political order, discussed in the following chapter. Chinese culture, partic-
ularly in the area of thought or philosophy,flourished during the Warring
States period, providing the intellectual foundation for the rest of Chinese
history. Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Sunzi, Xunzi, to list only a
handful of thinkers, struggled to make sense of the constant, large-scale
warfare and perceived moral decay of their time, and to propose some
means either to improve on the situation or to accommodate oneself to it
and remain moral.^3 A key problem in Warring States Chinese society was
the function, scope, and frequency of violence.
Martial prowess had served to distinguish the Spring and Autumn aris-
tocrats, but as the violence that their culture demanded became widespread
and frequent, aristocratic society had functionally destroyed itself.
Obviously, the scope and frequency of violence had to be diminished, but
in the process the function of warfare and violence also changed.
Technological changes in weaponry, including changes in individual martial
skills and unit tactics, prevented any reconstitution of the aristocratic class,
and permanently altered the relationship of commoner society to the martial
arts. At the same time, the ideal of what a“noble man”君子was continued
to hark back to an earlier, mythical ideal of a moral, cultivated warrior.^4
Warring States thinkers were, with the possible exception of Mozi,
members of the knightly class, and some, like Hanfeizi, were of even
more elevated background. These men were therefore well acquainted
with the martial arts because of their stations in life, and directed much if
not all of their efforts at communicating their ideas to rulers of states and
other members of their own class. Martial metaphors permeated many of
these thinkers’works. What emerged was not just martial arts–inflected
rhetoric but also a clear awareness of the possibilities of martial arts for
self-cultivation. Martial arts required a clear and focused mind, something
valuable beyond the realm of actualfighting. Yet this use of martial
metaphors was also tempered by the need to discredit violence as an
appropriate instrument of rule, and, connected to this, the argument that
moral cultivation was harder to achieve and more valuable than martial
arts mastery.
The martial arts backgrounds of the great Warring States thinkers are
often ignored when considering their works, with the exception of Mozi.
Mozi, it has been suggested, may have been of the merchant or artisan
class, but he created and led a highly disciplined, militarized school. Part of
Mozi’s solution to the problem of interstate warfare was the philosoph-
ically intriguing, but strategically bankrupt, idea of everyone onlyfighting
defensively. His school backed up his ideas by offering its services and
The Warring States Period 33