European feudalism was a mechanism for binding unrelated lords to unrelated vassals, facilitating social cooperation in a society where complex kinship no longer existed. In China, by contrast, the primary political actors were not individual lords but lords and their kinship groups. Within a European lord’s domain, impersonal administration had already begun to take root, in the form of the feudal contract between lord and peasant. Authority was vested in the lord himself and not in the lord’s clan.
