Modern state institutions were gradually implemented all over China in the later years of the Zhou Dynasty, but nowhere more so than in the western state of Qin. In most cases the adoption of new institutions came haphazardly, as the result of trial and error and dire necessity on the part of different governments. Qin, by contrast, formulated an ideology of state building that explicitly laid out the logic of the new centralized state. The Qin state builders saw clearly that the kinship networks of earlier ages were impediments to the accumulation of power, so they implemented policies
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