Fengjian

Through the fengjian system, the king would allocate an area of land to a noble, establishing him as the ruler of that region and allowing his title and fief to be legitimately inherited by his descendants.

[3][4]: 7–8 The earliest description of fengjian was in the Classic of Poetry (詩經, Shijing), which portrayed an image of prosperity, peace and order:[2] At Heaven’s bidding they looked down; The peoples below were awed, There were no disorders, no excesses; They dared not be idle or pause.

Firmly were their blessings planted and established (封建厥福fengjian juefu).The rulers of these vassal states, known as zhūhóu (諸侯; 'many lords'), had a political obligation to pay homage to the king, but as the central authority started to decline during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, their power began to outstrip that of the royal house and subsequently the states developed into their own kingdoms, reducing the Zhou dynasty to little more than a prestigious name.

In due course this resulted in the increasing power of the noble lords, whose strength eventually exceeded that of the Zhou kings, leading to dwindling central authority.

From the Qin dynasty onward, Chinese literati would find a tension between the Confucian ideal of fengjian and the reality of the centralized imperial system.

The Han dynasty emperors ultimately chose to parcel out land to their relatives and several other powerful officials, thus combining the junxian and fengjian systems.

[citation needed] The four occupations were the shì (士) the class of "knightly" scholars, mostly from lower aristocratic orders, the gōng (工) who were the artisans and craftsmen of the kingdom and who, like the farmers, produced essential goods needed by themselves and the rest of society, the nóng (農) who were the peasant farmers who cultivated the land which provided the essential food for the people and tributes to the king, and the shāng (商) who were the merchants and traders of the kingdom.

As time went by, all of these terms lost their original meanings, yet Zhūhóu (諸侯), Dafu (大夫), and Shi (士) became synonyms for court officials.

The well-field system (Chinese: 井田制度; pinyin: jǐngtián zhìdù) was a land distribution method existing in some parts of China between the ninth century BC (late Western Zhou dynasty) to around the end of the Warring States period.

[citation needed] As part of the "turning the clock back" reformations by Wang Mang during the short-lived Xin dynasty, the system was restored temporarily[17] and renamed to the King's Fields (王田; wángtián).

The practice was more-or-less ended by the Song dynasty, but scholars like Zhang Zai and Su Xun were enthusiastic about its restoration and spoke of it in a perhaps oversimplifying admiration, invoking Mencius's frequent praise of the system.

[25] Medieval European feudalism realized the classic case of the 'noble lord' while, in the middle and latter phases of the Chinese fengjian society, the landlord system was instead to be found.

[citation needed] Moreover, in Europe, feudalism was also considered to be a hierarchical economic system in which the lords were at the top of the structure, followed by the vassals, and then the peasants who were legally bound to the land and were responsible for all production.

In China, these conditions were non-existent and the king and his officials depended greatly on the regional lords for all governance, within towns and without, except in the royal demesne.

Therefore, according to some historians, the term "feudalism" is not an exact fit for the Western Zhou political structure[2] but it can be considered a system somewhat analogous to the one that existed in medieval Europe.