Professor Andrew Meyer

The range of action got bigger and bigger as these states expanded, not just inwardly, but outwardly too.

Yeah, the Zhou, they had had a kind of decentralized system from the very beginning.

They maintained very powerful royal armies, but they had delegated regional authority to about 100 different kinsmen and allies.

They had created about 100 different regional states to help them oversee the king's peace.

And they were mainly focused on the North China Plain, although they extended

into the region of the Yangtze River Valley too.

But by Confucius' lifetime, most of those hundred states had been destroyed.

The warrior society that the Zhou presided over were sort of inveterately belligerent.

They were warriors who lived to fight, and they fought one another as much as they fought anyone else.

And over the first centuries of Zhou rule, the different states that they had established sort of devoured one another.

And so the states tended to get bigger and bigger.

Their material power got greater and greater.

When the material power of the king was suddenly deflated, then the belligerence between these states got even worse.

And all of those trends of territorial consolidation, the competition between the states got more and more zero-sum.

That was contributing to this sense of crisis during Confucius's lifetime.

The idea that things keep getting worse and worse, conflict keeps getting more and more destructive.

How can we turn back this tide?

You know, by the time Confucius is alive, by the time the book opens, in a sense, it's hard for us to know because there were regional states that escaped the

being recorded in the chronicles.

So it's hard to know exactly how many states were still left in Confucius's lifetime, probably somewhere between 20 and 30 states.