Han Fei
Chinese philosopher of the Warring States period (c. 280–233 BCE), born a prince of the state of Han, a disciple of the Confucian Xunzi but the principal theorist and systematiser of Legalism (fajia), the school of thought that provided the ideological foundation for China's imperial unification under the Qin dynasty. Afflicted by a severe speech impediment that prevented him from shining orally at court, he poured all his intellectual capacity into writing: his essays, collected in the Han Feizi, synthesise three earlier Legalist currents —fa (written law, clear and applied equally to all, without exceptions for rank or kinship), shu (the secret techniques of control and administration a ruler must master to manage and monitor his ministers without their knowing his true intentions), and shi (positional power, authority deriving from office and structural position rather than from the personal virtues of its holder)— into a coherent political system that flatly rejects the Confucian ideal of government through virtue, ritual and moral example, which Han Fei regarded as a dangerous illusion. For Han Fei, men always act out of calculated self-interest, never spontaneous benevolence, and good government therefore requires clear, public laws, predictable and severe rewards and punishments applied without exception, and a sovereign who systematically conceals his preferences and emotions to prevent ambitious ministers from manipulating or deceiving him. Ironically, he died poisoned in a Qin state prison, a victim of intrigues by his former fellow student Li Si, who feared his brilliance would eclipse his own influence at court. His ideas, though officially discredited and denounced as tyrannical by later Confucian emperors, continued in fact to operate as the deep structure of the Chinese state's administrative and legal apparatus for centuries, in what has been described as a covert synthesis of 'Confucianism on the outside, Legalism within'.