What the Ancient Chinese Legalists Got Right (and Wrong) About Power

A Strange Disagreement

Here is a scene that would have been familiar to anyone living in China around 300 BCE. A king sits on his throne. Before him stands a traveling philosopher, who has come to offer advice. The philosopher says: “Great King, your kingdom is in chaos. The solution is simple. Find wise and virtuous men to help you govern. Reward the good, punish the bad, and set a moral example. If you do this, your people will follow, and your kingdom will prosper.”

The king nods. This sounds reasonable. Many philosophers have told him the same thing.

Then another philosopher steps forward. This one says something very different: “That advice is dangerous. You cannot rely on finding virtuous men—there aren’t enough of them. You cannot trust your own judgment—you will be fooled by flatterers. What you need are clear laws, strictly enforced. You need a system that works even with bad officials and ordinary people. You need fa.”

Fa (pronounced “fah”) is a Chinese word that means law, but also standard, model, or method. The philosophers who argued for fa were later called the fajia—the “School of Fa,” or, as Western scholars have named them, the Legalists. But as we’ll see, calling them “Legalists” is a bit misleading. They were interested in much more than law.

These thinkers—especially Shang Yang, Shen Buhai, Shen Dao, and Han Fei—developed one of the most controversial and influential political philosophies in human history. Their ideas have been praised as brutally realistic and condemned as totalitarian. They’ve been used to build empires and to justify oppression. And they raise questions that still matter today: Can a system be fair if people are selfish? Should a ruler be loved or feared? And what happens when the government treats its people like tools?

Before We Begin: The World They Lived In

Ancient China around 400–200 BCE was a terrifying place. The old Zhou dynasty was collapsing. Kingdoms fought each other constantly—this period is called the Warring States era for good reason. Wars became bloodier as new weapons like the crossbow appeared, and armies grew from a few thousand chariot-riding nobles to hundreds of thousands of peasant soldiers.

Thinkers from many different schools tried to solve the problem of violence. Confucians said: “Teach people morality, and they’ll stop fighting.” Mohists said: “Love everyone equally, and war will end.” Daoists said: “Stop trying so hard, and peace will come naturally.”

The fa thinkers said something harder to hear: “Morality isn’t enough. People are selfish. The only way to stop war is to build a state so powerful that no one dares attack it—and then unite the whole world under one ruler.”

This wasn’t a cozy philosophy. It was a philosophy for an emergency.

The Cleverness of Selfishness

Let’s start with something that might sound insulting but that the fa thinkers took as a simple fact: people are selfish. Not evil, necessarily. Just selfish. They want more food, more safety, more status. They want to avoid pain and death.

A Confucian philosopher named Xunzi (who lived around the same time) basically agreed that people are born selfish. But he thought education and ritual could transform them into virtuous people. The fa thinkers said: forget it. Most people won’t become virtuous. Most officials won’t become selfless. And a government that depends on finding the rare virtuous person is doomed to fail.

This is actually a clever insight. Imagine you’re designing a school. Would you design it so that the whole school works only if the principal is a saint? Or would you design it so that even a mediocre principal can’t mess it up too badly? The fa thinkers chose the second option.

Here’s how Shen Dao, one of the early thinkers, put it:

“Among the people, everybody acts for himself. If you try to change them and make them act for you, there will be none whom you can employ. Employ the people for their own interests, not for your sake. Then there will be none whom you cannot make use of.”

Think about that. Instead of fighting against selfishness, use it. Instead of hoping people will be good, arrange things so that being good happens to be in their self-interest. This is the core of the fa approach.

History Doesn’t Repeat—But It Does Rhyme

The fa thinkers had another unusual idea for their time: history moves forward, and you can’t go back.

Most ancient philosophers—in China and elsewhere—assumed that the golden age was in the past. The ancestors knew best. The wise ruler studies history and copies what the ancient sage-kings did.

Shang Yang (a reformer who basically built the state of Qin into a military superpower) said this was nonsense. He pointed out that past rulers hadn’t agreed with each other. Which ancient ruler should you copy? And anyway, society had changed. In the distant past, there were few people and lots of resources, so people didn’t compete much. But now, Han Fei added, a single grandfather might have twenty-five grandchildren. People are many and goods are scarce. You can’t govern a crowded, competitive world with the same methods that worked for a small, simple one.

Here’s how Shang Yang put it: “When the affairs of the world change, one should implement a different Way.”

This might not sound shocking to us today—we’re used to the idea of progress. But in ancient China, this was radical. It meant you didn’t have to respect tradition. You could invent new laws. You could reorganize society from scratch.

The Great Machine: How to Run a State Without Trusting Anyone

This is where the fa thinkers get really interesting—and really disturbing.

Their basic idea was simple: create clear, public laws that apply to everyone equally. Then reward people who follow them and punish people who break them. Make the rewards attractive and the punishments terrifying. Then get out of the way and let self-interest do the work.

Han Fei explained: “For correcting the oversights of superiors, for prosecuting the wickedness of subordinates, for bringing order to chaos and sorting out tangles, nothing is as good as fa.”

This sounds reasonable enough. But Shang Yang took it further. He wanted the entire population focused on just two activities: farming and fighting. These were the “One”—the only things that mattered. Everything else was a distraction.

He wrote: “Poems, Documents, rites, music, goodness, self-cultivation, benevolence, uprightness, argumentativeness, cleverness: when a state has these ten, superiors cannot induce the people to engage in defense and fighting.”

He called scholars and moralizers “lice” and “parasites.” He wanted to close off every path to success except agriculture and war. If you wanted to get rich or famous, you had to farm or fight. Period.

And the punishments? Brutal. Shang Yang argued for harsh penalties even for minor crimes. The logic was: if you terrify people enough, they won’t break the law at all. “To prevent wrongdoing,” he wrote, “nothing is better than making punishments heavy. When punishments are heavy and criminals are inevitably captured, then the people dare not try to break the law. Hence, there are no penalized people in the state.”

This is the famous line: “Eradicate punishments with punishments.” Scare people so badly that nobody commits crimes, and then you don’t need to punish anyone.

The Problem of Officials

So far, the fa thinkers have been telling us how to control the people. But they knew there was an even bigger problem: how do you control the people who run the government?

Shang Yang was a genius at reforming society, but he didn’t think much about managing officials. Han Fei, who lived about a century later, saw this as a major weakness. He said: “The sage orders the officials, not the people.”

Han Fei developed a whole system for managing bureaucrats. His key insight was that officials are just as selfish as everyone else. They will lie, cheat, and steal if they can get away with it. Some will even try to take over the state.

So Han Fei proposed a method he called “techniques of rule” (shu). The idea was: make officials state their goals clearly in advance. Then check their actual performance against what they promised. Reward those who match. Punish those who don’t.

He compared this to a bidding system. An official says: “Give me this job, and I’ll accomplish X.” The ruler says: “Fine.” Later, he checks. Did the official actually accomplish X? If yes, reward. If no, punish. Simple.

This sounds like modern management. But there was a darker side. Han Fei also advised rulers to be secretive and deceptive. “Techniques of rule are hidden in the breast,” he wrote. “Laws are best when they are clear, whereas techniques should not be seen.”

The ruler should never show his emotions. He should never let anyone know what he’s thinking. He should even say the opposite of what he means, to keep his ministers guessing.

Why? Because Han Fei believed that every minister is a potential assassin. He quoted the legendary Yellow Emperor: “A hundred battles a day are fought between the superior and his underlings.” And he wrote: “If a minister does not murder his ruler, this is because the cliques and cabals are not formed yet.”

This is paranoid, yes. But it’s also honest about something most political philosophers prefer to ignore: power is dangerous, and people who get close to power often get corrupted by it.

The Lonely Ruler

Here’s one of the strangest tensions in fa thought. On one hand, the fa thinkers wanted the ruler to have absolute power. He should control rewards and punishments. He should make the final decisions. He should be the single source of authority, because too many cooks spoil the broth.

On the other hand, they didn’t trust the ruler either.

Han Fei and Shang Yang both assumed that most rulers would be mediocre at best. They were born into the job—they didn’t earn it. So how can a system built on absolute power work when the person wielding that power is probably not very smart or virtuous?

The answer: design the system to work with mediocre people. Han Fei wrote that his system was designed for “average rulers”—not moral geniuses, not monstrous tyrants, but normal people. The system should be so good that even a mediocre ruler can’t mess it up.

But what does that mean in practice? It means the ruler should do as little as possible. He should follow the laws himself. He should not interfere in daily government. He should avoid making personal decisions, because his personal judgments are unreliable.

Han Fei even said: “Being unworthy, he is the master of the worthies; being unwise, he is the corrector of the wise.” In other words: the ruler doesn’t need to be smart. He just needs to sit there, enforce the system, and take credit for the results.

One modern scholar, Angus Graham, provocatively suggested that in Han Fei’s system, the ruler “has no functions which could not be performed by an elementary computer.” The ministers do the real ruling.

So here’s the paradox: create a system of absolute power, then tell the person who holds that power to stop using it. Trust no one—not your ministers, not the people, and not even yourself.

Did It Work? (And What Happened Next)

The short answer is: yes, it worked terrifyingly well.

Shang Yang’s reforms turned the state of Qin into a military machine that conquered all of China by 221 BCE. The Qin dynasty, though it lasted only 15 years, unified the country for the first time. The fa thinkers’ methods—clear laws, meritocratic promotion, state control of society—were brutally effective in an age of total war.

But after unification, the system fell apart. The Qin dynasty collapsed amid rebellion and resentment. And the fa thinkers became a kind of bogeyman in Chinese history. Later scholars called them “strict and having little kindness.” For two thousand years, no major statesman wanted to be associated with Shang Yang or Han Fei, even while quietly using some of their methods.

Why? Because their philosophy is hard to love. It’s cynical. It treats people as tools. It has no room for kindness, for art, for friendship, for anything except the state’s power. The fa thinkers would say: that’s because we were honest about reality. Their critics would say: they were honest about the worst parts of reality and ignored the best.

Still a Live Debate

The fa tradition has experienced a revival in the last hundred years. Some modern Chinese thinkers have admired its emphasis on law, its evolutionary view of history, and its practical approach to government. Others have pointed out that its ideas about thought control and harsh punishment look uncomfortably like totalitarianism.

And there are real questions here that we still struggle with. Can a government function without trusting its officials? Is it possible to create a fair system when people are selfish? What’s the right balance between law and human judgment?

The fa thinkers gave one kind of answer. They were honest, brutal, and consistent. They may not have been kind philosophers, but they were serious ones. And their questions haven’t gone away.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Fa (法)	The system of laws, standards, and institutions that should govern society impartially
Shu (術)	The secret techniques a ruler uses to control officials and prevent them from seizing power
Shi (勢)	The ruler’s positional power—authority that comes from the throne itself, not from the ruler’s personal qualities
Rank of merit	A system Shang Yang created to give common people rewards (land, status) for military achievements, replacing inherited nobility
The “One” (壹)	The idea that a state should focus its people on only two activities: farming and fighting
Impartiality (gong 公)	The principle that laws should apply equally to everyone, regardless of status or family ties

Key People

Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE): A reformer who transformed the state of Qin into a military superpower by reorganizing society around farming and fighting. His ideas are collected in the Book of Lord Shang.
Han Fei (d. 233 BCE): A prince of the state of Han who synthesized earlier fa ideas and added sophisticated techniques for controlling officials. His book Han Feizi is the most famous fa text.
Shen Buhai (d. 337 BCE): A chancellor who focused on administrative techniques (shu) for managing bureaucrats. Only fragments of his work survive.
Shen Dao (4th century BCE): A thinker who emphasized the importance of the ruler’s position (shi) and argued that people act from self-interest, not virtue.
Li Si (d. 208 BCE): A student of Han Fei who became the architect of the Qin Empire and launched a famous burning of books in 213 BCE to suppress rival philosophies.

Things to Think About

Han Fei said laws should be public and clear, but his “techniques of rule” should be secret and hidden. Is this a contradiction? Can a system be both transparent and manipulative?
The fa thinkers argued that relying on virtuous people is dangerous because there aren’t enough of them. But doesn’t their own system still need a virtuous ruler—or at least a minimally competent one? Can laws really replace good judgment?
Shang Yang wanted to close off every path to success except farming and fighting. Imagine living in that world. What would be lost? What would be gained? Is there a version of this idea that isn’t oppressive?
If you think about it, the fa thinkers seem to trust nobody: not the people, not the officials, and not even the ruler. Who’s left? Is this kind of total distrust sustainable?

Where This Shows Up

Modern management and bureaucracy: Han Fei’s “performance and titles” system—where you state your goals in advance and are judged against them—is basically how performance reviews work today.
China’s political system: Some scholars argue that elements of fa thinking—especially the emphasis on law as a tool of state power—persist in modern Chinese governance.
Your own school: Think about how your school uses rewards (grades, honors) and punishments (detention, suspension) to shape behavior. Is this fa thinking? What’s the difference?
Discussions about fairness: When people argue that “the law should apply to everyone equally, even the rich and powerful,” they’re echoing a core fa principle—though the fa thinkers would also say that law should serve the ruler’s interests, not protect individual rights.