The History of China - #146 - N. Song 13: The New Policies, Pt. 2

Episode Date: July 25, 2018

Wang Anshi weilds his newfound power to implement, through his hand-picked Finance Planning Commission, a sweeping series of reforms aids at revitalizing that dynasty's sagging economy. They'll include a government loan program, new tax policies to pay for laborers, a rethink of the state's very relationship with commerce and traders, and a re-formatting of the empire's volunteer self-defense forces. Time Period Covered: 1069-1073 CE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the History of China. Episode 146, The New Policies, Part 2. We're back after hopefully only a few days lag time between Part 1.

Did you miss me? I certainly missed you. Last episode, as you will surely recall, we introduced the figure known as Wang Anshi, who rose from relative obscurity as the son of a mid-level local bureaucrat from south of the Yangtze River, to the dizzying heights of being perhaps the most powerful man in the empire, save, of course, for the emperor himself. He had done that by becoming a fierce proponent of economic and agricultural reforms so revolutionary and with such ferocity that we virtually would have to go back a millennium to the interregnum between Western and Eastern Han between the years 9 and 23 CE, where the usurper

emperor Wang Man of the short-lived Qin dynasty became perhaps the world's first radical proto-socialist. See episodes 32 and 33 for details. And so today we will be taking a closer look at these so-called new policies themselves and how they were enacted. Then in part three, we will look ultimately at how they came to embody the very corruption and wastefulness that they had initially been set out to unmake, best laid plans of mice and men and all that, and then finish out with the fall of Wang Hanshe from grace, the restoration of the conservative faction of government ministers to what they certainly would have thought is their proper place at the head of the table, and the lasting effects of the new policies on the remainder of the Northern

Song. Sounds like quite a bit, huh? Yeah, now you're beginning to see why I had to take three parts for this episode. Alright, let's dive right in. We last left off circa the year 1069 to 1070, just as Wang had seized Emperor Shenzong's ear and amassed enough governmental power as a result to effect the creation of the Finance Planning Commission, to the horror of the already-existent Imperial Finance Commission who were like, hey, that's our job. A memorial to the emperor by the financial minister, Su Shi, in late 1069 expressed this to a T. He wrote, quote, From the founding of the dynasty to the present, the fiscal administration of the empire has been Quote, Commission. Six or seven young men are empowered to discuss fiscal policies day and night within the Bureau, while more than 40 emissaries have been sent out to enact their policies in the

provinces. The vast scandal of their initial operations has made people frightened and suspicious. The strangeness of the new laws adopted has made officials fearful and puzzled. Worthy men seek explanations, and failing to get any cannot relieve their anxiety. Small men simply conjecture as to what is going on at court and give voice to slander, End quote. That's no small list of serious charges. So, just how much of it was accurate and how much is just the hand-wringing of old men afraid of change? In the service of answering such a question, we must look both at the new policy's successes as well as their failures.

For instance, in terms of one of its great successes, the reformist Economic Corps enacted many water control and land reclamation projects, the extent and success of which can be little disputed. Between 1070 and 1076, according to Higashi Ichiyo's widely cited 1970 publication O Anseki Shinpo no Kinkyu, which roughly translates to Research on Progressive Advancement, they initiated 10,793 such projects empire-wide, resulting in almost 39 million acres of land reclaimed for agricultural use, as well as largely solving the long-standing flooding problems along the courses of both the Yellow River and the Bian Canal. Last episode, I talked about how arch-conservatives like Sima Guang had argued that the economic system of the Song could not be expanded because

it was strongly tied to the amount of land that the empire physically possessed, and that couldn't be changed. Such projects seemed to be then, at least in some sense, Wang and his followers saying, oh yeah, we can't change the amount of agricultural land in the empire, you say? It's fixed, is it? Here, hold my rice wine. In terms of the overall tax burden facing the populace, there were notable successes there as well. This was especially true of the five northern burden facing the populace, there were notable successes there as well. This was especially true of the five northern circuits comprising He Dong, the two circuits of He Bei, Yongxingchun, and Qinfeng. And by the way, I have made and posted a new map which shows the Song dynasty as of right now and all of its circuits, which is actually directly referenced in this

episode, so I encourage you to go look at it, because it did take me a while to do, and I think it looks pretty nice. These five circuits had been hit particularly hard by both taxation levels and natural disasters. See the Yellow River's eternal propensity to flood with devastating results. In 1072, the land survey and equitable tax policy took effect, with the express goals of reappraising and redistributing the tax burden, which over time had been progressively sloughed off by the large and politically connected landowners onto their smaller, politically powerless neighbors, while themselves taking umbrage through special tax exemptions. By the time this particular program was rescinded in 1085, their final report determined that there was in the five circuits alone some 34.7 million acres of untaxed land that had been revealed to the government.

Smith notes that, quote, While the overall impact of the measure is difficult to assess, it is quite possible that the exposure to these previously untaxed lands allowed some shifting of the tax burden away from the poor northern households, already encumbered by the severe labor service burdens occasioned by militarization of the borders with the Liao and Xixia, end quote. Yet for all of those successes, it's impossible to get away from the conclusion, or at the very least, the assertion so vehemently put forth by those who survived and succeeded Wang Anxue and his policies' respective tenures, that they would wind up being far more trouble than they'd been worth. So let's take some time to expand on that, specifically with the four policies most harped upon by Wang Anshi's fiscalist critics. And those are the Green Sprouts Program, the replacement of Corvée Labor with Hired Service, the State Trade,

and the Mutual Security Program. As we saw last time, Wang Anshi hadn't just come up with his policies out of the clear blue. Rather, his convictions and ideas for solving the problems he saw as dragging the empire down stemmed largely from the local-level experiments that had been undertaken across the empire itself, but particularly in the south, distant as it was from the prying eyes and meddling fingers of the capital, during the extended but indolent reign of Ren Zong. That said, one of his innovations that seems to truly have been of his own making was the Qing Miao Fa, the Greensprouts Program. Now, I know that translating it like that sort of makes it sound like it might be some sort of preschool program,

but in fact the name is far more literal than that. The Greensprouts Program was, put simply, a credit and loan system designed to aid farmers. It's no great secret that across history, farmers have held a very tenuous existence. Even in the best of times, the fact that everyone else is having bountiful yields as well tends to minimize their potential profit margin. And they are, of course, utterly at the mercy of the cruel twists of the natural world. One bad turn of the weather at the wrong time can lead them with less than nothing, starving and cripplingly in debt. Wang Anshi had noted, however, that whatever else he thought about the ongoing

monetization of the Chinese economy, it was clear that quite often it did not act to the benefit of the small farmer. From Smith, quote, as land and the entire agrarian regime were drawn deeper into the commercial vortex, the peasant's ability to hold onto his land came to depend increasingly on his access to money and credit. The enveloping cash nexus fostered a cycle of rural debt and propertylessness that seemed to be intensifying throughout the 11th century. End quote. By the middle of the century, out of the more than 10 million rural landowning households, or chuhu, as distinguished from the tenant or literally guest households or kehu. More than 8 million of them had come to occupy the two lowest rungs of the imperial six-tier economic hierarchy, which was five for commoners and one for officials, and held just 22% of the cultivatable land across the empire, with an average household ownership of a mere 15 mu,

or about two acres. This was calculated at the time to be about three mu, or about a half acre, short of the bare survival level sufficiency for a family of five. These people were therefore required to supplement their already backbreaking work on their homestead by hiring themselves out as labor on other farms, or even giving up land ownership entirely to become tenant farmers within the larger landowner's estate. Even so, from Peter J. Golis, quote, Such an outcome was not just a personal tragedy, but presented a mounting problem for the state as well. Dispossessed peasants with nothing left to lose are, after all, if allowed to achieve a critical mass, one of the most dangerous and

destabilizing forces in the universe. What's more, given the nature of the Chinese tax structure, based as it was overwhelmingly on registered households and their land ownership, fewer landed farmers meant less revenue, as well as a smaller potential labor pool. You can't conscript the man that you can't find on the books, after all. Now, to be clear, none of this was a new issue. This sort of thing had been a perennial bugaboo since time immemorial, basically. All other things held equal. The rich inevitably got richer at the expense of the poor, until the system itself collapses. But up until the initial decline of the Tang dynasty in the 8th century, culminating with the rise of one Empress Wu Zetian, as it were,

the imperial regime du jour had been able to periodically correct such imbalances through large-scale land redistribution, or as they termed it, equalization, which protected and restored peasant solvency in what might be thought of as a little bit like a periodic land-based jubilee. Yet now, three centuries out of practice, even a way of the ancients, a file like Wang Anshu, had to admit that there was no way to re-implement such an archaic solution. Instead, he came to view the idea of lines of credit extended to smallhold landowners as the, quote, fulcrum through which state power could best protect the peasantry, end quote. This is where the Greensprouts program came in, by offering the peasantry cash loans during the leanest time of year, the period between which they'd exhausted their own supply of food from

last year's harvest and the harvest of the upcoming crop, when they were forced to borrow and buy just to make it through. Wong's initial foray into this government-based loan program was done in kind, that is to say with direct loans of grain rather than cash to be repaid the following harvest season, plus interest, of course. With that local success under his belt, as of 1069, he rolled out the Greenspout program nationwide, but this time using cash rather than grain supplements directly. As part of this nationwide rollout, Wang's reformists couched the program in the language of being an attack on the predatory loan sharks of the rural regions, who preyed upon the hapless

farmers in their time of most desperate need, and then stripped away their very livelihoods when they couldn't pay up. From the Qing era Song Huiyao Zhegao, or the Song Compendium of Government Manuscripts, quote, Wang's state-run system, on the other hand, proposed to solve this problem by offering much more reasonable rates on their loans, payable in two installments, in either cash or grain, the subsequent summer and fall, and with exchange rates set and fixed ahead of time at rates calculated only to ensure that the government wouldn't actually be losing money on the exchange. In order to have the cash on hand to be able to actually carry this out at

scale, the Greensprouts program proposed to liquidate the 250,000 kilograms of rice and strings of cash that sat moldering in government warehouses under the ever-normal greenery and the universal charity vault, respectively. Well, at one time, these systems had functioned as a check against famine by buying up excess grain when prices were low and selling them off when necessary, by the 1060s the system had effectively ceased to function altogether, resulting in a tremendous untapped resource for the government to actually make work rather than just languish until it rotted. Wang Anxia and his followers were confident of nothing less than a wholesale renaissance or the central government was getting out of all this, the reformists balked.

The loan is for the sake of the people. The government will claim no benefit from its recipients. There was just one teensy-weensy little hitch. Those usurious, engrossing, middle- and large-scale landowners that so villainously robbed from the poor in their most desperate hour. Yeah, it turns out that life wasn't all mimosas on the beach for them either. By the mid-11th century, you see, the three highest grades of commoners were far from living in the lap of luxury. They too were on pretty thin ice. The reason why actually gets us into yet another

slice of life aspect of the common life in Song China, which has to do with how localities were organized, how the government functioned down at that level, and the expectations of those commoners who were deemed to have more than enough. In spite of what we might typically think of when we think Chinese empire as some vast, omnipowerful monstrosity, the reality was, and is, much different on the ground. The fact of the matter was the imperial state never had had enough money or personnel to oversee its operation at anywhere below about the county level. Thus, such slack at the local level needed to be taken up by the local residents themselves. This had been done for centuries by the chai-i-fa, or the draft service system. Villages were assigned as groups

of households, most typically as a unit of 110 households called a li. The li was then further subdivided into 11 units of 10 households called a jia, according to their tax brackets being high, middle, or low. Of those 11 jia, the richest was assigned by the census taker each decade as the administrative jia, and each household took a one-year shift as the head of the li. From the remaining 10 jia, they would likewise take one-year-long shifts as the levy labor unit for their li. From Rui Huang, under the direction of the lead chief of the year, it performed the local tax collection and delivery, and met all material and labor requisitions on behalf of the entire Li. The other units paid their regular taxes, but were not liable to service obligations that year. Thus, in a decennial period, all households took a one-year turn at discharging their service obligations. After the 10-year cycle,

a new census was taken, and all Li Jia were reorganized in accordance with the changes that had occurred during the decade. With certain variations, the wards and precincts in the cities were organized along similar lines. Services rendered by the Jia called up for their year-long spate of duties could expect to perform tasks for the government, such as providing office attendance for the administration, from the county all the way up to the imperial government, if necessary, in roles as varied as doormen, guards, messengers, litter bearers, cooks, buglers, boatmen, patrolmen, jailers, stable grooms, receiving men in warehouses, operators of canal watergates, and clerical assistants, just to name a few. As I mentioned, this wasn't necessarily confined to one's own home region, but instead wherever the government deemed a vacancy needed to be filled.

In terms of materials that were requisitioned from the Li Jia system, they too fell completely onto the designated Jia and could be quite extensive. They were expected to supply the local government with things like stationery, oil, charcoal, and candles, as well as even military equipment like swords, bows, arrows, and even uniforms. And from regions that had interesting or useful botanical growths, the Jha could also expect to have herbs and medicinal plants as part of the quotas. Those quotas were based on the basic fiscal unit of the Ting, or the able-bodied male, and what one of those ought to be expected to provide. Unlike, say, a land tax, though, there were elements of progressive taxation. Households were not all expected to be able to contribute the same amount, but instead classified

into upper, middle, and lower categories, as I said, with obligations, at least on paper, distributed accordingly. So that helps us understand the expectations heaped upon the multitudinous Li Jia all across the empire's localities, but we're not done yet because we still have to look at the additional expectations meted out to those 11th administrative Jia units. The principal positions included such various roles as village chieftain, office scribe, local tax assessors and collectors, among others. These roles, all totally unpaid it should be pointed out, as this was a conscription-based system, were nevertheless expected to fulfill imperial expectations to the letter. The local tax

collectors, for instance, were expected to make up any shortfall below their quota out of their own pocket. Again, from Smith, quote, much more burdensome was the stipulation that after completing their local duties, village servicemen could be drafted into government service, jì yì, attached to the county and prefectural yamen, or Mandarin official. These official posts, which numbered over a million at any one time, included office messengers and miscellaneous servants, bookkeepers and scribes, a wide variety of granary and supply functionaries servants, bookkeepers and scribes, a wide variety of granary and supply functionaries and laborers, and yamen police for the arrest of thieves and people charged in lawsuits. But the most onerous post was that of supply master, Ya Tian. Drafted

from the wealthiest households, the supply masters were responsible for managing government granaries, hosting prefectural guests, and two functions that required extensive travel, accompanying civil officials to and from office and overseeing the transmission of taxes and tribute goods from their local official to designated destinations throughout the empire, including the capital, end quote. All of that was, of course, on their own dime, and they were likewise on the hook financially or otherwise if something were to go wrong. In some more urbanized and commercially advanced regions like Jingnan and Sichuan over the course of the 11th century, the supply masters became semi-professionalized, and those households undertaking said duties were able to at least

somewhat defray the enormous expense incurred by securing the rights to manage official ferry crossing points, operate wine mash franchises, and the like. And in some cases, they could even turn a tidy profit in so doing. Quote, but in most parts of the country, the post was filled by unremunerated conscripts who were ill-prepared to finance their long trips to the capital, bribe clerks to accept their shipments, or cover the costs of goods lost or damaged in transit. End quote. So congratulations on being the wealthiest and most successful family in the village. Here's your ruinously expensive set of duties that you've just won. It was so bad that in 1067, for instance, the finance commissioner Han Jiang memorialized to the throne that the position of supply master was the single greatest threat to peasant productivity in the empire, and that heads of households in danger of being

selected for the role were known to commit suicide, break up their family, or outright abandon their property in order to be downgraded away from the dubious honor. A similar lamentation from the official Wu Cheng, a year later, described a particular family which, having been newly assigned as their local supply master, was immediately beset by a county official there to take a complete inventory of all the properties and belongings, quote, from cups and pestles to baskets and chopsticks, end quote, to be used as collateral against the inevitable losses incurred in the course of their service. Wu wrote,

It gets even to the point that when household property is exhausted, but the debt's not yet requited, then the children and grandchildren are in turn impoverished, and neighboring guarantors sought out. Therefore, in order to avoid ruinous draft service, the people do not dare to cultivate much land, so as to avoid high household rank. And men of the same bones and flesh do not dare live together out of fear as to avoid high household rank, and men of the same bones and flesh do not dare live together out of fear of raising their eligibility for corvée, end quote. Expenses for a single term of service, which lasted some two to three years in many cases, could find a household out as much as 1,000 strings of cash in debt. It's easy enough for me to say 1,000 strings of cash, but what does that

mean to a farmer, even a relatively wealthy one? To throw that into perspective, we turn to economic historian Chen Mingshen, who wrote in his 2009 Song Ren Sheng Huo Shui Ping Kao Cha, or Research into the Living Standards of the People of the Song. In it, Chen writes that among the poorest citizens of the period, those living in the mountainous western interior of the empire, for one, they might see the equivalent of about 100 iron coins, called won, per day for a household of five, which would have been, depending on the area, between just barely having enough to eat and maybe having a couple coins left over at the end of the day. In the cities, one might earn double

or triple that, yet still just be scraping by. Yet even in the capital city, Kaifeng, official relief standards indicated that 20 coins per person per day was considered the minimum necessary to survive. In the particularly bitter winter of 1069, for instance, emergency measures kicked in after heavy snowfall resulted in widespread death of the poorest residents from the cold. The city government issued a proclamation to that effect, stating, quote, those too poor to survive on their own shall be given 20 coins per day, end quote. At the opposite end of that spectrum, Chun gives a figure from the Southern Song period, a little later on, which calculates the cost of housing and adequately feeding a surrender general of the Jin Dynasty and his family of 22 people,

estimating that such a distinguished retinue would require perhaps 70 to 75 one coins per day, per person, for a total of no more than 600 coins per day in all. So given that 1,001 coins is one string of cash, holding an imperial general and his entire extended family in sufficiently lavish fashion for three full years might run you about 660 strings of cash, or roughly two-thirds of what a particularly unlucky local supply master might incur in debt over that same timeframe. Okay, so all of that is to say that it was a really big problem, and pretty much everyone agreed that it definitely shouldn't be this way. So much so that

even arch-conservative Sima Guang had been saying in the prior decade that the government really ought to do something like taking some of the profits from the imperial wine monopoly and creating a stipend to compensate those commoners who drew the short straw on government service. And that brings us to the second reform proposed and enacted by Wang Anshi's Finance Planning Commission, paying people for their labor. I know, it sounds like one of those head-bonkingly obvious things, but in fact, at the time, the idea of paying for imperial service was so not obvious to the majority of the government that it had been kicked around from department to department for the last 50 years at least without anyone having the political traction to actually get it enacted.

Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered. Follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. And in fact, the Finance Planning Commission's rollout produced such a dust-up that it took them more than a year and a half after the Emperor first officially announced the plan to actually implement it on a wide scale.

The reason that it ruffled so many feathers is that it fundamentally challenged the entrenched interests of those already in power. The Greensprouts credit system had been a relatively easy sell for the reformists. Look, all we're doing is extending a lifeline to the farmers and maybe putting one or two private loan sharks out of commission. It's win-win. But this? Paid labor?

There were definitely losers here, as the moneyed classes saw it, and it was them. You see, if the empire had largely run off of the blood and sweat of its peasant masses at no cost, then it was the city dwellers, and especially the officialdom, who reaped those benefits. But now, proposing a salary for that labor meant that money was going to have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was the purses of those self-same urban elite, specifically as a tax on all households with property and wealth but not liable for the corvée service themselves, including Buddhist and Taoist temples, which I can tell you had more than a few pearls clutched. But they clutched even harder when it became evident that the more value a household had, the more they were going to be expected to contribute in the labor compensation fund. Not just a tax, but a graduated progressive tax specifically targeting the rich and influential? Quickly, get me over to the fainting couch. It's a testament not only to Wang Anshu

and his clique's political power, but also the sheer clear and present necessity of such a reform that the policy wasn't killed the minute it was proposed. Still, it would take longer than the Finance Planning Commission would even exist as an entity to push the final policy through into actual execution, a mark of just how much pushback by the wealthy there must have been. The rollout of this new tax to fund labor was not applied empire-wide all at once, as it was feared that trying to do so would result in widespread corruption of the system and large loopholes opening up due to collusion between the elites and the local officials,

both of whom made to lose out as a result of this shift. Instead, a few carefully selected areas were selected to, in effect, run a beta test of the system, including Shanxi, Sichuan, and Hebei. Undoubtedly, the most successful and influential prototype of the service exemption policy, as it was called, was conducted in Kaifeng itself under the watchful eye of the central government. From Smith, quote, 15 subgrades and all urban households into 10 grades, with the poorest rural grades, 4 and 5, and the poorest urban grades, 6 through 10, exempt from payment. Second, in order to neutralize the opposition of the property classes previously exempt from service, the households of ranked officials, households headed by women, families without

taxable males, and temple households were required to pay only half the rate of their assigned grade. Finally, the fees collected from these two sources, draft liable and draft exempt households, would be used exclusively to hire volunteers from households of grade 3 and higher, middle and upper rich peasantry, for the three most important government service posts, supply masters who had to put property up as collateral, county militiamen who had to be tested in martial arts, and scribes, who had to be tested in their ability at accounting. Terms of service were set at two to three years, and actual salaries were to vary with the labor market in each locale, and the difficulty and number of workdays required by each position. Rather hilariously, that bit about ensuring that certain

specific types of rich households only had to pay half the going rate was one issue that really stuck in Wang Anxia's craw through the whole process. Though he did end up acknowledging the necessity of compromising with the wealthy in order to get them to play ball, it really irked him, and he said as much to Shen Zong, holding the emperor himself partly to blame. Quote, If your majesty were truly able to plan for benefit and harm, to distinguish true from false, and to clearly distinguish good and evil with rewards and punishment so that everyone would be awed, then no one would dare speak evil talk or rumor, nor put forth wild and malicious plans,

and powerful and cunning officials and commoners would naturally be stilled. If this were the case, then without doing any harm, even more could be extracted from the engrossing magnates in order to assist the poor. End quote. What's the matter, McFly? You chicken? Smith notes that the overall rates on the tax in Kaifeng are spotty, but does give some notable figures. In the whole of the Kaifeng County for 1071, 22,600 households were charged a total of 12,900 strings of cash, so a bit more than half a string per year on average. The richest households are estimated at having been charged as much as 25 strings per year, while mid-tier households 8-9 strings annually. Though the local citizens and censors affected by the plan had made plainly

known their displeasure at Big Brother Wang Anshu playing the Robin Hood to their Prince John, by this point, Wang held the reins of government firmly enough that he was able to make the service exemption policy the law of the land across the whole of the empire by the 10th month of 1071. Both the Greensprouts and the hired service initiatives had been squarely aimed at reviving the agricultural economy by loosening the chokehold the rural creditors held on poor farmers, and by attempting to put in some measure of counterbalance against the traditional regressive service burden heaped by the powerful onto the powerless. But the new policies of Wang Anshu were far from finished. His next target was none other than the wealthy merchants and great traders,

who, as Wang saw it, quote, manipulated the market for commodities to their own advantage, end quote. Wang himself favored what became known as an equalized tribute measure, which would have sought to close the gap between local quotas of supplies collected via imperial tributary tax and the requirements of the government so exploited by those disreputable merchants for their own personal

profit by having the imperial government purchase its required supplies directly rather than relying on them arriving via tribute quotas. He said that in the event that the government then wound up with more of a particularly good than it needed, it could turn around and resell it to recoup its costs. Again, pretty head-bonking stuff to us, but it was too much for the Song Court of 1070, and the proposal was never enacted. Nonetheless, there was wide agreement about the ongoing worry of the great urban merchants having created commercial monopolies that locked out smaller traders and harmed the consumers. The answer would come in early 1070, put forth as a frontier initiative in the contested western border zone between Tibet and China, Qinghai Lake, also sometimes called by the Mongolian name

Kokonor, and Qinfeng Circuit. Along the border zone, trade between the two peoples was highly lucrative, but it was noted that the profits of that trade, handled as it was by private merchants, were almost entirely closed off to the government. Thus, it was put forth that the government ought to step in and monopolize Sino-Tibetan trade altogether, which would in turn greatly assist in subsidizing the frontier campaign against them. The plan's mastermind, a guy named Wang Xiao, argued persuasively that though each year hundreds of thousands of strings of cash worth of imports and exports cross the frontier zone, quote, the profits created by these merchant travelers all revert back to the people rather than the state.

I wish to establish a state trade agency in Qinfeng Circuit that will use government funds as capital to buy domestic goods for trade to foreign merchants, in order to capture for the state the profits that now flow to merchants and traders, end quote. He promised that the resulting profits would not only pay for the initial expenditure, but would be more than sufficient to finance the entire frontier campaign without any further input from the imperial treasury whatsoever. Well, that certainly pricked up ministerial ears, chief among them the ever-fiscally conscious Wang Anshir. Emperor Shenzong was likewise enamored by the idea, especially the promise of limitless revenue generated through the magic silver bullet that was compound interest. Shenzong put it, quote, The government uses its funds to buy up goods brought to market by Tibetan merchants, saving them the trouble of waiting around for a buyer.

The officials then resell these goods to resident merchants on credit, saving them the trouble of having to have cash on hand. In addition to its markup on the sale, the government also collects interest on the credit transaction. And that is why the plan is advantageous." Yes indeed, like a 16 year old with access to dad's credit card, Shenzong had discovered, at least from his perspective, a limitless pool of free money with no consequence. Within two years, what had begun as an experiment along a battle-pocked frontier zone

had been enacted in the capital itself. Though the policy as enacted in Qinfeng Circuit had been neither specifically anti-merchant in tone nor redistributionist in its intent, it was just trying to get some easy extra war funds after all, the reformists in the capital were quick to add their own flavor to the policy. In the course of the rollout in Kaifeng, the policy was accompanied with a memorial taking to task the rich men and great families who so callously raked the poor over the coals by having the audacity to buy low and sell high. In doing so, it managed to give possibly the most direct but inadvertent reference to Robin Hood ever by citing the ancient imperial prerogative to

confiscate from the rich in order to be able to give to the poor. It drew upon the long-standing precedent of price normalization embodied by the charter of the ever-normal granaries to enact and fund the Changping Shi Yishu, or the ever-normal state trade agency, to be managed by finance officials assisted by worthy merchants. These worthy merchants would be authorized to receive state credit to buy up depressed commodities at a mutually agreed-upon price. In order to receive such loans, though, the merchants had to form a bao, a collective, of five or more merchants who all agreed to guarantee the loan in the event of one failing to service it. The amount loaned was also dependent on the amount of collateral these

baos could offer up, with an annual interest rate of 20%. From Smith, quote, like its ever-normal greenery prototype, the state trade agency would pay relatively generous prices to buy unmoved goods in a stagnant market, to the advantage of the traveling merchants, and would charge relatively cheap prices to sell high-demand goods in a robust market, to the advantage of the consumer. In this way, the state could equalize To say that this policy stepped on more than a few toes would be putting it very, very mildly indeed. This was an arrow aimed at the very heart of the intersection between the economic and political elite, including, at least according to Wang Anshi, no less than the family of the Empress herself. Moreover, it seems to have been from the outset plagued with what might be generously termed an uneven implementation, or somewhat less generously, systemic corruption. Within only a few months of its rollout in Kaifeng, the number of complaints

against the policy threatened to swamp the central government completely. Complaints of state officials harassing merchants, of hampering the ability of private shopkeepers to sell their own goods, and of it driving prices up rather than down on critical goods like sesame, combs, and cooking oil. In similar fashion, Wang Anshu looked at that veritable mountain of complaints and said, this is definitely not my fault. No, this is the fault of the middlemen, merchants, and engrossers who are losing their accustomed to profit margins. And let me tell you, them having to tighten their belts a little so that everyone else can actually make a living isn't worth shedding a single tear over. It was a bit less clear-cut for Emperor Shenzong, though, since he did have to hear it from all

angles, probably most loudly his own extended family, and that of his empress, who were pretty much frothing at the mouth over this tremendous cut to their own profit margins. Nonetheless, as Smith puts it, quote, Shenzong's worries were always overcome by that fascination with the power of interest to generate revenues, and the emperor himself became one of the policy's biggest investors, providing massive subventions from the inner treasury to seed the state trade agency and help it grow, end quote. The final of the four major policies enacted as a part of Wang Anshu's reform package that we'll get into today is that of the baojia, or mutual security system. At its conception, the baojia system had originated as a response to heightened banditry in the regions surrounding the capital. This is to say, it began purely as a peasant self-defense initiative and was not economic whatsoever.

At first. As you'll recall, the imperial bureaucratic apparatus simply could not extend below the county level. The levels below that, be they township or canton unit, where the defense against banditry and crime rested on the locally selected elder and his contingency of likewise local stalwart militiamen. And at the smallest sub-bureaucratic level lay the individual villages which could, at times of emergency, organize an ad hoc neighborhood mutual self-defense group, or Linzhu Xiangbao. Ad hoc and voluntary as they were, though, these local-level defense groups tended to dissipate after a fairly short interval,

which once again opened the door to increases in local criminal activity. The inefficiency of such a system came to be addressed in 1070 by the Commissioner General of Kaifeng, Zhao Zizhi, which, yeah, try saying that name five times fast. Commissioner Zhao called therefore for a state-sponsored revitalization of the old mutual security system, quote, so that the wealthy can live in peace without fear of thieves by grouping together with the poor for survival, while the poor can live securely on the land by relying on cooperation with the wealthy for their livelihoods, end quote. This proposal was jumped on by Wang Anxue and his fellows, who saw in it the potential for so much more than just keeping the small folks safe. Wang saw the potential to achieve a much larger objective,

replacing entirely the costly and unreliable mercenary force that had for so long supplemented the imperial army with a people's army that would be willing, ready, and able to defend their own lands against any incursion, bandit or barbarian. Again, from Smith, quote, Wang had only contempt for the hirelings who made up the backbone of the Song army, whom he derided as shiftless and unruly riffraff who cannot even see to their own safety.

Peasants, in contrast, Wang glorified as simple, strong, and single-minded men who know how to obey commands. From this perspective, it is clear that in a crisis, there is nothing so useful as a people's army. End quote. After all, the five dynasties had used that kind of levee en masse to great effect a century ago. Why couldn't we? Beyond the ostensibly patriotic goal of military revitalization and the resuscitation of the national spirit, etc., etc., lay the cold-heart economic math that no doubt underpinned much of Wang's more lofty rhetoric about the peasantry. You see, one area of government that Wang Anshu felt could, and indeed must, be slashed budgetarily was the military. By his own calculations,

Wang saw the replacement of the mercenary corps with the baojia system by having the potential to cut military expenditures by as much as 80 to 90 percent, which seems pretty optimistic, let's put it that way. In any event, it would take about a year and a half to take this system from its initial local level beta test and apply it to the whole empire as of late 1073. It was laid out as followed. In every locality, a group of households, first ten but then later reduced to five, were organized into a small guard unit, from which two mature males, or more depending on the extenuating circumstances, could be called up for active duty. A level higher than that, the process largely repeated, with these small guards organized by fives into large guards, headed by the wealthiest landowner from

among them. A level up, and again, the large guards were grouped by five into a single superior guard, headed by the two most wealthy landowners of the whole group. All other households in the area not eligible for service as guardsmen, those unlanded peasants and urbanites for instance, were considered to be eligible to be called upon as auxiliaries to the Guard Corps. Guardsmen and auxiliaries alike were permitted to train with bow and arrow, as well as any weapon not specifically forbidden by law. Probably the most significant difference between the Baojia and the older security systems, though, was that service was compulsory rather than voluntary, and to keep track of who had supplied

what in terms of manpower, each unit was required to write up and maintain a list of each household in their region, and who was expected to report for duty when called. In this way, it bears at least a passing resemblance to the army requirements of the Roman Republic prior to the Marian reforms of the late 2nd century BCE, that is, landed farmers were expected to serve as a part of their duty to protect both their own holdings and that of the state. The local militia's duties ran the gamut of what you'd expect. Everything from nightly patrols of the township to pursuit of thieves and informing on bandits, murderers, arsonists, rapists, cultists to their government

high-ups, as well as those suspected of harboring them. That, however, was just phase zero for Wang Anshu, who, as always, dreamt big. From the very outset, he was planning methods by which he could, in due time, integrate these local defense militias into the wider imperial army, eventually as permanent additions, thus obviating the need to hire on mercenary soldiers. He forwarded this goal through two means, the so-called detached service system, which took those local units and then began rotating them across different regions of the county or prefect in preparation for those guardsmen to go wherever they might eventually be needed, and an official system of military drill and review, which sought to standardize and equalize the training and combat readiness of the militia with the training practices of the wider imperial

army. It should be noted that the local militiamen weren't simply accepting these wider assignments for nothing. Unlike the guard corps as an institution, these rotational assignments were on a voluntary basis, and offered additional pay in the form of grain and so-called sustenance cash. Said volunteers were then dispatched in units of 50 men for 10-day-long assignments under the command of their prefectural military inspector. While off-duty, such guardsmen could earn additional pay for participation in local bandit sweeps, as well as the potential to earn time off of their next detached service term. From Smith, quote, while on detached service, guardsmen received three sheng of rice, which is about three dry quarts or liters, and between 10 to 80 cash per diem. Payments for

supervisors were far more generous, 3,000 cash per term for the large guard chiefs and 7,000 cash for the supervisor guard leaders and assistant leaders. All volunteers for detached service were obliged to undergo military training, and those guardsmen who achieved the top three of eight levels of skill were eligible for grants of between three and 15 piquils of relief grain in times of dearth, which is between 180 to 900 kilograms, end quote. So all in all, not a bad deal, and it seems little wonder that many took the government up on its call for such volunteers. Of course, it wasn't all campfire songs and s'mores. Quote, in addition to their training in the martial arts, while on duty, the civilian

guardsmen and their large guard and superior guard supervisors were all subject to a strict schedule of military discipline that put them directly under the command of the military inspectors and mandated corporal punishment for any acts of insubordination, end quote. Wang Anxue had high hopes for these new Baozhao guardsmen. Beyond the obvious dollar and cents savings he was counting on through employment of the peasantry itself to guard the realm, he also hoped that the combination of training, incentives, and rewards would do what hadn't been done in China, well, basically since the conclusion of the Warring States period, and that was make the population as a whole willing, ready, and able to fight. He wrote that he hoped the populace would thereby be driven to, quote, compete towards greater levels of military

skill so that they will not even have to go on detached service to learn satisfactorily. In a few years' time, not only will the Baozhao guardsmen exceed the skill of the righteous brave militia, they will even surpass the regular troops, who are not driven in their hearts like the guardsmen." And indeed, hope springs eternal for Wang Anshi. In due course, however, these programs that had begun as voluntary reward-driven extras transformed into required aspects of the Baozhai units as a whole, especially in the northern circuits where the threat of invasion seemed poised to break out at any moment. In 1075, as a sure sign of its increasing militancy, command of the Baozhai system was turned over from the Court of Agricultural Supervision to that of the Bureau of Military Affairs, and ipso facto, you're in the army now, son.

Just how deeply did the Baojia militia reform affect the populace of Song China? Well, according to Song Huiyao, or the Essential Regulations of the Song, as of 1076, some 6.9 million were active on the militia rosters. And that is what the map that I so recently made actually shows, is what percentage of the population by military circuit was enrolled in those Baozhao militias. Again, check it out. In any case, assuming that the average household contribution would have been a single male, that would have meant that almost half of the empire's 15 million total households were supplying the system.

Smith makes sure to point out that averages are deceiving, since certain regions such as the southern and northern frontier regions would have had much higher rates of enrollment than the interior zones like, say, Jiangnan. Moreover, the purpose of the Baojiaguardsmen often varied widely by region. While along the northern border the militiamen were heavily militarized and, insofar as was possible, integrated into the imperial military command structure, in the south, absent any major foreign threat, they were much less so, and instead more concentrated on maintaining social control and cohesion by rooting out and dispersing banditry among the locales.

And so, that is where we're going to leave off this second of three parts about Wang Anshu and the reforms he sought to remake China and its economy with. Next time, as I said at the beginning, we will finish out with the increasing corruption of Wang's high-minded policies, his ultimate fall from grace out of the echelons of power, and what would become of the new policies. Thanks for listening. Have you ever gazed in wonder at the Great Pyramid?

Have you marveled at the golden face of Tutankhamun? Or admired the delicate features of Queen Nefertiti? If you have, you'll probably like the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore tales of this ancient culture. The History of Egypt is available wherever you get your podcasting fix. Come, let me introduce you to the world of Ancient Egypt.