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War itself became fundamentally different in China during the Warring States Period. As in the Fertile Crescent (and elsewhere), ancient military combat had a strong ceremonial component, as befits aristocratic or feudal societies: upper-class warriors clad in expensive armor fought each other from their expensive chariots, while the proles walked or run to their deaths, bludgeoning each other with inferior weapons and no regard for property or tradition.
The whole aristocratic system, based as it was on the fundamental superiority of the aristocrat, required that they were the most important, indeed decisive, factor in battle. Thus, it really used to be counterproductive in the long term to field huge armies of commoners, or providing them with equipment that would put unneeded notions of success into their heads; any nobleman who strayed from this conception put the whole arrangement at risk, so complex webs of military traditions and unspoken rules were put in place, effectively to protect the awesome superiority of the charioteer on the battlefield.
The Warring States era swept all that away. Victory, not aristocratic propriety, slowly became the overriding factor, since family ties between noblemen descended from old Zhou heroes were now so weak as to be inexistent, and many others had risen through the ranks, with no particular interest in maintaining a system to which they had no attachment. When the pretense no longer needed to be maintained, in China as elsewhere cumbersome chariots that required wide, flat plains to be effective fell out of fashion, quickly turning into relics for parades or specific situations.
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