Chinese warrior class?

Is it possible for a warrior class similar to samurai or knights to have developed in China? What would need to change to make it plausible?
 
Is it possible for a warrior class similar to samurai or knights to have developed in China? What would need to change to make it plausible?

Maybe extend the Spring & Autumn Period, political disunification would probably help in that. I'm not the least bit knowledgeable in China, but it seems like the right move.
 
They had one during the Zhou Dynasty until Qin unified the land.IIRC,Confucius was from such a class.

Rather strange that Confucius would come from such a class and teach such disdain for soldiers to his disciples. The Confucians did not regard warriors and soldiers very highly. I think they were closer to the bottom of his idealised social hierarchy along with merchants. The pen was favoured over the sword more often than was sensible.

Wang Mang fought rebellion in his brief dynasty by ordering edicts to rename his palace and ministers every other day hoping to restore the peace and unity of the empire rather than stop the raids along his borders from nomads or deal with the increasingly unstable countryside.
As the rebels burst through the gates of his Palace he had spent nearly a week surrounded by astronomers giving him hourly updates on his future while he turned in tandem with the north star hoping to get back the Mandate of Heavan.

Confucianism is very disparaging of soldiers and military. You will need to uproot it early like the Qin Dynasty planned to (Qin Shi Huang buried 10000 Confucian scholars alive and burned their books trying to do away with their teachings).

Perhaps a less brutally insane variety of Shang Yangs Legalism would get you a more militarised China. Look into the Book of Lord Shang for how to run your very own dystopia.
 
As far as I know, he was from a somewhat educated local gentry class, a kind of clerk, not from a warrior background.

Local gentry of the time were expected to be good at the martial arts (archery, charioteering), a consequence of the Spring and Autumn period's emphasis on ritual battle, which itself is derived from the idea that only a select few from a state (the guoren) have the duty for battle.

China does have a long history of a 'warrior class' loosely defined. For the Xia and the Shang, members of the 'core tribe' were the warrior class (the zu, which now means 'clan'). This evolved into the guoren during the Spring and Autumn Period, which was eventually replaced by conscription during the Warring States.

The Western Han's conscription system allowed families to provide 'substitutes' as a replacement for service; as such, there developed a system where mercenaries would do duty on the garrisons as permanent substitutes. Over time this became a family business and so a 'warrior class' of sorts eventually developed, permanently stationed on the borders. The Eastern Han turned these mercenaries into full-time professionals.

The collapse of the Eastern Han meant that local retainers waxed powerful and began to provide safety and work for people under them. Since security concerns were paramount during the period, some peasants were exempted from paying dues and in return, they became 'military households' whose members were obliged to provide hereditary military service. This idea of the 'military household' was also practiced by the central government with regards to its own state peasants as well as surrendered 'barbarian peoples', and their existence is a defining feature of the Jin and Southern Dynasties. The 'barbarian' northern dynasties reverted to a 'core-tribe' army until the Western Wei, which reintroduced conscription under the fubing system.

The collapse of Tang authority at the An Shi Rebellion once again created a 'warrior class' of sorts. Local military commanders once again managed to create armies that owed loyalty to them rather than to the central government, and to secure continuing loyalty they also made the 'privilege' of soldiering pretty much hereditary with numerous perks and rewards for their trouble. Interestingly enough, the Tang also saw the development of a sort of 'class consciousness' amongst the ordinary soldiery, who knew that local commanders relied on them - mutinies were therefore very common and were trigged by perceived threats to the interests of the soldiery, for example, cuts in perks or pay.

So it would seem that a warrior class would develop rather quickly whenever China was in an extended period of fragmentation. This is understandable since in periods where the military threat was constant and often led to extended wars, it's much more preferable to retain professional militaries that specialize in combat than unreliable conscripts. And what better (pre-industrial) way to create professional militaries than to create a 'warrior class' whose sole purpose was fighting?
 
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I did not know about Confucianism's disdain for soldiers and the military. Could someone go more in depth about it for me? Why did they feel that way and how did these beliefs effect warfare? Were soldiers not respected then? Seems like it would be a terrible drag on moral.
 
I did not know about Confucianism's disdain for soldiers and the military. Could someone go more in depth about it for me? Why did they feel that way and how did these beliefs effect warfare? Were soldiers not respected then? Seems like it would be a terrible drag on moral.

There are two ideas in Confucianism that could lead to an anti-military bent. First, there is the idea of a 'natural political order' in the world, with the King/Emperor on top and the peasants on the bottom. The people at the bottom owed allegiance and obedience to their betters, while the people at the top owed to the bottom a responsibility for their welfare.

When this order was broken, it was known as disorder or chaos: this is characterized by 'kings not being kings', and 'officials not being officials'. How can this happen? Through military force, of course. So in a sense, soldiers are the enablers of chaos. Similarly, a non-virtuous ruler can hold onto power through military force, which similarly breaks order.

The second idea concerns that of the 'virtuous ruler'. Confucius states that those who 'first cleansed their hearts could then organize their families' and so on up to 'those who first managed their states could then unite all under Heaven'. So Confucius sees virtue as naturally and inevitably bringing to the individual ever-increasing states of responsibility, ideally with the most virtuous being King/Emperor.

But what is the process by which virtuous people get to become Emperor? Confucius here refers back to the example of Lord (later King) Wen of Zhou, who ruled with virtue by observing ritual, creating order and generally being benevolent. Despite the fact that King Wen was still nominally subservient to King Di Xin of Shang, Shang officials and citizens flocked to Lord Wen's domain and eventually formed the basis of Zhou's strength, which the dynasty then used to defeat Shang under King Wu.

This is almost certainly 100% Zhou propaganda (plenty of Shang armies were left to resist Zhou even after conquest), but Confucius used this example to argue that people naturally 'gravitate' towards virtuous rule, and so with enough virtue one would eventually claim all under heaven (the same reasoning of Romance of the Three Kingdom's Liu Bei). As such, military conquest is a 'lower' form of dominance compared with hua or 'moral rectification'. Idealist Confucians were pacifists in that they argued that 'moral rectification' was the way to achieve the submission of peoples, and so soldiering in such an environment was positively detracting from the work of hua.

It's easy to overestimate how Confucianism affected the Chinese military, though. Truly idealistic Confucians were really only found in the bureaucracy, and even there people were more using the language of idealistic Confucians as a means of winning policy debates rather than actually believing in the whole theory itself (there's a saying that Chinese governance was 'Confucian with a Legalist [e.g. Machiavellian] core). For example, arguments during the Western Han against the militaristic policy of Emperor Wu utilized the concept of hua extensively as a means of restraining the Emperor, but in reality focused more on the practical troubles of fighting the Huns, e.g. logistics and cavalry issues. A lot of the anti-military ideas floating around in the Imperial Courts were more concerned about the potential of border garrisons to revolt than any abstract Confucian ideal.
 
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PhilippeO

Banned
What would need to change to make it plausible ?

- failure of development of crossbows (crossbows make conscript more effective)
- more hilly terrain (reduce effectiveness of large infantry armies and nomadic horsemen)
- less political unification (fragmentation encourage growth of local military elites)
- less incursion from nomadic armies (nomad armies make the need of border garrison who need pay from unified state, nomad armies also make it easier to hire mercenaries rather than rely on local military elite)

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i think Knight, Samurai or Iranian Azatan "warrior class" who are elite who own land and administer peasant,

have massive difference from border professional "warrior class" like fubing, roman legion, or other professional military at border who loyal to their general

and also different from nomadic "warrior class" like eight banner, wu hu, xianbei, etc who have tribal loyalty.
 
If what I have read is to be trusted,the Eight Banners system decayed rapidly after the conquest of China,the wars of Kanxi were apparently fought mostly using the Green Banner armies because the effectiveness of Bannermen troops apparently decayed due to luxury ad privilege.
 
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