Power, Law and Statecraft

Philosophically, Han Fei was in accord with Xunzi’s idea that human nature has an evil element and a mentality bent on self-interest. He deemed all attempts to educate and instill morals in the common people would be futile. It followed that rulers should eschew all impulses toward mercy. Generally, Han Fei was scornful of the Confucian method of ruling a state with benevolence, and advocated draconian laws and severe punishments to transgressions. A great synthesizer of legalism based on former legalists’ thoughts on the art of governance, he put forward that a ruler should control his state with three tools: power (shi), law (fa) and statecraft (shu).

In a hierarchical society, the degree of power and deference accorded to a person is often determined by one’s position and status. This is particularly true in feudal times when a state naturally had a single supreme ruler like a king or emperor. According to Han Fei, the unequal relationship between the ruler and his subordinates is the origin of the propensity for power. The propensity for power is the capability to impose one’s will on others, and he wanted rulers to be extremely aware of this propensity and try their best to sustain it. The essence of state power, in other words, is command over people, not over things. It makes people do what the power-holder wants them to do. Substantive power comes in the obvious forms of material and human resources and military force, which enable the ruler not only to dominate his subjects and inflict punishments on opponents, but to conquer other states as well.

Han Fei believed that just as a fish cannot live out of water, a ruler cannot rule without power. To ensure his grip on power, the ruler should rely on not only strong “muscles” and sharp “claws,” but also “eyes and ears,” which means a pervasive network of informants permeating all corners of society. The wise ruler arranges matters so that the world has no alternative but to watch for and listen to him. Thus while the ruler resides deep in the palace his light illuminates the four seas; and the world cannot hide from him nor scheme against him. This is because the paths of treachery have been narrowed and the reach of governing intelligence enhanced. Familial bonds and personal relationships must be subordinated to unconditional loyalty to the ruler and his state. In this way, the world of the ruler becomes his eyes and ears and there is nothing he cannot see, nothing he cannot hear.

The significance of law was something else Han Fei didn’t discount, and he proposed that laws should be written as explicitly as possible for common people. However, Han Fei’s idea of the law was dramatically different from the Western idea of natural law in that he rejected that it was based on any eternal universal principle. Unlike laws in other major ancient civilizations (Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindi, Jewish, Islamic, Greek or Roman civilizations), the ancient Chinese idea of law was not conceived of as having a divine origin or as being related to any religious sanctions. For Han Fei and Chinese legalists in general, maintaining laws and the legal mechanism as part of a system to reward and punish subjects was entirely in the interests of rulers. Religion had a minimal role to play in Chinese jurisprudence. This idea of law (fa), as the embodiment of the will and wishes of the ruler, enforced by penal punishment (xing), was to ensure the ruler held on to power.

Statecraft (shu) can be interpreted as certain administrative techniques to help rulers manage the risks of losing power. Han Fei argued that a competent ruler should keep his innermost thoughts secret and remain distant from his officials and people, so that the officials and people can’t read his mind, and therefore remain in awe of him. A head of state needs special techniques to make sure the people he rules are doing their work efficiently and without deceit, one of them being the art of controlling his people’s minds. Different from the Confucian idea of guiding people to be good citizens, the legalists want to help rulers stay in control of officials and subjects alike. This is the kind of special statecraft that the legalists brought into being.

The fundamental reason for a political ruler to apply the system of governance, law and statecraft was to maintain the position’s superiority. Thus, Han Fei’s philosophical thought can be taken as the mechanism and art for managing political struggles. The society that a legalist scholar envisioned was autocratic rule, where one man perched on the top of a power pyramid. This utopia is also like an animal farm where the ruler is the shepherd, his ministers are the watchdogs, and his people make up the herd.

WEN HAIMING is an associate professor at the School of Philosophy of Renmin University of China. He has a doctorate from the University of Hawaii and specializes in Chinese and Comparative Philosophy.