The fa Tradition and Its Modern Fate: The Case of the Book of Lord Shang

This chapter analyzes the conflicting views of the fa tradition in post-1900 China and elsewhere. Its focus is on the attitudes toward Shang Yang 商鞅 (d. 338 BCE) and the Book of Lord Shang (Shangjunshu 商君書), which attracted considerable scholarly and political interest since the beginning of the twentieth century. As the chapter demonstrates, the rediscovery of Shang Yang remained somewhat abortive, primarily due to the habitual study of his legacy on the basis of the thinker’s biography in Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 Records of the Historian (Shiji 史記) without in-depth reading of the Book of Lord Shang. Due to political constraints or mere scholarly inertia, some of the best early analyses of the Book of Lord Shang (e.g., by Mai Menghua 麥孟華 and Chen Qitian 陳啓天) remained largely ignored. Later, the grotesque lionization of Shang Yang during the anti-Confucian campaign of 1973-1975 inadvertently created an alienating effect, causing a decades-long lull in the studies of the Book of Lord Shang. Only since the second decade of the twenty-first century can one witness a renewed engagement with this foundational text of the fa tradition both in China and in the West.