law and using secrecy to prevent ministers from manipulating him. Ironically executed on the orders of Li Si, a fellow student of Xunzi who feared his talent, Han Fei's text became the intellectual blueprint the Qin state used to unify China in 221 BC.
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