In 403 BC (the twenty-third year of King Weilie of Zhou), the Three Families of Han, Zhao, and Wei simultaneously sent people to Wang Du. Nominally, he went to see Zhou Tianzi, but in fact he wanted Zhou Tianzi to officially appoint them as princes. Zhou Tianzi saw that after the Jin and Tang uncles, it was already an established fact that the three families of Han, Zhao, and Wei divided the Jin state, so they had to push the boat along the water and officially crown Han Qian as the Marquis of Han (i.e., the Marquis of Han Jing), Zhao Yun as the Marquis of Zhao (i.e., the Marquis of Zhao Lie), and Wei Si as the Marquis of Wei (i.e., the Marquis of Wei Wen).
Wei Si was the Marquis of Wei Wen, and he was the grandson of Wei Huanziju. In 445 BC, he became the heir of the Wei family, and by 403 BC, he was officially crowned as a prince by Zhou Tianzi along with Han and Zhao.
The land of Wei was fertile and the population was large, which was undoubtedly very beneficial to social and economic development. Wei Wenhou was also a man with great ambitions. In him, we can see the image of the vigorous, energetic and promising "living tiger" of the emerging feudal class after it first gained power.
Wenhou was determined to exert himself to govern and reform and strengthen. In the center, he set up generals directly appointed and dismissed by the monarch to command hundreds of officials; in the localities, he established counties and counties, and the monarch directly appointed the shou orders to rule the people. Wen hou personally established a new centralized state in the State of Wei. He was a corporal of Lixian and employed meritocracy, successively using Wei Chengzi, Zhai Huang, and Li Wu as his counterparts, Bu Zixia, a famous disciple of Confucius, as his teacher, and tian zifang, Duan Ganmu, and other social sages of the time. The style of recruiting talents and raising soldiers in the Warring States can be said to have begun from him.
In Wei Wenhou's court, a large number of people with lofty ideals and abilities from all over the world were gathered, such as Wu Qi, a military expert and politician who was good at managing the army, Le Yang, who was bent on serving the country and not paying attention to selfish feelings, and Ximen Leopard, who was good at rejuvenating water conservancy and eliminating harm for the people, and so on. He relied on this group of people to carry out comprehensive reforms from the economy to politics and military. In this process, it should be mentioned in particular that Li Wu, who played a particularly important role.
Li Wu, also known as Li Ke, is said to be a student of Bu Zixia and once served as the northern guard of the State of Wei. Li Wu was an outstanding politician. He inherited and carried forward the ideas of the pioneers of the Dharma and summed up their historical experience. During the 10 years of Xiang Wei, he gained both the trust of Wen Hou and the support of a group of emerging landlord class intellectuals like Bu Zixia. So he was able to effectively carry out more thorough reforms from the economic base to the superstructure.
In terms of economy, Li Wu proposed the "teaching of exhaustion" and the "law of peace".
The so-called "religion of exhausting the land" is mainly to break the old feudal territory, encourage the free opening up of cultivated land, cultivate diligently, and make full use of land. For example, it is stipulated that mulberry trees should be planted in front of the house and behind the house, and vegetables and fruits should be planted on the mounds between the fields. In order to avoid the impact of natural disasters on a single crop, it is stipulated that grains must be planted at the same time. This is all about doing everything possible to increase agricultural products and prevent natural disasters from impoverishing and bankrupting individual smallholder farmers.
Li Wu saw that from the Spring and Autumn Period to the beginning of the Warring States Period, the small peasant economy that had just developed was very young and weak, and if it was not supported, it would go bankrupt in the face of natural disasters and man-made disasters. The inevitable consequence is that the people are in exile, the labor force is lost, the land is barren, the state taxes cannot be collected, and the treasury is empty, thus leading to the rise of "thieves" and threatening the emerging feudal rule. In order to resolve this contradiction, Li Wu adopted the "teaching of doing his best" on the one hand, and on the other hand, he also implemented the "Pingyi Law."
The "Pingzhi Method" and the "Best Effort" complement each other, and from different angles, they urge farmers to be diligent in farming. According to the Book of Han and The Chronicle of Food and Goods, Li Wu believed that "if it is very expensive, it hurts the people, and if it is very low, it hurts the peasants." When the people are wounded, they are scattered, and the peasants are wounded and the country is poor." In our current words, it is: grain is too expensive for the people to buy, and too cheap for the peasants to suffer too much. If the people cannot afford to buy food, they will flee everywhere to seek a living; the peasants will suffer too much, which will affect their enthusiasm for production and will not benefit the country.
In order to be politically stable, the people's lives must be stabilized, and the most important of these is to bind them firmly to the land. The "Pingyi Law" is for this purpose. Li Wu's specific approach was: when the harvest came, the peasants paid tithes, leaving behind the grain for their own use, and the rest of the grain was purchased by the government at a price. When the famine year comes, it is cheaply paid by the government. In this way, not only can we prevent "famine and water drought," but also because the price of millet is uniformly stipulated by the government, merchants are exempted from hoarding and making huge profits from it, and naturally they can maintain the stability of grain prices in times of famine and shortage of grain. In this way, the people's lives will be stable and the government's fiscal revenue will be guaranteed.
Politically, Li Wu practiced the methods of "eating and laboring and having merit" and "robbing the people of the people, since the four sides of the people" (see "Saying Yuan, Political Reason"). Specifically, it is to abolish the old shiqing shilu system and replace it with the granting of posts and new knighthoods according to the size of merit and the amount of contribution to the country.
Those "adulterers" who have not contributed to the country, but enjoy privileges by virtue of Lao tzu's title, wear gorgeous costumes, go out in a carriage, return to the mansion and immerse themselves in dance music, are not ashamed but proud, and are mighty and blessed, are banned, and these knights are used to attract the scholars needed by the emerging landlord class in all directions. In this way, it dealt a blow to the remnants of the old forces, opened a convenient door for the rise of the new feudal class, and was conducive to the development and growth of the new landlord class.
In order to further consolidate the emerging feudal regime, Li Wu also fixed the interests of the emerging landlord class in the form of law. He collected and sorted out the legal provisions of various countries since the late Spring and Autumn Period, "collected the criminal codes of various countries", and combined with the actual situation of the Wei state at that time, compiled the first systematic feudal code in China's history, the "Book of Laws".
This code was not only brought to the Qin state by his student Wei Martin (i.e., Shang Martingale), which became the blueprint for the implementation of the rule of law in the Qin state; moreover, many of its contents were also used by successive feudal rulers after the Qin and Han dynasties.
The original text of Li Wu's "Fa Jing" has long been lost. However, from the relevant records, it can be seen that the main contents of the original work are roughly divided into 6 parts: "Theft Law", "Thief Law", "Prison Law", "Capture Law", "Miscellaneous Law", and "JuFa". The first four articles mainly talk about the methods of detaining and arresting "thieves" and "thieves". If it is stipulated that the murderer shall be put to death, the whole family and the wife's family shall be taken into slavery. For the "great thieves", the light ones are charged to remote places, and the heavy ones are executed. The Fa Jing even stipulates that those who pick up the leftovers on the road should also have their toes cut off.
The Miscellaneous Laws mainly stipulate the punishment methods for fornication, gambling, theft of official seals, corruption and bribery, and the use of transgressions, discussion of conquest decrees, and so on. Even those who live in the mass settlement will be punished once they are questioned, and they will be executed for more than three days. It can be seen that the law is extremely harsh. The "JuFa" deals with the issue of commutation of sentence according to different circumstances.
Judging from the entire "Fa Jing," although in some places there are also targets some people within the ruling class who are doing wrongdoing, such as officials who embezzle and accept bribes, stipulate that the prime minister must be killed at once, and the prince who gambles must be flogged or deposed, etc., but the law is, after all, the concrete embodiment of the will of the ruling class, and from the perspective of the entire content and spiritual essence, it is mainly to deal with the ruled class.
The reforms carried out by Wei Wenhou with Li Wu as his counterpart were comprehensive, and through a series of fruitful reforms, the State of Wei became strong and prosperous in a short period of time, becoming the first typical centralized state of the feudal landlord class dictatorship in the Warring States.
The content of this article is compiled from the "Warring States History" of the China International Broadcasting Publishing House's China Reading Book "Classic Chinese General History". The authors of "Warring States History" are Xie Qi and Peng Bangjiong, both of whom are researchers at the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
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