Why was the feudal system of the Western Zhou Dynasty stable for hundreds of years, but the feudal state of the Western Han Dynasty reversed itself for several decades?
The Zhou Dynasty's sub-feudal system has always been talked about as a relatively perfect system. But in fact, a large part of the reason why King Wu of Zhou implemented the sub-feudal system was because the Zhou Dynasty itself was not strong enough to govern the territory of Noda on its own. The Zhou Dynasty was able to destroy the Shang Dynasty, which also exploited the loophole, when the main forces of the Shang Dynasty went to pacify Dongyi, and the garrison of the capital City Ofge was weak. Therefore, when the Zhou Dynasty army reached chaoge, the king of Shang could only arm the slaves to resist, and as a result, the slaves turned against the enemy, and the Shang Dynasty was defeated, but the remnants of the Shang Dynasty still had great influence and strength in the Central Plains and Shandong and other places, and Zhou was originally a small country, and did not have the strength to completely annex these areas, so it had to implement a sub-feudal system.
The princes of King Wu of Zhou were mainly the clans of the Ji clan, the descendants of the ancient kings, the heroes of the destruction of merchants, and so on. In order to appease the remnants of yin merchants, King Wu of Zhou also divided King Wuyi of Shang into princes to govern the merchants, but King Wu of Zhou left an eye on it, and arranged for his younger brothers Guan Shu, Uncle Cai, and Uncle Huo around the Wuyi feudal state, collectively known as the "Three Prisons", to monitor Wuyi to prevent him from committing rebellion.
The Zhou Dynasty was able to destroy many other tribes of the Shang Dynasty, and it would be unreasonable if King Wu of Zhou did not divide these tribes after he took over the world, so in the end it was still the Zhou Dynasty that was not strong enough to control such a large territory alone, so it implemented the sub-feudal system to maintain its rule. Moreover, the Yidi on the border at the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty were very strong, and the central government could not take into account the surrounding borders, and could only rely on strengthening the local military strength to resist the Yidi, but this led to the strength of the feudal state becoming stronger and stronger, the strength of the Zhou Dynasty in the center became weaker and weaker, and after the collapse of the Eastern Zhou Lile, Zhou Tianzi was no longer able to govern the princely states.
However, before the Spring and Autumn Warring States Warring States Wars, there was also a rebellion by the princes in Western Zhou, and it was shortly after the death of King Wu of Zhou. Although King Wu won the world, he only served as the co-lord of the world for three years before he died, and the successor King Zhou Cheng was still young and unable to handle government affairs, so he had King Wu's younger brother Zhou Gongdan as regent, but this caused the dissatisfaction of the "Three Prisons", after all, everyone is the brother of King Wu, why can you regent me. So Wuyi took the opportunity to win them over and unite with other eastern princes to rebel against the Zhou Dynasty, known in history as the "Rebellion of the Three Prisons". Zhou Gongdan immediately led the "Sixth Division" to suppress the rebellion, and the result was not surprising, Zhou Gongdan killed Wu Geng and Guan Shu, released Uncle Cai, degraded Uncle Huo as a commoner, and finally put an end to the rebellion of the Three Prisons. This battle made Zhou Gongdan see the inadequacy of the sub-feudal system, and then he divided the remnants of the Shang Dynasty, the Lu state of Zhou Gongdan was divided into six tribes of shangmin, the Weiguo of King Wu's brother Kang Shufeng was divided into seven tribes of shangmin, the zhou kingdom of King Zhou Cheng was divided into ten tribes of shangmin, and the rest was the song state, which stabilized the rule of the Zhou Dynasty and made Western Zhou continue for more than two hundred years.
After Qin Shi Huang unified the Six Kingdoms, he abolished the sub-feudal system, implemented the county system, and established an incomparably powerful Qin Dynasty, but his younger son Hu Hai defeated the country's centuries-old foundation within two years, and the Qin Dynasty collapsed. Later, Liu Bang established the Han Dynasty, learned the lessons of the Western Zhou and Qin Dynasties, and implemented the parallel system of counties and states, which not only divided the princely states, but also established counties. However, this is different from the sub-feudal system of the Zhou Dynasty, which was multi-layered, with Qing Dafu below the princes and scholars below the Qing Dafu, and there was a corresponding ceremonial system to restrain them. In the Han Dynasty, it was a layer of feudalism, the princes directly ruled the feudal state, had greater power, and the ritual music system collapsed as early as the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, not to mention that hundreds of years later, the Han Dynasty, without the constraints of the princes and other powerful people, they would want to sit in the position of emperor. After Liu Bang became emperor, he also knew that feudalism was a threat to the central government, so he successively destroyed all the princes with different surnames, but he did not reclaim the land of these fiefdoms, but also gave these lands to Liu's relatives, thinking that his family would not be a threat, but who knew that under the temptation of imperial power, there was no family affection. Therefore, decades later, the Western Han Dynasty suffered from the "Rebellion of the Seven Kingdoms", while the Zhou Dynasty could be stabilized for hundreds of years through a cumbersome system and a perfect system of sub-feudalism.