a Sparapet (supreme commander), King, and chief Aspet were each taken from individual noble houses. However, Armenian feudalism differs from the feudalism of most of Europe as the estates were owned by families, not lords, and could not be split or given without the family's permission. Also, if a tanuter died heirless, he was succeeded by a different branch of the family, rather than by a noble who was sworn to him. Cilician Armenia, through contact with crusader states, had a system even closer to western feudalism. The economic and political systems of medieval Europe in which people exchanged loyalty and labor for a lord's protection Pakistan and Bangladesh The Taluqdari or Zamindari system is often referred to as a feudal or feudal-like system. Originally the system was introduced in the pre-colonial period to collect taxes from peasants, and it continued during colonial British rule. After independence Zamindari was abolished in India and East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh), but it is still present today in Pakistan. In modern times historians have become very reluctant to classify other societies into European models and today it is rare for Zamindari to be described as feudal by academics; it still done in popular usage, however, but only for pejorative reasons to express disfavour, typically by critics of the system. China The People's Republic of China is officially a Marxist–Leninist society and state, based on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics under a people's democratic dictatorship, and attempts have been made by Marxist academics to record China's history in the PRC. Feudalism is the model that modern Chinese Marxists and Tokyo school historians use to identify China's recent past, neologized from the Chinese concept of fengjian (which means to allocate a region or piece of land to an individual, establishing him as the ruler of that region), a term used to designate the multi-state which existed in China under the Zhou dynasty, and was eradicated by the Qin, by which time the state of Qin had conquered all other states and established the first China-wide empire. After King Wu of Zhou defeated the Shang dynasty, he created five hereditary ranks; 公 gōng, 侯 hóu, 伯 bó, 子 zǐ and 男 nán, commonly translated as Duke, Marquis, Earl (or Count), Viscount and Baron. However, unlike their Western European equivalents, the titles often indicated more in the way of perceived nobility rather than amount of land possessed. For