There was no overt attack on the feudal system. The system, however, possessed within itself contradictions which led to its doom. The central power was insufficient to keep the peace, and certain local groups were—by talent, economic factors, or geography—too strong to remain subordinate. The period known as the Spring and Autumn epoch (Ch'un Ch'iu; 770-473 b. c.) yielded to that known as the Age of Warring States (Chan Kuo; 473-221 b. c.). From feudal cores there grew states, which began to follow the course of development that led to the appearance of a system of sovereign nations in Europe; they increasingly interfered with the free operation of the feudal economy. By effecting the massing of power they eliminated the overawing charioteer from the field of decisive combat.[5] The chariots remained as the vehicles of the leaders or the focal points of battles, but they no longer implied a skill so great as to make up a monopoly of first-rate military force. While the most eminent thinker of the age, Confucius, lamented the decline of order, a new order was being shaped from the social, economic, and military realities laid bare by rapid development, Machiavellian intrigue, and the hard necessities of wartime economies.

The state of Ch'in, a Chinese Prussia, attained overwhelming hegemony in the third century before Christ. Its power rested on universal registration of the inhabitants, conscription, heavy policing, taxation involving constant intervention in economic matters, and legalistic administration. In its warfare there was little of the ritual which characterized the military period when chariots were dominant; codes did not amount to much. The immediate end of war was slaughter for political and economic purposes, not the hazardous parade of a feudal class. The Ch'in monarch who finally established a centralized empire took the vainglorious title of Shih Huang Ti (The First Emperor), and set himself the task of eradicating the regionalist ideologies of his conquered rivals by suppressing all political history but that of his native state. Proceeding from innovation to innovation, he ended by becoming one of the historic figures detested by later epochs. One of the practices which he extended throughout the Empire of China was the regularization of military service. He is also known as the originator of the grandiose project of the Great Wall; it is less well known that he forbade the erection of walls around cities within the Empire. His system of conscription involved three years of compulsory military service for all young men, and a corvee of three days' service each year at the frontier for every citizen; the former came to depend for its inclusiveness upon administrative integrity, while the latter was soon replaced by a money tax.

Although the First Empire established by the Ch'in did not last long, the Han dynasty (202 b. c. to a. d. 220) continued its military system[6] and kept standing armies at the northern frontier and at the imperial capital. The frontier forces were composed of militia augmented for special campaigns by volunteers and criminals. The Chinese fought the barbarians with the tactics of mounted archers, devices learned from the nomads. Away from the northern steppes, infantry seems to have gained constantly in importance. By the time of Christ the chivalry of the religious-social-military class of charioteers was ancient history, and mass armies had taken their place.

[Military Elements in Chinese Imperial History]

Through the greater part of the past two thousand years, Chinese society has been governed by civilians. The scholastic bureaucracy secured and kept a position of primacy, and a common ranking of the social classes was: scholars, farmers, merchants, soldiers. The Confucians were antagonistic to war, and bureaucrats—if for governmental reasons alone—suspected the danger which lay in the broad dissemination of military knowledge. The Chinese consistently ranked the military man below the civilian; as a natural consequence most of the abler men went into scholarship and politics. Chinese history has its great military names and ample accounts of spectacular military exploits, but even here the elements of strategy, of diplomatic and cunning warfare, rate higher than in the corresponding European histories. Despite the fact that arms did not play as great a role in Chinese history as in Western, the difference is one of degree only; military considerations appeared and persisted which colored governmental action and social organization. Among these was the relation of the armed forces to the social order—in point of numbers and in point of force. When elections are lacking in a civilized society, fighting power demarcates an electorate of force, as it were; the distribution of power determines the center of political gravity as located in the society. In China there were, however, elements distinctly different from those in the West.

One of these was the correlation of mass power and military power. In epoch after epoch, armies seem to spring forth out of the very soil—armed groups radically unlike the Roman legion. For seasoned veterans marching forth with elaborately effective disciplines China substituted mass forces drawn directly from the populace, as need arose. In some dynasties the system was regularized in militia form. Of the Han, H. H. Dubs writes:

Chinese armies were largely militia. Everyone was compelled to serve three years in the army or in forced labor; at the northern border, the whole male population had constantly to be ready to repel Hun forays. Hence all males seem to have been able to fight and to be required to do so. When the Emperor Wu [ca. 120 b. c.] wanted armies and none would volunteer, he merely had his officials sentence criminals to army service—and thus secured armies which seemed to be able to fight as successfully as his previous armies. Universal military conscription plus a registration of all able-bodied males seems to have been the Han method.[7]

The common people had crossbows for shooting birds or pronged hoes for digging which were efficient even in fighting standing armies; they were also frequently in possession of weapons because they were called up as militia against barbarians. Underlying such military conditions, with their highly important political consequences, there were several surprisingly concrete and simple mechanical considerations. The charioteers had come to an end partly because the chariots were drawn by horses yoked in such a fashion that when the horses pulled hard, they often choked themselves. Other factors are suggested by Dubs:

By the time that horses became plentiful, so that cavalry was employed, the crossbow had reached such a state of development that cavalry was shown to be inferior to infantry with crossbows. The medieval European crossbow was hampered by the mechanical weakness of its trigger mechanism—the crossbow was likely to be discharged prematurely by a jar; the Chinese Han crossbow had no such defect and was a powerful weapon. A group of crossbowmen with others in the rear to string crossbows and others to bring cocked bows to the marksmen in the front rank, could shoot down cavalry before they could come near enough to discharge the lighter bows cavalry necessarily carried. Cocked crossbows could be carried around safely and fired when needed. A bolt from a powerful crossbow could pierce any armor. Hence the strong-backed peasant with a crossbow had an advantage over the noble no matter how well the noble was armed or how good horses the latter possessed. The only advantage retained by the noble was that of leadership—tactical skill and command of large bodies of infantry. Cavalry became useful for scouting and pursuit chiefly.[8]