Fan Ju's Revenge

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0800

A while back, I wrote a Twitter thread suggesting that the author of “Speaking to the King in Zheng”, an anonymous chapter of the Stratagems of the Warring States, was Han Fei, the author of parts of the Han Feizi:

It seemed like an interesting possibility, so I asked a couple of developers from Lexikat (my company) to accept a brief side-gig writing some text analysis scripts for the purpose of investigating further. You can find the results here, which seem to confirm that the chapter is stylistically close to those Han Feizi chapters most likely to have been written by the historical Han Fei. We used relatively simple analysis techniques, but were later approached by an academic partner at Seoul National University to build a more sophisticated AI model to perform the same task. It turns out that our work was so good that it inspired other investigations on the same topic. In particular, this one, by Park Sunyoung, an SNU grad student, in the Journal of Humanities (Inmun Kwahak). We shall refrain from commenting on the background of this study, as certain questions have been raised by her colleagues regarding the origins and originality of her code and ideas, and the issue is currently sub judice.

“Someone spoke to the King in Zheng”: using high tech methods to solve an ancient Chinese mystery

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0800

This story begins with an ending.

The Han Feizi is a compendium of essays about the bloodthirsty politics of the Warring States era in China. It opens with the death of its author in approximately 233 BC.

In the first chapter, we meet Han Fei[1] — writer, tongue-in-cheek contrarian, freelance politician and perennial insider-outsider — as he is about to speak before the court of King Zheng of Qin. Zheng’s armies are on the verge of sweeping across China, which he will rule under the name of Qin Shihuang, and Fei’s essays have already caught his attention. This is the perfect moment to secure a position in the Qin government. However, Zheng is too smart to fall for the sort of bland flattery that could be deployed elsewhere to win a sinecure. Instead, Fei stands to speak and delivers a ruthlessly effective criticism of Qin’s failure to wipe out the other feudal states, including Han — to whose ruling family he himself belongs. In a speech that is unquestionably one of the high points in the history of human rhetoric, he argues that Qin’s prior hesitations in overrunning its neighbours were a false mercy, merely prolonging a conflict that could have been brought to an end at multiple points over the past century if Qin’s advisors had only been more intelligent or less compromised in their allegiances. Having long been a critic of the Han government, Fei finally throws his family and his state to the wolves, aligning himself once and for all with Qin.

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Fan Ju's Revenge

“Someone spoke to the King in Zheng”: using high tech methods to solve an ancient Chinese mystery