Abstract

Albert Galvany

Institut d'Asie Orientale at Lyon

The court as a battlefield:

the art of war and the art of politics in the Han Feizi

Most of the scholarly works analysing the writings traditionally attributed to Han Fei tend to overlook the influence that military literature might have had on its conception and unfolding. At most, scholars point out the military origins of the introduction of disciplinary mechanisms, which are mainly understood as the distribution of rewards and punishment in keeping with certain kinds of behaviour and action, and they suggest that, in this regard, the Han Feizi would have followed in the wake of its ideological predecessor, Shang Yang. Apart from this shared conventional element, any other influence of strategic thought in the Han Feizi is ruled out, to such an extreme that some scholars go so far as to assert that the figure of the ruler, as described in this text, and that of the commander, as portrayed in military literature, are radically opposed and fundamentally incompatible.

In refuting this deep-rooted tendency, I shall attempt to demonstrate throughout my paper that the writings attributed to Han Fei and collected in the Han Feizi embrace the logic of military confrontation, which entails, among other things, the deployment of deception and cunning intelligence. Accordingly, I shall also show that a comprehensive understanding of the political stance of this work is not possible unless one takes into account the conceptual input deriving from early Chinese military literature.