The cold, hard-headed Chinese theory of statecraft -- the school of "methods and law" (Fa-jia) that held people are selfish, that a ruler's virtue cannot govern them, and that order comes only from clear law, ruthless reward and punishment, and an all-powerful state. It built the first unified Chinese empire under the Qin, was disgraced when that empire collapsed, and then survived as an administrative skeleton many later "Confucian" dynasties continued to use in altered form.
In 221 BCE the state of Qin finished swallowing its rivals and forged the first unified Chinese empire. Its engine was a philosophy that rejected almost everything Confucians believed about how to govern. People, the Legalists said, are not good and cannot be made good by a ruler's fine example. They move for reward and they flinch from punishment, and a wise state pulls only those two levers. So Qin built itself for two things, farming and war, governed by one clear and brutal law that fell on noble and peasant alike. It worked. It also burned books, worked men to death, and ruled by terror, and the empire it made collapsed within fifteen years. Legalism was blamed forever after. Yet the irony at the heart of Chinese history is that it never really died: later dynasties often governed with centralized tools the Qin had made powerful, while explaining rule in Confucian language, Confucian on the outside, Legalist within.