The territories of the state of Ch’in, the present Shensi and eastern Kansu, were from a geographical point of view transit regions, closed off in the north by steppes and deserts and in the south by almost impassable mountains.  Only between these barriers, along the rivers Wei (in Shensi) and T’ao (in Kansu), is there a rich cultivable zone which is also the only means of transit from east to west.  All traffic from and to Turkestan had to take this route.  It is believed that strong relations with eastern Turkestan began in this period, and the state of Ch’in must have drawn big profits from its “foreign trade”.  The merchant class quickly gained more and more importance.  The population was growing through immigration from the east which the government encouraged.  This growing population with its increasing means of production, especially the great new irrigation systems, provided a welcome field for trade which was also furthered by the roads, though these were actually built for military purposes.

The state of Ch’in had never been so closely associated with the feudal communities of the rest of China as the other feudal states.  A great part of its population, including the ruling class, was not purely Chinese but contained an admixture of Turks and Tibetans.  The other Chinese even called Ch’in a “barbarian state”, and the foreign influence was, indeed, unceasing.  This was a favourable soil for the overcoming of feudalism, and the process was furthered by the factors mentioned in the preceding chapter, which were leading to a change in the social structure of China.  Especially the recruitment of the whole population, including the peasantry, for war was entirely in the interest of the influential nomad fighting peoples within the state.  About 250 B.C., Ch’in was not only one of the economically strongest among the feudal states, but had already made an end of its own feudal system.

Every feudal system harbours some seeds of a bureaucratic system of administration:  feudal lords have their personal servants who are not recruited from the nobility, but who by their easy access to the lord can easily gain importance.  They may, for instance, be put in charge of estates, workshops, and other properties of the lord and thus acquire experience in administration and an efficiency which are obviously of advantage to the lord.  When Chinese lords of the preceding period, with the help of their sub-lords of the nobility, made wars, they tended to put the newly-conquered areas not into the hands of newly-enfeoffed noblemen, but to keep them as their property and to put their administration into the hands of efficient servants; these were the first bureaucratic officials.  Thus, in the course of the later Chou period, a bureaucratic system of administration had begun to develop, and terms like “district” or “prefecture” began to appear, indicating that areas under a bureaucratic administration existed beside and inside areas under feudal rule.  This process had gone furthest in Ch’in and was sponsored by the representatives of the Legalist School, which was best adapted to the new economic and social situation.