for the state of Ch’u. Ch’u was the large southern state, then on the frontiers
of Chinese settlement, where Mohist logicians had for several generations
enjoyed support. Hsün Tzu was posted to Lanling in southern Shantung (the
eastern seaboard), where he set up his own school. Here he attracted pupils
such as Han Fei and Li Ssu. The Lanling school and its network offshoots
continued to be influential down to the beginning of the Han dynasty, when
its scholars dominated the intellectual life of the new regime, producing high
imperial officials as well as the scholars who fed the system of state Erudites
(Knoblock, 1988: 38–39).
States came to find prestige in sponsoring intellectual centers and emulated
one another. Wei, Ch’i, Chao, and apparently Ch’u (with less emphasis on an
“all comers” approach) had their centers; the intellectual stars circulated
among them as local conditions changed. Even the “barbarian” and ruthlessly
practical state of Ch’in, on the western frontier, took as prime minister Fan
Sui (271–265 b.c.e.), a famous debater and former diplomat in the service of
Wei. In the next generation Lü Pu-wei, a rich merchant connected to the Chao
court, maneuvered to become prime minister at Ch’in, and assembled at his
own expense a group of some 3,000 scholars.^5 This group probably drew
heavily away from the older centers at P’ing-yuan (in Chao), the Chi-hsia
Academy, and Hsün Tzu’s center at Lanling, from which was recruited the
arch-Legalist Li Ssu. The Ch’in state, as it conquered the rest of China in the
220s, acquired a reputation as anti-intellectual, above all because of the burn-
ing of the books of rival factions engineered by Li Ssu in 213. Nevertheless,
we ought to see this as an act of rivalry among intellectuals, one faction of
whom had finally come to absolute power. It was the last act of a situation of
intellectual emulation, which had promoted creativity for half a dozen genera-
tions until the structural independence which undergirded the competition was
closed down to a single source.
It was in this period of “the hundred schools” that Chinese intellectual life
was most similar to that of Greece. The debaters moving among the courts of
the Warring States remind us of the Sophists, many of whom were diplomats
too, as well as refugees or participants in colonization schemes of the Greek
world. Greek philosophers were concerned not only with military alliances (the
Persian wars, the Athenian and anti-Athenian coalitions, later the wars of the
Macedonian and Hellenistic states), but also with internal factions of aristo-
crats against democrats. Greek tyrants, who played opportunistically on either
side of this class conflict, were especially likely to act as patrons of philoso-
phers, like some of the upstart ministers of Chinese states. In both China and
Greece the external structure gave emphasis to public argument, and growing
prestige to the intellectual community per se. In China this happened at the
time of the Chi-hsia Academy and its rivals; the comparable center was Athens
Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China^ •^145