Part One: The Development of the Great Yellow Turban Uprising and Its Decisive Impact on the Confucian-Legalist Struggle of the Three Kingdoms
The rise in intensity of the Confucian-Legalist struggle in the late Han and Three Kingdoms period was not something that Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang, and a handful of other figures simply launched out of thin air, nor was it a sudden ideological change that arose because a few politicians read the Book of Lord Shang or the Han Feizi. Its root cause lay, first of all, in the unprecedented sharpening of the contradiction between the peasant class and the landlord class in the late Eastern Han, which was concentrated in the great Yellow Turban Uprising that broke out in 184 CE.
Although the Yellow Turban Uprising was ultimately suppressed by a united effort of the landlord class, it dealt a heavy blow to the rule of the Eastern Han dynasty and the powerful clans, destroyed the old relations of land, population, bureaucracy, and ideology, and caused a major transformation in the entire social structure. From then on, the different degrees to which Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Quan pursued Legalist policies all unfolded under the new conditions created by the Yellow Turban uprising. Without the fierce sweeping away of the old Eastern Han order by the Yellow Turban uprising, there would have been no real political stage for the reemergence of Legalist policies in the late Han and Three Kingdoms period.
Therefore, any analysis of the Confucian-Legalist struggle in the Three Kingdoms period must begin with the great Yellow Turban Uprising.
1. The rule of the powerful clans pushed Eastern Han society toward a total explosion
The Eastern Han regime itself had been established on the support of powerful landholding clans. Liu Xiu, with the backing of the Nanyang and Hebei powerful clans, suppressed the Green Woods and Red Eyebrows uprisings and seized power. After taking the throne, he not only failed to weaken the powerful landowners, but instead protected them as they annexed land, controlled refugees, and expanded clan power. By the middle and late Eastern Han, the powerful clans had grown from ordinary large landowners into local ruling groups that simultaneously controlled land, population, armed force, office holding, and public opinion.
Economically, they possessed vast estates, slaves, dependents, and tenant households; politically, they monopolized official careers through recommendation, special summons, and connections between disciples and former officials; militarily, they built fortified strongholds and maintained retainers, private troops, and death squads; socially, they oppressed ordinary peasants through clan power, marriage ties, and local moral censure; ideologically, they revered Confucian classics and used doctrines of ruler-subject hierarchy, father-son order, ethical norms, and Heaven’s mandate to prove that their hereditary privileges were divinely ordained.
The so-called Confucian great clans that “transmitted Confucian learning from generation to generation” were, in essence, the combination of powerful landowner economic strength and Confucian political ideology. The ritual order that Confucianism promoted was not meant to eliminate the violence of the powerful clans, but to fix the hierarchies, clan order, and hereditary privileges within the landlord class; the benevolent governance it preached did not stop the powerful clans from annexing land, exploiting dependents, and driving peasants into exile.
Although fierce conflicts arose in the late Eastern Han between imperial in-laws, eunuchs, and scholar-officials, these were not struggles between laboring people and the ruling class, but conflicts within the landlord class over imperial power, office, and wealth. The imperial in-laws relied on the empress’s family to control the court, the eunuchs seized power through the emperor’s private favor, and the scholar-officials used recommendation systems, classical learning, and public opinion to organize disciples and former officials. The three factions slaughtered one another, yet all survived by relying on the exploitation of peasants.
The annexation by powerful clans created large numbers of peasants who lost their land and fell into the status of dependents, tenant households, and slaves. Peasants not only had to hand over most of their harvest to landlords, but also bear the state’s taxes, corvée labor, and military service. Floods and droughts occurred frequently, yet landlords and the state continued to demand rent and taxes as usual. Large numbers of peasants were forced into exile, sold their children, or even died in ravines and ditches.
It was precisely under these conditions that peasant uprisings broke out continuously from the reign of Emperor An of Han to Emperor Ling of Han. At first, the uprisings involved only hundreds or thousands of people; later they grew to tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands. Peasant struggles developed from scattered local resistance into armed uprisings spanning multiple commanderies and prefectures. The great Yellow Turban uprising was not an accidental event, but the total explosion of the class contradictions long accumulated under the rule of the Eastern Han powerful clans.
2. The Yellow Turban uprising developed from scattered resistance into an organized nationwide struggle
Compared with many spontaneous peasant revolts in the past, one important feature of the great Yellow Turban uprising was that it involved a relatively long period of ideological propaganda and organizational preparation.
Zhang Jiao and others used the Taiping Dao as their organizational form and penetrated the peasant masses through activities such as healing and preaching. Over more than ten years, the influence of Taiping Dao spread across vast regions including Qing, Xu, You, Ji, Jing, Yang, Yan, and Yu. The number of participants reached hundreds of thousands. Zhang Jiao divided the masses into thirty-six formations; the large ones had more than ten thousand people, the smaller ones six to seven thousand, each with its own band commander, forming an organizational system with a military character.
This kind of organization far surpassed simple riots that relied on starving people gathering temporarily. Peasants were no longer merely uprising sporadically wherever life became unbearable, but were preparing nationwide struggle on the basis of shared slogans, unified timing, and mutual coordination.
The Yellow Turban army proclaimed:
The blue sky is dead, the yellow sky shall rise; when the year is jiazi, all under heaven shall be blessed.
Although this slogan used religious language, it contained very clear political content. The “blue sky” represented the decayed Eastern Han dynasty; “the yellow sky shall rise” announced that the old dynasty was not eternal and that the oppressed had the right to overthrow the Liu regime and establish a new political order.
Confucian theory of the Mandate of Heaven claimed that imperial power was granted by Heaven and that the existing hierarchy could not be changed. The Yellow Turban army openly declared that “the blue sky is dead,” fundamentally denying the eternity of Eastern Han rule. It was not merely asking the emperor to reduce taxes a little, nor simply demanding the replacement of a few corrupt officials; it pointed the spearhead of struggle directly at the entire Eastern Han dynasty.
The original uprising plan was exposed early because Tang Zhou betrayed it. Ma Yuanyi was arrested and killed, and large numbers of Taiping Dao members in Luoyang and elsewhere were hunted down. Zhang Jiao was forced to launch the uprising ahead of schedule. In 184 CE, peasants across the country “rode day and night to order the various formations, and all rose at once.” Tens of thousands of people wrapped their heads in yellow cloth, attacked government offices, killed and drove out officials, and assaulted landlord strongholds. The uprising rapidly spread across eight provinces and twenty-eight commanderies.
At that time, three main battlefronts took shape: the Hebei Yellow Turbans led by Zhang Jiao, Zhang Liang, and Zhang Bao; the Yingchuan Yellow Turbans led by Bo Cai and others; and the Nanyang Yellow Turbans led successively by Zhang Mancheng, Zhao Hong, Han Zhong, and Sun Xia. In many areas the Yellow Turban army repeatedly defeated local government troops, killed provincial inspectors and commandery administrators, occupied commanderies and counties, and directly threatened Luoyang.
In Yingchuan, the Yellow Turbans once surrounded Huangfu Song at Changshe; in Hebei, they successively defeated Lu Zhi and Dong Zhuo, forcing the Eastern Han court to change commanders repeatedly; in Nanyang, they captured Wancheng, had a mass following of more than a hundred thousand, and resisted government troops for a long time. The Yellow Turban army’s ferocious attacks plunged the Eastern Han ruling group into deep panic.
The final defeat of the Yellow Turban army was due both to the landlord class’s control of regular armies and the country’s resources, and to the insurgents’ lack of long-term war experience, the failure of local forces to form stable unified command, and the premature exposure of the plan. Huangfu Song, Zhu Jun, and others took advantage of the Yellow Turbans’ inexperience in battle and used fire attacks, night raids, and divided encirclement to suppress the main forces in Yingchuan, Nanyang, and Hebei one after another. After about nine months of intense fighting, Zhang Jiao died of illness, Zhang Liang and Zhang Bao died in succession, and the insurgents were slaughtered on a massive scale.
But the defeat of the main Yellow Turban forces did not mean the end of peasant struggle. Afterwards the Black Mountain Army, the Qing-Xu Yellow Turbans, the White Wave Army, and peasant armed forces in many other places continued their activities. Zhang Yan’s Black Mountain Army once claimed a million men; the Qing-Xu Yellow Turbans moved back and forth across Beihai, Yanzhou, and other areas with an extremely large following; and the Zhang Xiu and Zhang Lu forces in Hanzhong established local regimes that lasted for decades.
Therefore, the Yellow Turban uprising did not simply disappear after the nine months of fighting in 184 CE ended. Its aftershocks ran through the entire process of the late Han warlord wars. The rise of Cao Cao, Yuan Shao, and others was directly connected to the suppression, absorption, and reorganization of these peasant armed forces.
3. The Yellow Turban uprising temporarily lowered the intensity of the Confucian-Legalist struggle within the landlord class
The main contradiction in feudal society is the contradiction between the peasant class and the landlord class. The Confucian-Legalist struggle within the landlord class, no matter how sharp, is ultimately a secondary contradiction subordinate to this main contradiction.
Before the outbreak of the Yellow Turban uprising, divisions between conservative and reformist factions already existed within the landlord class. The powerful clans wanted to preserve recommendation, pedigree, clan power, and local privilege; a portion of lesser and middling landlords and aristocratic officials without strong pedigree backgrounds wanted to strengthen central authority, clean up official administration, restrict land annexation, and assess merit against name.
Critiques by Wang Fu, Zhongchang Tong, Cui Shi, and others of the politics of powerful clans and the corrupt system of selecting officials had already expressed this demand. In his early career, Cao Cao, when serving as Northern District Captain of Luoyang and as Chancellor of Jinan, also punished powerful clans and removed corrupt officials, displaying a tendency toward enforcing law and suppressing the clans.
However, before the Yellow Turban uprising, the powerful clans had roots and branches everywhere, controlled the court and the localities, and the reform demands of the lesser-landlord factions were very weak. Even though Cao Cao had a background in an eunuch family, after his early attacks on the powerful and eminent, he was quickly marginalized and had to retreat to avoid disaster. This shows that the strength of a small number of reformers within the landlord class alone was fundamentally unable to break the rule of the Confucian great clans.
After the Yellow Turban uprising broke out, the situation temporarily changed in another way. The insurgents attacked not merely one powerful clan or another, but the land system and state power of the entire landlord class. In the face of the peasants’ armed struggle, all factions within the landlord class immediately stopped or eased their struggles and united to suppress the Yellow Turban army.
The Eastern Han court pardoned members of the Partisan Proscription and lifted some restrictions, causing eunuchs, imperial in-laws, scholar-officials, and famous men who had previously attacked one another to jointly turn against the peasants. Figures from powerful Confucian clans such as Lu Zhi, Huangfu Song, and Zhu Jun participated in the suppression; figures later described as Legalist or supporters of Legalist policies, such as Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Jian, also took part in the suppression.
This shows that during the Yellow Turban uprising, what determined the political situation was first and foremost not the Confucian-Legalist contradiction within the landlord class, but the contradiction between the peasant class and the entire landlord class. No matter how much they fought among themselves, once peasants rose to resist landlord rule, the landlord factions united.
Therefore, the Yellow Turban uprising did not directly cause the reformist and conservative factions of the landlord class to immediately enter decisive battle. On the contrary, at the height of the uprising, the Confucian-Legalist struggle was temporarily suppressed. The landlord factions first jointly suppressed the peasants; only after the main Yellow Turban forces had been crushed did they again begin fighting over the land, population, armies, and political power left by the uprising.
4. After the defeat of the main Yellow Turban forces, the Confucian-Legalist struggle immediately rose sharply
The Yellow Turban uprising dealt a heavy blow to the Eastern Han dynasty, yet it did not create a nationwide new regime that could replace the landlord system. After the main peasant army was defeated, the old central government existed in name only, while the provincial governors, inspectors, administrators, and generals who led the suppression held the armies and the territory.
Thus, the contradictions that had been temporarily suppressed within the landlord class by the peasant war quickly exploded.
Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu, Liu Biao, Liu Yan, and Tao Qian built separatist regimes relying on pedigree, clan power, and local powerful clans. On the one hand, they suppressed the remaining peasant armed forces and seized the land, population, and supplies left behind by the Yellow Turban army; on the other hand, they expanded their own clan power through military and political authority, turning provinces and commanderies into independent kingdoms.
Most of these figures came from powerful clans, valued pedigree and reputation, and relied on gentry bureaucrats to govern localities. What they wanted to restore was not a strong unified state, but the continued preservation of the privileges of powerful clans in the regions they controlled. Yuan Shao, with his “four generations of three dukes,” used disciples, former officials, and family reputation to summon scholars; Liu Biao in Jingzhou “widely sought Confucian learning” and relied on local great clans to maintain rule; Yuan Shu even more directly used his lineage and the so-called Mandate of Heaven to proclaim himself emperor.
After the Yellow Turban uprising shattered the Eastern Han central government, the divisive nature of the Confucian great clans was fully exposed. Though they verbally upheld the Han house and ritual law, in reality they carved out territories of their own and slaughtered one another, plunging the north into prolonged warlord warfare.
On the other hand, some military groups without deep pedigree or local clan foundations also developed through the Yellow Turban uprising and the wars of suppression. They had no qualification to command the realm on the basis of hereditary office and could only build regimes through military merit, law, and practical administrative ability. Cao Cao was the principal representative of this force. The Liu Bei group and the Sun clan group, in the course of their own development, also adopted similar methods to varying degrees.
Therefore, after the main Yellow Turban forces were suppressed, the landlord class immediately began intense struggle around two issues:
One route relied on pedigree, clan power, powerful local clans, and local privilege to maintain division and separatism; the other relied on military merit, law, state farms, and centralization to reorganize land, population, and armies and to push toward partial or even national unification.
The rise of the Confucian-Legalist struggle in the late Han and Three Kingdoms period emerged under precisely these conditions.
5. The Yellow Turban uprising shattered the old conditions under which Confucian great clans monopolized politics
For the Legalist route to be implemented, one basic precondition had to exist: the old powerful clans’ control over local politics, land, population, and the official selection system had to be weakened. If the old clan and disciples-former-officials networks remained intact, then even if lesser landlords advocated rule by law and merit-based appointment, they would have no power to turn those views into actual policy.
The Yellow Turban uprising precisely changed these conditions.
The insurgents attacked prefectural and county offices, killed and drove out officials, and assaulted landlord estates and strongholds, causing many local powerful clans to die or disperse. Long-term war also caused massive population flight, clan separation, and land abandonment. The recommendation and recruitment systems that had previously operated on the basis of local reputation, clan genealogies, and fixed household registers were severely damaged.
In the past, whether a person could become an official depended mainly on whether local powerful clans and famous men recognized his family background, filial conduct, and reputation. The Yellow Turban uprising and the ensuing chaos of war caused “the people of talent to move about,” making it difficult to conduct the old local reputation evaluations. In such conditions, the official selection system based on family background and local reputation could no longer function normally. Only then was the ground created for Cao Cao’s later policy of “appointing only the talented.”
The Yellow Turban uprising also left behind large numbers of refugees, soldiers, land, and means of production detached from the old landlord control. Whoever could reorganize these people and resources would have the possibility of building a new regime.
Cao Cao’s rise is the clearest example. He truly obtained independent military power not when he punished a few powerful clans before the Yellow Turban uprising, but after suppressing and incorporating the Qingzhou Yellow Turbans. He obtained large numbers of troops and people from the Qingzhou Yellow Turbans, formed the Qingzhou troops, and then used the abandoned land, draft animals, and farm tools left after the war to implement state farms, turning refugees into state-controlled tenant farmers and supplying grain for the war of unification.
Therefore, Cao Cao’s implementation of state farms, appointment by merit, suppression of powerful clans, and unification of the north was not something created by personal talent alone. The Yellow Turban uprising first broke the old relations through which the Eastern Han powerful clans controlled population and land, and only then was Cao Cao able to re-incorporate the power left by peasant war into the landlord state.
This process had a clear dual class character.
On the one hand, Cao Cao used the new conditions created by the Yellow Turban uprising to attack local separatism, restore production, and promote northern unification, which had historical progressive significance; on the other hand, he suppressed and absorbed the insurgent peasants, seized the land, draft animals, and weapons they had obtained, and turned them back into soldiers and state-farm tenants under state control.
The Yellow Turban peasants fought to escape the oppression of the landlord class, while Cao Cao used the results of peasant war to rebuild the unified landlord state. The two must never be conflated.
6. The Yellow Turban uprising determined the regional differences in the development of the Three Kingdoms’ Legalist route
The degree to which the Yellow Turban uprising damaged powerful-clan forces differed from region to region, directly affecting the conditions under which the Legalist route was pursued in Wei, Shu, and Wu.
The north was the area where the Yellow Turbans, the Black Mountain Army, and the Qing-Xu Yellow Turbans were most active and the struggle most intense, and it also experienced the chaos caused by Dong Zhuo and prolonged warlord warfare. The Eastern Han’s original bureaucratic institutions, household registers, land relations, and powerful-clan rule suffered the most severe destruction. Cao Cao was able in this region to absorb large numbers of refugees and peasant soldiers, establish state farms and a new military-bureaucratic group based on merit. Therefore, the social conditions for Cao Cao’s Legalist route were the most favorable, and the degree of centralization in Cao Wei was also the highest.
Yi Province was struck more weakly by the direct impact of the Yellow Turban uprising. Although peasant uprisings and Five Pecks of Rice Dao forces also appeared in the Bashu region, the local powerful clans, clans, and local scholar groups in Yi Province were preserved relatively intact. After Liu Bei, as an external military group, entered Yi Province, he had to rely on local Yi scholar-officials on the one hand and restrain these local forces on the other; he had to absorb them into the state while not allowing them to hollow out the center through clan, pedigree, and local ties. Thus, although the Shu Han Legalist route was relatively distinct, it was always constrained by the power of the local powerful clans in Yi Province.
The old clans and local powerful-clan organizations in Jiangdong were preserved even more completely. The Sun clan was not one of Jiangdong’s most established great lineages and had to rely on the Gu, Lu, Zhu, and Zhang families and local armed forces to maintain rule. Although Sun Quan made important use of military-merit figures such as Zhou Yu, Lu Su, and Lü Meng, and also implemented state farms and campaigns against the Shanyue, he still had to acknowledge the military command, retained-client, and local privileges of the Jiangdong great clans. Therefore, the Legalist route in Eastern Wu was the least thorough, and the powerful clans developed most rapidly within the state.
So the different degrees to which Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang, and Sun Quan implemented Legalist routes cannot be simply explained by differences in the three men’s talent or character. The more fundamental reason lies in the differing degrees of destruction inflicted on the old local powerful-clan structures by the Yellow Turban uprising and the subsequent class struggles.
The more thoroughly the old order was shattered, the greater the room for a central government to reorganize land, population, and officials; the more intact the old powerful clans remained, the deeper the new regime’s dependence on them became.
7. The Yellow Turban uprising helped shape the political understanding of Legalist figures
The Legalist thought of Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang, and others did not come from pure inheritance from ancient books detached from social struggle. The social reality revealed by the Yellow Turban uprising and the great late Han wars forced reform-minded figures of the landlord class to rethink how to maintain rule.
The Eastern Han powerful clans ruled society by relying on Confucian moral authority, recommendation, public criticism, and local privilege, yet what resulted was not “benevolent governance” but land annexation, bureaucratic corruption, peasant flight, and a nationwide uprising. The great Yellow Turban uprising proved in the most violent way that the old Confucian ruling line could no longer sustain the landlord state.
From the Yellow Turban uprising and the warlord chaos, Cao Cao saw that continuing to rely on pedigree, empty moral talk, and indulgence toward the powerful clans could only produce state fragmentation. His later emphasis on agriculture and war, law, reward and punishment, and practical talent was precisely a response to the collapse of Eastern Han politics.
Although Zhuge Liang did not directly participate in suppressing the Yellow Turban uprising, he grew up in an era of Eastern Han collapse and warlord chaos. He connected the prosperity of the Western Han with law, reward and punishment, and the appointment of the worthy, and linked the late Eastern Han decline with the favoring of petty men, the abandonment of laws, and the monopoly of power by powerful clans. After Liu Bei entered Shu, Zhuge Liang opposed Fa Zheng’s proposal to “lighten punishments and relax prohibitions,” and pointed out that when Liu Zhang ruled Yi Province, he indulged local notables too much, leading to “private power and self-indulgence,” so they must now be “restrained by law.”
These understandings were not created out of thin air by thinkers. They were reflections within the landlord class of the class contradictions laid bare by the Yellow Turban uprising. The Yellow Turban uprising proved the bankruptcy of the Confucian great-clan mode of rule and forced a portion of landlord figures to adopt Legalist methods to rebuild the state.
But it must be emphasized: when Legalist figures absorbed the lessons of the Yellow Turban uprising, it was not to complete the goals of peasant revolution, but to prevent new peasant uprisings from destroying landlord power again. By strengthening law, regulating administration, restricting powerful clans, and restoring production, they were ultimately still aiming to build a more effective and more stable order of landlord rule.
8. The Yellow Turban uprising was the true driving force of Three Kingdoms history
Traditional historical narratives often attribute the changes of the late Han and Three Kingdoms to Cao Cao’s broad strategy, Liu Bei’s benevolence, Sun Quan’s ability to employ people, and Zhuge Liang’s wisdom, as though the wills of a few heroes determined history.
This view reverses the real relationship of historical development.
Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Sun Quan, and others did not create the great social transformation of the late Han. Before they formed independent forces, the Yellow Turban peasants had already shaken the Eastern Han dynasty through nationwide war; before they fought for the realm, peasant armies had already struck powerful-clan strongholds, destroyed the old bureaucratic apparatus, and changed population movement and land relations.
It was precisely the Yellow Turban uprising that caused the Eastern Han dynasty to lose its ability to rule, caused provincial military and political power to fall into the hands of local generals, destroyed the conditions under which the Confucian great clans monopolized official selection and controlled the localities, and made military merit, law, and practical talent possible as new political standards; and it was precisely the vast amounts of population, land, arms, and means of production left behind by the Yellow Turban uprising that became the material basis for the Three Kingdoms regimes to reorganize society.
The historical role of Legalist figures such as Cao Cao lies in the fact that they adapted to the new situation after the Yellow Turban uprising and adopted policies favorable to ending separatism, restoring production, and reuniting the realm. But they were not the original creators of historical change; they were users and appropriators of the gains of peasant revolution.
Nor was the purpose of the Yellow Turban uprising to create conditions for Cao Cao’s state farms, Zhuge Liang’s rule by law, or Sun Quan’s Jiangdong regime. The Yellow Turban peasants resisted the exploitation of the entire landlord class and the rule of the Eastern Han state. It was only under the historical conditions of the time that the peasant class failed to establish a new social system and win victory nationwide, and the new situation created by the uprising was ultimately used by reformist figures of the landlord class.
Therefore, the relationship between the Yellow Turban uprising and the Legalist route of the Three Kingdoms is both connected and opposed:
The Yellow Turban uprising struck at the powerful clans, challenged Confucian ideology, and destroyed the basis of division, thereby opening the road for the Legalist route; Legalist figures, for their part, used these conditions to attack local powerful-clan separatism and promote unification, while also suppressing peasants and seizing the results of the uprising to rebuild the dictatorship of the landlord class.
This is the basic contradiction of the late Han and Three Kingdoms period. The Yellow Turban uprising was the true driving force pushing history forward, while the Legalist route was the response of reformist elements within the landlord class to the new situation produced by peasant war.
All the development of the Confucian-Legalist struggle in the Three Kingdoms period must be understood on this basis. The reasons why Cao Wei was able to pursue the strongest Legalist route, why Shu Han could only laboriously maintain itself amid the contradictions between the external group and the Yi Province powerful clans, and why Eastern Wu was constrained by Jiangdong great clans from the very beginning all ultimately relate closely to the different degrees of impact the Yellow Turban uprising had on the social structures of each region.
The great Yellow Turban uprising failed, but it shattered the Eastern Han dynasty and the rule that the powerful clans had imagined would last forever. All the unification wars, institutional reforms, and Confucian-Legalist struggles of the Three Kingdoms unfolded on this land that had been violently upheaved by peasant war.
Part Two: The Confucian-Legalist Struggle in Cao Wei: From Cao Cao’s Legalist Reforms to the Sima Clan’s Aristocratic Seizure of Power
Among the three regimes of Wei, Shu, and Wu, the Legalist route developed most fully in Cao Wei, and the internal Confucian-Legalist struggle in Cao Wei also most completely went through the entire process of rise, development, compromise, decline, and failure.
Part Three: The Confucian-Legalist Struggle in Shu Han: From Zhuge Liang’s Rule by Law to Qiao Zhou’s Surrender Line
The Confucian-Legalist struggle in Shu Han was clearly different from that in Cao Wei.
Cao Cao, on the basis of the destruction of the old powerful-clan order by the Yellow Turban uprising and the prolonged wars of the north, directly organized refugees, land, and armies and established a relatively strong centralized regime. But when Liu Bei entered Yi Province, the local powerful clans, clans, and bureaucratic system already in place there had remained relatively intact. The Liu Bei group itself was a military-political group entering Yi Province from outside and lacked clan foundations spread throughout the commanderies and counties of Bashu.
Therefore, in order to rule Yi Province, Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang had to rely on the local landlord scholar-officials while also restricting these local forces; they had to absorb them into the state, yet not allow them to hollow out the center through clan, pedigree, and local ties.
This was the basic contradiction of the Confucian-Legalist struggle in Shu Han.
During Zhuge Liang’s administration, Shu Han formed a relatively strong centralization through unified laws, strict reward and punishment, assessment of name against reality, and control of finances and the army. The powerful clans of Yi Province, palace favorites, and military merit officials all came under state law, and the Legalist route occupied the dominant position.
After Zhuge Liang died, Jiang Wan and Fei Yi continued according to the old system and temporarily maintained this political structure. After Fei Yi’s death, Shu Han lost the central leadership capable of integrating administration, finance, and the military. Jiang Wei’s militaristic line of northern campaigns, Qiao Zhou and other Yi Province scholar-officials’ line of preserving the region through peace, and Huang Hao’s palace-favorite line gradually split apart. The front-line army was still fighting, but the bureaucratic landlords in the rear increasingly did not want to bear the burden of war, while the court itself destroyed state law, eventually leading Shu Han to surrender even though its main army had not yet been fully defeated.
The rise and fall of Shu Han shows that the Legalist route could rely on a strong central government to suppress local powerful clans, but could not eliminate the land and clan foundations on which those clans depended. Once central power weakened, the local landlords’ thinking of preserving the region, the private politics of court favorites, and the independent military route of generals all reemerged.
1. Yi Province society before Liu Bei entered Shu
Yi Province had closed terrain, fertile land, a highly developed agricultural zone around the Dujiangyan irrigation system, and was far removed from the center of the late Eastern Han north’s warlord chaos. The long wars in the north caused massive population death and exile. Although Yi Province also had class contradictions and local unrest, the old powerful clans, clans, and bureaucratic system suffered relatively little damage.
When Liu Yan and his son Liu Zhang ruled Yi Province, they did not establish a powerful unified state machine. After Liu Yan entered Yi Province, he used outside migrants and the Eastern Province troops to suppress local opposition; after Liu Zhang inherited, his political ability was weak, and he could neither effectively control the Eastern Province faction nor truly restrain the local powerful clans of Yi Province.
At that time, local people in Yi Province relied on clan ties, land, and local relationships to wield great influence in the various commanderies and counties. Liu Zhang’s regime had to exchange offices and favors for support from the powerful clans. As a result, local officials and great clans “usurped power and acted without restraint,” and the distinction between ruler and subject as well as state law gradually loosened.
Zhuge Liang later gave a clear critique of Liu Zhang’s rule in his reply to Fa Zheng. He pointed out that Liu Zhang had long used favors and titles to co-opt the people of Yi Province, but had not established strict laws or a proper order above and below. The higher the offices he handed out, the less these people took pride in state office; once his favors were exhausted, they treated the center with contempt. The ills of Yi Province politics lay precisely in the fact that local powerful clans treated state office as their private privilege, while not bearing the responsibility of obeying unified edicts.
So before Liu Bei entered Yi Province, it was not a blank region without order, but a region where local great-clan power was relatively strong and central authority relatively weak.
What Liu Bei faced in trying to establish a regime there was not a powerful-clan order that had been completely scattered, but an entire local landlord society that remained relatively intact.
2. The three main political forces in the Shu Han ruling group
After Liu Bei seized Yi Province, the Shu Han ruling group consisted roughly of three kinds of people.
The first group was the Jingzhou faction that had long followed Liu Bei, including Zhuge Liang, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun, Ma Liang, Jiang Wan, and others. This group was the main political and military backbone of Liu Bei’s regime and had strong identification with Liu Bei personally and with the political goal of “reviving the Han house.”
The second group was the Eastern Province faction that entered Yi Province during Liu Zhang’s time, as well as some former subordinates of Liu Zhang, such as Fa Zheng, Li Yan, and Meng Da. They had contradictions with the local great clans of Yi Province, so they were more willing to rely on Liu Bei to establish a new central regime.
The third group was the local landlord scholar-officials of Yi Province, such as Huang Quan, Qin Mi, Du Wei, and Qiao Zhou. They were familiar with local society and possessed culture and local connections, making them indispensable for governing Yi Province, but some among them valued local order and family interests more and did not necessarily fully support the Liu Bei group’s long-term foreign campaigns.
These three groups were not three tightly organized and always unified political parties. There were contradictions within the Jingzhou figures as well; Eastern Province figures did not necessarily all support Zhuge Liang, and Yi Province figures did not all oppose northern campaigns.
But their different social origins determined different political tendencies.
Having lost their original base, the Jingzhou group had to rely on the Shu Han state to maintain political standing, and thus leaned more toward strengthening central power and continuing the war of unification. The Eastern Province group had old contradictions with the local powerful clans of Yi Province and often supported restricting local great clans through state law. The local scholar-officials of Yi Province, on the other hand, had more stable local ties and, once the burdens of war increased or the regime’s future darkened, were more likely to develop tendencies toward preserving the region, preserving local soil, and accepting a new dynasty.
The development of the Confucian-Legalist struggle in Shu Han unfolded amid the alliance and conflict of these forces.
3. The political nature of Liu Bei’s seizure of Yi Province
Liu Bei did not enter Yi Province to liberate the peasants of Yi Province, but to obtain a base for establishing a separatist regime and contending for the realm.
Liu Zhang had originally invited Liu Bei into Shu hoping to use his troops to resist Zhang Lu. After Liu Bei entered Yi Province, he gradually broke with Liu Zhang and seized Chengdu by war. This war was essentially a struggle between two landlord military groups over the ruling power in Yi Province.
However, Liu Bei’s victory over Liu Zhang also showed that Liu Zhang’s original regime had lost vitality. Liu Zhang could neither effectively resist external military pressure nor unify the Eastern Province faction and the local great clans of Yi Province. Local powerful clans pursued their own interests, central law and order weakened, and many officials and generals quickly changed sides when Liu Bei attacked.
Although Liu Bei’s group was an external force, it had stronger military organization, clearer political goals, and more concentrated leadership. The fact that Fa Zheng, Zhang Song, and other former Liu Zhang subordinates switched to supporting Liu Bei reflected the severe fragmentation already present within Liu Zhang’s regime.
After Liu Bei seized Yi Province, he did not distribute land to poor peasants, but instead redistributed offices, land, and political power. He united the Jingzhou group, the Eastern Province figures, and the Yi Province scholar-officials willing to cooperate, and established a new landlord-class state.
Therefore, Liu Bei’s regime had a dual character: it replaced Liu Zhang’s weak and decayed regime and established a more unified administrative and military system; but it remained a feudal regime ruling laboring people through landlords, bureaucrats, and armies.
4. The drafting of the Shu Code and “founding the state by law”
After Liu Bei occupied Chengdu, one important measure was organizing Zhuge Liang, Fa Zheng, Liu Ba, Li Yan, Yi Ji, and others to draft the Shu Code.
Those who participated in drafting the Shu Code included figures from the Jingzhou faction, the Eastern Province faction, and former Liu Zhang subordinates. This reflected the fact that Liu Bei did not rule Yi Province solely through one regional faction, but tried to draw people from all sides into a unified state system.
The specific articles of the Shu Code have not been fully preserved, but its political significance is quite clear: the new regime was to use unified written laws to reorganize Yi Province and could no longer rely on Liu Zhang’s private favors, local customs, and powerful-clan relations to maintain rule.
Fa Zheng once advised Zhuge Liang to relax criminal law. His reason was that Liu Bei had just acquired Yi Province and should, like Emperor Gaozu of Han entering Guanzhong, reduce restraints and win people over with lenient policies.
Zhuge Liang, however, pointed out that the problem with Liu Zhang’s rule over Yi Province was not that punishments were too harsh, but that authority and orders did not function and powerful clans monopolized power. Liu Zhang continuously gave officials and local people favors and status, but did not make them obey the state system. Now “might must be used through law, and rank must be limited by law,” so that laws are enforced and official titles have clear hierarchy; only then can proper order be rebuilt.
This debate concentrated the distinction between two ruling routes.
One route continued to use private favors and titles to win over local powerful clans, acknowledging their existing privileges; the other required unified laws above clan and personal relationships, so that officials, generals, and powerful clans all had to obey the center.
Zhuge Liang’s view had a distinctly Legalist character. He was not opposed to all favors and moral instruction, but believed that favors had to be built on law and state authority. Without compulsory unified institutions, so-called leniency would simply become indulgence toward the powerful clans.
5. The Legalist tendency in Liu Bei’s political line
In his political propaganda, Liu Bei long emphasized that he was a member of the Han imperial clan and used the orthodox name of “reviving the Han house.” This propaganda clearly borrowed from Confucian patrilineal legitimacy and loyalty to the ruler.
But in actual governance, Liu Bei was not a ruler who relied purely on Confucian benevolence and moral preaching. He could support Zhuge Liang in drafting strict laws and also valued military merit, practical ability, and the concentration of power.
Liu Bei’s deathbed instructions to Liu Shan to study the Book of Han and the Book of Rites, while also telling him to read works such as the Six Secret Teachings and the Book of Lord Shang, show that Liu Bei did not advocate pure Confucianism, but combined Confucian legitimacy and political education with Legalist statecraft and military strategy.
His entrusting of the state to Zhuge Liang also showed his emphasis on centralized authority. He did not arrange for multiple ministers to check each other around Liu Shan, but clearly instructed Liu Shan to treat Zhuge Liang like a father and to have state affairs handled by Zhuge Liang.
Liu Bei told Zhuge Liang that if Liu Shan could assist, then assist him; if not, Zhuge Liang could handle matters himself. Regardless of how much testing and political posturing was involved in this statement, it shows that Liu Bei recognized that the survival of the state was more important than Liu Shan’s personal ability, and was willing to hand actual power to the person most capable of preserving the regime.
The limitations of Liu Bei’s route were also obvious. His campaign at Yiling was driven both by strategic considerations of recovering Jingzhou and maintaining the alliance’s credibility, and by the desire to avenge Guan Yu and protect his own political prestige. The defeat at Yiling cost Shu Han large numbers of soldiers, generals, and supplies, further damaging the Jing-Yi two-pronged offensive basis envisioned in the “Longzhong Plan.”
Liu Bei supported Legalist centralization, but he remained influenced by ruler-subject loyalty, imperial lineage legitimacy, and personal political relationships, and could not completely escape the limitations of a feudal ruler.
6. Zhuge Liang’s administration and the peak of Shu Han’s Legalist route
After Liu Bei’s death, Liu Shan ascended the throne. The military and political power of Shu Han was mainly in Zhuge Liang’s hands. Historical records state that at that time “in matters great and small, all were decided by Liang.”
This shows that Shu Han had formed a highly centralized prime-minister system. Liu Shan retained the nominal title of emperor, while Zhuge Liang actually handled administration, military affairs, finance, personnel, and foreign relations.
The core of Zhuge Liang’s administration was not ordinary diligence in the personal sense, but the attempt to make the whole state operate according to unified law and clear responsibilities.
One of the most important political propositions in the Chu Shi Biao was that “within the palace and within the ministries, all should be one body; promotions, punishments, praise, and blame should not differ.” The palace refers to the emperor and his close attendants; the ministries refer to the prime minister’s office and the state administrative organs.
Zhuge Liang required the court and government to obey the same system of reward and punishment, so that no one would be exempt from review just because they were close to the emperor, and no one would receive special protection just because they belonged to the prime minister’s office.
This directly opposed the tendency in feudal states for private court relationships to override state institutions.
Zhuge Liang also required that both lawbreakers and meritorious officials be handled by the responsible officers according to law, and that there should be no partiality or different laws inside and outside the court. This stood in sharp contrast to Huang Hao later using the emperor’s favor to interfere in politics.
The fundamental feature of Zhuge Liang’s rule by law was to use the state’s public authority to restrain the private interests of the court, bureaucracy, generals, and local powerful clans.
7. Strict rewards and punishments and the restriction of meritorious privileges
A major manifestation of Shu Han’s Legalist route during Zhuge Liang’s rule was that high officials and generals could not publicly escape responsibility by relying on merit, status, or private relationships.
Ma Su had long been valued by Zhuge Liang and had a close relationship with him. In the first northern campaign, Zhuge Liang assigned Ma Su to defend Jieting. Ma Su disobeyed orders, abandoned the water source, camped on the mountain, and was ultimately defeated by Zhang He, causing the failure of the entire campaign plan.
Zhuge Liang did not protect Ma Su because of their personal relationship, but instead pursued responsibility according to law, while also submitting a memorial to reduce his own rank by three levels. Here it should be noted that historical records differ on the exact circumstances of Ma Su’s death, but Zhuge Liang’s strict accountability for the defeat at Jieting is clear.
This handling shows two principles: generals must be responsible for actual battlefield outcomes, and the supreme commander must also bear political responsibility for errors in personnel selection.
The case of Li Yan is even more obvious.
Li Yan was one of Liu Bei’s entrusted ministers, second only to Zhuge Liang in status. During the northern campaigns, Li Yan was responsible for grain transport. When transport failed, he did not honestly report the difficulties; instead, he demanded that Zhuge Liang retreat, then tried to deny his own orders and shift the blame to the front.
Zhuge Liang joined with several officials to submit a memorial and demoted Li Yan to commoner status. No matter how high Li Yan’s rank was, he could not use his status as a trusted minister to conceal dereliction of duty and deception.
However, Zhuge Liang did not thereby implicate Li Yan’s entire family. Li Yan’s son Li Feng was still employed later. When Li Yan heard of Zhuge Liang’s death, he died of grief and anger, because he believed that only Zhuge Liang could reassign him according to actual circumstances.
This shows that Zhuge Liang’s rectification primarily targeted office responsibility, rather than being a mere factional purge.
Of course, Shu Han was still a rigidly hierarchical feudal state and could not truly achieve equality before the law. But compared with the powerful clans of the time relying on pedigree and connections to evade state responsibility, Zhuge Liang’s direction of “punishment does not spare the noble” was clearly progressive.
8. Assessment of names and realities and Shu Han’s personnel route
Zhuge Liang’s personnel selection did not rely entirely on family background and local pedigree, but paid relatively more attention to administrative ability, actual performance, and loyalty to the state.
Jiang Wan had once been criticized by Liu Bei for being drunk and ineffective when serving as county magistrate. Zhuge Liang, however, believed Jiang Wan was a “talent for the state” and should not be disposed of lightly over one episode of poor performance. Later Jiang Wan indeed became the important figure responsible for state affairs after Zhuge Liang.
The status of Fei Yi, Dong Yun, Guo Youzhi, Xiang Chong, and others likewise came mainly from administrative, diplomatic, and military ability rather than from illustrious lineage.
Zhuge Liang did not exclude all Yi Province scholar-officials. Qin Mi, Du Wei, and Qiao Zhou all received summons and appointments. Any Yi Province figure willing to accept central law could enter the regime.
So Zhuge Liang’s route cannot simply be described as “the Jingzhou faction oppressing the Yi Province faction.” The real dividing line was not wholly geographical origin, but whether one obeyed the unified state and fulfilled official responsibilities.
But the fact that Jingzhou and Eastern Province figures long occupied important positions in the Shu Han center also shows that Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang still distrusted the Yi Province powerful clans. External groups lacked local clan foundations and therefore depended more heavily on the central state; local great clans, by contrast, had social relations independent of the center and more easily developed a tendency toward regional self-preservation.
Zhuge Liang, on the one hand, absorbed Yi Province scholar-officials, and on the other hand did not allow local forces to control the center. This balance was basically maintained during his lifetime.
9. The organization of state finances, production, and military supplies
Shu Han had a small territory and far fewer people, land, and goods than Cao Wei, yet it had to maintain a central bureaucracy, more than a hundred thousand troops, and prolonged warfare. This required the state to organize production and finance in a relatively strict manner.
Shu Han placed importance on the Dujiangyan irrigation system and other hydraulic works, and established specialized officials to maintain irrigation projects. The agriculture of the Chengdu Plain was the basis of Shu Han’s finances and military grain.
Shu Han also set up salt offices and salt superintendent positions to control salt production; Shu brocade was an important state handicraft product and a commodity for external exchange. Zhuge Liang once said that much of the state’s military spending depended on Shu brocade, reflecting Shu Han’s direct organization and use of handicraft production.
In the area of military equipment, Zhuge Liang attached importance to weapons, transport tools, and technological improvement. Although the exact structure of the wooden ox and flowing horse is still debated, Shu Han did indeed make long-term efforts to improve transport conditions in mountainous terrain.
These measures show an important feature of the Legalist state: the state not only levies existing wealth, but directly intervenes in production, salt and iron, weaving, and military supply, concentrating limited resources on the regime and the war.
From the standpoint of restoring production and maintaining a unified state, these policies had a certain positive effect; but laboring people also bore heavy taxes, corvée, and military service as a result. Although Shu Han’s registered population was under one million in its later years, it maintained a very large army and bureaucracy, showing that the burden on ordinary peasants was extremely heavy.
10. The political and class nature of the southern campaigns
After Liu Bei’s death, unrest broke out in the Nanzhong region. Local forces led by Yong Kai, Gao Ding, and Zhu Bao opposed the Shu Han central government. After stabilizing relations with Eastern Wu, Zhuge Liang personally led a southern campaign and pacified Nanzhong.
Traditional accounts often turn this war into a tale of Zhuge Liang’s “seven captures and seven releases of Meng Huo,” praising him for ruling through virtue. The specific story of seven captures and seven releases mainly appears in later sources and not every detail is necessarily reliable.
In political essence, the southern campaign was a war by the Shu Han central state to suppress resistance from local elites and extend control over the southwest.
Zhuge Liang did not station large numbers of Shu Han officials and troops broadly across Nanzhong; instead, he continued to use local chieftains to manage the area. This reduced garrison and administrative costs and made Nanzhong supply Shu Han with manpower, goods, and fiscal revenue.
On the one hand, it weakened open separatist forces and strengthened political and economic ties among the regions; on the other hand, it preserved the local upper strata’s domination over the laboring people and incorporated Nanzhong resources into the Shu Han war system.
The historical record’s phrase that the “military resources came from there, and the state became wealthy and abundant” precisely shows that pacifying Nanzhong provided the material basis for Shu Han’s northern campaigns.
Therefore, the policy in Nanzhong had the same character as Zhuge Liang’s policy in Yi Province: not to eliminate local landlords, but to subdue, absorb, and use the local upper strata so that they would obey the unified state.
11. The northern campaigns were part of Shu Han’s political line
Zhuge Liang’s northern campaigns cannot be understood simply as personal loyalty to the Han house, nor can they be reduced to mere grandiosity.
The political legitimacy of Shu Han was originally built upon the goal of “reviving the Han house and returning to the old capital.” Liu Bei’s group was not a dynasty naturally arising in Yi Province, but an external group that had come to Yi Province after moving through the north and Jingzhou.
If Shu Han completely abandoned the northern campaigns and merely sought to remain a separatist regime in Yi Province for a long time, the Han-house orthodoxy it promoted would gradually lose real content. The Jingzhou group and military-merit generals would also lose their common political goal, while the Yi Province local powerful clans’ tendency toward regional self-preservation would continuously strengthen.
Therefore, the northern campaigns had several political functions.
First, they maintained Shu Han’s unified goal and prevented it from degenerating entirely into a local separatist regime.
Second, they preserved the political status of the army and military-merit officials, allowing the central government to use wartime mobilization to suppress local powerful clans.
Third, they tied down Cao Wei and prevented it from concentrating all its forces on attacking Shu Han after stabilizing the north.
Fourth, they were also an active attempt by Shu Han to gain political response in Guanzhong, Liangzhou, and elsewhere and alter the balance of forces.
From the standpoint of the Confucian-Legalist struggle, Zhuge Liang’s northern campaigns represented a route of active advance, strengthening state mobilization and striving for unification; opposite to this was the route of Yi Province landlords demanding that state mobilization be reduced, local interests be preserved, and separatist rule be accepted.
But political necessity does not mean the campaigns were destined to succeed, nor does it mean any scale of northern campaign matched Shu Han’s actual strength.
12. The strategic foundation of the Longzhong Plan had already been destroyed
In the original Longzhong Plan, Zhuge Liang proposed a strategy not of attacking Cao Wei head-on with Yi Province alone, but of occupying both Jingzhou and Yi Province simultaneously, allying with Sun Quan, waiting for changes in the north, and then dispatching troops from two directions.
One route would attack from Jingzhou toward Wan and Luo, and another would move from Yi Province into Qin territory. If the two routes cooperated, they could disperse Cao Wei’s forces and directly threaten the Central Plains.
However, after Guan Yu lost Jingzhou, the key condition for that strategy no longer existed. Liu Bei’s defeat at Yiling also cost him large numbers of troops and generals.
When Zhuge Liang later carried out the northern campaigns, he could in fact only rely on Yi Province, crossing the Qinling Mountains from Hanzhong to attack Guanzhong. The original two-pronged offensive of the Longzhong Plan had regressed into a single difficult mountain route.
The loss of Jingzhou meant not only the loss of land, population, and tax revenue, but also the loss of a more convenient path directly into the Central Plains. Cao Wei could concentrate its main defensive forces in Guanzhong and north of the Qinling, and every Shu offensive had to break through perilous roads and solid defenses.
So Zhuge Liang’s northern campaigns were carried out from the very beginning under conditions where the original strategic basis had been severely damaged.
13. The vast disparity in material strength between Shu and Wei
The fundamental reason Zhuge Liang’s northern campaigns could not achieve strategic success was the huge gap between Shu Han and Cao Wei in land, population, military strength, horses, and finance.
Cao Wei occupied the vast regions of the Yellow River basin, Guanzhong, Hebei, and north of the Huai River, with far more population and farmland than Shu Han. Even if one Wei army lost a local battle, Cao Wei could still mobilize troops and grain from other regions.
Shu Han had only one province, and also had to defend the directions of Eastern Wu, Nanzhong, and Hanzhong. Each northern campaign required concentrating a substantial portion of the state’s total troops. As long as the war dragged on, the relative losses borne by Shu Han were far greater than those borne by Cao Wei.
The attacking side had to create sufficient local superiority and also capture cities, maintain supply lines, and occupy areas. The defending side only had to rely on Guanzhong Plain, mountain passes, and strong fortresses to stall time, and once the Shu army ran out of grain and withdrew, strategic objectives were achieved.
So, for Zhuge Liang to alter the balance of forces, he had to achieve a series of major victories capable of shaking Cao Wei’s rule in Guanzhong. As long as Cao Wei did not suffer a decisive collapse, it could continue to wear Shu down by relying on its national strength.
Chen Shou’s statement that the “numbers were not comparable and attack and defense were of different forms,” while not summing up all the causes, does grasp the most basic material conditions.
