274 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

During this overture a common tendency towards spontaneous dis-
ruption through the play of centrifugal domestic forces was at work in
all the larger states of the Sinic World of the day. The anarchic effect of
the institution of feudalism, which had previously made itself felt at the
expense of a once oecumenical Chou Power, and which had brought
about the breakdown of the Sinic Civilization and the onset of a Sinic
Time of Troubles before the close of the seventh century B.C., after the
Chou had become manifestly impotent to control their parochial vassals,
was now making itself felt within the body politic of each of these
parochial states that had been the beneficiaries of this centrifugal
tendency in the preceding chapter of the story. The principal sufferers
in the fifth century B.C. were the states that had exhausted themselves in
the seventh and sixth centuries by taking leading parts in the com-
petition for hegemony during that earlier paroxysm. Now, however,
that it was the turn of the parochial states to undergo an ordeal which
had already worsted the imperial Ch6u, the local responses to this
identical challenge were far from being uniform. The two parochial
states which had played the most ambitious—and consequently the
most exhausting—parts in the first paroxysm of the Sinic Time of
Troubles (saeviebat 634-528 B.C.) were Tsin and Ch'u; and, after the
failure first of Ch'u's final attempt to impose her hegemony by force of
arms in the war of 538-528 B.C.1 and then of Tsin's subsequent motion
to deal a coup de grdce to Ch*u in 506 B.C.,2 the authority of the central
government was at a low ebb in both states. The sequels, however, were
dramatically different in the two cases.

Ch'u's predicament was, to all appearances, by far the more serious
of the two, for, whereas Tsin at this time was threatened only by
domestic disruptive forces, Ch'u was the target of foreign attacks as
well. In the very year, 506 B.a, in which Tsin found herself too feeble to
strike, Ch'u was attacked and overrun by Wu—a ci-devant barbarian
state in the Lower Yangtse Basin which had followed Ch'u's example in
adopting the Sinic culture and turning to account the consequent
potential enhancement of her military strength by intervening in the
arena of Sinic power-politics. In this crisis in Ch'u's fortunes, Ch'u was
saved by the recklessness of her parvenue adversary Wu and by the rise,
in this adversary's rear, of another ambitious ci-devant barbarian state,
the principality of Yiie in the country that was eventually to become the
Chinese province of Chekiang. In 506 B.C. Ytie saved Ch'u from annihila-
tion by attacking Wu from behind; and, though Wu subsequently took
her revenge on Yue by imposing her suzerainty upon her in 494 B.C.,3
Wu was mined by these successive triumphs over Ch'u and Yiie. They

the state of Tsin, marks the true beginning of the first war-and-peace cycle of the Chan
Kuo period of Sinic history. Since this great civil war was the beginning of the break-up
of Tsin, and since the break-up of Tsin was the historic event which set this new series
of \rar-and-peace cycles in motion, 497 B.C. is manifestly a more significant date to take

date for the death of Confucius (see V. vi. 294, with n. 3).

1 See Masp6ro, op. cit., pp. 348-51, and the present Study, V. vi. 393.

* See Maspero, op. cit., pp. 352-3. 3 See ibid., p. 355.