Despite its outcast status throughout the history of imperial China, Han Fei's political theory and the Legalist school continued to heavily influence every dynasty thereafter, and the Confucian ideal of rule without laws was never to be realized.
[4] Han Fei borrowed Shang Yang's emphasis on laws, Shen Buhai's emphasis on administrative technique, and Shen Dao's ideas on authority and prophecy, emphasizing that the autocrat will be able to achieve firm control over the state with the mastering of his predecessors' methodologies: his position of 'power' (勢 shì), 'technique' (術 shù), and 'law' (fa).
He stressed the importance of the concept of holding actual outcome accountable to speech (刑名 xingming), coupled with the "two handles" system of punishment and reward, as well as wu wei ('non-exertion').
[1] The Records of the Grand Historian say that Han Fei studied together with future Qin chancellor Li Si under the Confucian philosopher Xun Kuang.
He regarded the intellectuals as a disturbance to the law by employing their literature and thought that knights violate the prohibition of the state by using armed forces.
Severely distressed over the reality that men of high integrity and uprightness were not embraced by the subjects with immorality and corruption, he observed the changes in the gaining and losing of the past.
[9]His works ultimately ended up in the hands of King Ying Zheng of Qin, who commented, "If I can make friends with this person [Han Fei], I may die without regrets."
Han agreed with his teacher's theory of "virtueless by birth", but as in previous Legalist philosophy, pragmatically proposed to steer people by their own interest-driven nature.