The History of China - #147 - N. Song 14: The New Policies, Pt. 3

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

Wang Anshi's heady, glorious dream at last comes crashing into the cold, mechanical reality of imperial bureaucracy, to everyone's chagrin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 147, The New Policies, Part 3. But little mouse, you are not alone. Improving foresight may be in vain. The best-laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry, and leave us naught but grief and pain for promised joy. From Robert Burns' To a Mouse I think it's safe to say that all of us have loved. When Will the Bright Moon Light My Journey Home? Wang Anxia's Sailing Past Guazhou. I think it's safe to say that all of us have loved, whether that be a person, a country, an idea, even a family pet, or a simple object.

And we all know the phrase, love makes you blind. But what happens when the thing that you love and have pledged yourself to has changed, as will sometimes happen, into something that is no longer even really recognizable as the thing that you began loving in the first place? Maybe you recognize the change and divest yourself of that thing as something that you no longer can love.

But maybe that change has happened subtly, or maybe you just don't want to see what you don't want to see about it. Maybe love has truly made you blind of its failings. Or maybe you've become just so invested in it, put so much of your love and effort and time and energy into this thing that you so desperately love and cling to, that even if you do somehow recognize that perversion that's taken hold of it, you're subject to the sunk cost fallacy. And for anyone who may not remember what the sunk cost fallacy is, it is the all too common tendency of our brains to look at something that has been shown to be a bad investment, but justify it by the fact that we've already invested

so much into it already. That somehow, you just can't jump off that sinking ship, even as you're clearly aware that it's sinking, because that would be admitting that you wasted your time and money on it in the first place. For many of us, I'd even dare say most of us, admitting to that is often more painful than actually going down with the ship itself. And today, we have one of those stories. Over the last two episodes, we have gone over the implementation of Wang Anshi's radical new vision of the Song Chinese economy, as laid out in four of the most major policies that he and his finance planning commission enacted. They were, to recap, the Greensprout's credit and loan system, paying wages to local

functionaries rather than relying on forced conscription, direct buying and selling of goods by the state instead of depending on tributary quotas, and reforming the local self-defense forces into the so-called baojia system of semi-militarization of the populace at large. It must have been truly heady times for Wang Anxue, especially given that so long as he and his policies enjoyed the full support of Emperor Shanzong, who was almost as eager as his reformist minister to institute those changes, there was absolutely nothing stodgy old conservatives like Sima Guang and Ouyang Xiu could do but grumpily harumph in the corner. Yet it wasn't long before the problems that Wang and his backers had all agreed amongst

themselves would totally not be a problem totally became problems large enough to throw all of Anxia's grand visions and his very career arc into jeopardy. You see, the new policies had, by dint of their very implementation, given the imperial government as an organization a potent whiff of that most addictive of narcotics, cash. And as the mechanism of bureaucracy kicked into gear to carry out those directives, the Song government found itself, like any addict, craving more. So, much like we did last time, let's break down each of those four policies and how they rapidly went from high-minded idealistic goals to help the little guy into ruthlessly exploitative money churns bent on little more than, as Paul Smith puts it,

revenue extraction. First up, the Greensprout's rural credit system. Seems like a great idea, right? We, the government, offer loans at much lower rates than private loan sharks to the impoverished farmers of the nation so that they don't starve or are put into financial ruin and make a tidy profit in the process. Win-win, right? You'd think so. But almost as soon as the teeth of the bureaucracy's gears started turning, that noble Robin Hood-esque goal of wealth redistribution was thrown entirely out the window as the last part, the part about turning a tidy profit, became the only part of the plan that the officials placed at the credit system's head really remembered. Within only a few months of the plan's initial implementation, in spite of the governmental mandate initially making no

provision to collect interest on the loans during the initial rollout, interest rates were jacked up to between 20 and 30 percent annually. This wasn't, in spite of the requisite pearl clutching by Sima Ouyang et al. at such an unseemly act of usury by the government. In spite of that, it wasn't a surprise, nor was it unintended. After all, interest rates were the only way to keep the funds solvent. And in any case, the government interest rates were still much more reasonable than that of loan sharks, which could run as high as 100%. But from Smith, quote, Long's critics were right that the imposition of interest charges opened the door to government profit-seeking,

for maximizing the revenue potential of the loan fund soon became the first priority of the Greensprouts measure. End quote. One way to up profit margins? Why, make sure everyone gets a loan. That the idea of e-pay, or forced loans, had been expressly forbidden by the government itself was of little consequence in the face of the rich rewards for those officials with the best numbers, and stiff punishments for those who let funds go undistributed or repayments scrupulously recollected. And here's where we get to the part that I found when reading through this to be just so hauntingly familiar. The ease of loans and the system's push to get as much loaned

out as possible naturally led to the commission issuing loans to those least able to pay them back, quote, making both them and their guarantors subject to confiscation first of their collateral and then of their movable property, end quote. And if the words subprime mortgage and poxic debt packaging start drifting through your head right about now, I'm right there with you. When the impoverished defaulted on their payments and their houses foreclosed on, well, that just meant even more valuables for the state to then resell and up its numbers. lifespan, the Greensprouts program would be caught between the opposite polarities of it literally being a program designed and intended to help the poor rather than harm them and that of the relentless bureaucratic drive to ensure that new loan collections not fall below quota. In the short term at least, the solution had seemed clear enough. If we need to maximize profits but also need not to drain the poor for every ounce of their

lifeblood, then we should just expand our eligible pool of loan recipients. And so it was that the rural loan program, specifically envisioned and enacted to help the poor and downtrodden get a leg up, became a government loan program for pretty much anyone with a pulse, with gradations to amounts that could be loaned based on social rank, ranging from one and a half strings for the lowest grade up to 15 times that for the highest ranked residencies, with additional funds to be allocated to even wealthier rural and urban households as they could back with collateral.

This ruffled even more feathers within official circles because, my god, the next step that seemed likely, if more revenues were indeed the goal, would be to force loans on the rich as well. Sima are assigned relatively large loans, the poor somewhat smaller. They order the poor and rich to array themselves together in baojia guarantee groups. The wealthy are made the chiefs, the poor obtain the money, and in no time all of that money is gone. Inescapably, the wealthy will have to repay the accumulated debts of the many households." He quote. He went on, outlining his nightmare endgame scenario, in which, quote, Once the wealthy are completely exhausted, if the nation should have the misfortune of a border emergency and have to raise many troops,

then from whom will the monies for grain, cloth, and military provisions be raised? End quote. There was yet another issue with the ramping up of governmental loans out to everyone, and that was it actually threatened the actual purpose of the fund from which it was drawing its cash reserves, the ever-normal granary, which was, after all, supposed to be there for disaster relief. Should a disaster befall the state, and the bulk of its reserves tied up as loans, more than 71%, in fact, as of 1074, well, what then? Even Emperor Shenzong, starry-eyed as he still was about the massive profit margins these programs were generating, got concerned enough by this prospect that he ordered thereafter that the ever-normal granaries hold a minimum of 50% of their resources in reserve at all times. Yet despite such safeguards, Smith writes that,

quote, in the end, all Shenzong's doubts about the Royal Credit Program were overwhelmed by its revenue potential. With an average interest return of 26.5% over the program's lifespan between 1069 and 1086, it managed to produce an additional 2.9 million strings of cash in profit yearly, based on minimum loan quotas of 11 million strings. Smith writes that, quote, in the end, all Shenzong's doubts about the rural credit program were overwhelmed by its revenue potential, end quote. With an average interest return rate of 26.5% over the program's lifespan between 1069 and 1086, it managed to produce an additional

2.9 million strings of cash in profit yearly based on minimum loan quotas of 11 million strings per year. And once again, just to recap, when I say strings or strings of cash, that means 1,000 coins. At least with the Greenspouse program, the poor welcomed the measure as a relief from private usury, even though the conservative officials of the court continued to complain about it. Going in almost the opposite direction, popularity-wise, was the hired service system in place of the old conscription service. It did not trigger nearly as apoplectic a reaction from the officialdom,

many of whom actually supported its basic goals. It was, after all, Sima Guang himself who had so lamented the plight of the poor saps who got saddled with being the local supply master, that he personally had proposed paying them to offset their costs. No, this time it was the wealthy and politically connected segment of the populace as a whole that smelled rotten fish in the wind. They quickly assessed the service exemption fees that would pay the salaries of those official posts as little more than a new and particularly obnoxious form of taxation. And once again,

in spite of its initial stated intentions, they were quickly proved very right, and that the imperial bureaucracy, once it creaked into ponderous action, would remember to make a profit and little else. By 1071, for instance, public protest broke out in the Yangtze Circuit, that economic hub at the mouth of the Yangtze River encompassing modern Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. These riots broke out when it was learned that these service exemption fees collected for their region had been set at more than twice the actual costs of the services rendered, and that the administrators who had proposed such price gouging had been promoted for their clever idea. Wang Anshu tried to gloss over this matter as nothing more than the babble of the powerful

engrosser class to confuse the innate benefits of the program to the emperor's ears. But he was less able to do so when, later the same year, yet more protests broke out, this time in the capital city itself, in which some 1,100 residents had marched on the local Mandarin's house to complain about their household status, and thus their tax rate, that had been arbitrarily raised for no reason other than for the government to meet its revenue quota. When the local official turned the mob away without even giving them an audience, though, the mood darkened and the crowd turned against Wang Anshu and his house directly, marching over to his residence and demanding that he be held to account.

Though he was ultimately able to get the crowd to disperse without violence, he was told as being left shaken by the incident and his very near run with summary mob justice. This particular incident, known as the Dongming Affair, after the capital region in which it took place, would later be seized upon by the imperial censor and outspoken opponent of the measure, Liu Zhi, who later wrote that such activist statecraft inevitably resulted in, quote, petty men who actually administer the politics devote themselves to raising revenues in order to earn rewards, thereby transforming the best intention of measures into outright fiscalism. End quote. By the time of Wang Anshi's forced

retirement in 1076, what had been proposed as a progressive tax aimed at distributing the burden off of the shoulders of the poor had instead devolved into a regressive cluster of fees and surcharges imposed on the entire population in order to swell revenues. Wang Anshi attempted to argue, with some success, that the fees that had been placed on the lower tiers of the population were a mere pittance, but the truth was that in practice, even this pittance could prove ruinous. In certain areas, the amount of coins, such as 50, might be all a peasant saw in an entire year, while even light fees became onerous on those poor farmers who may live far afield from their collection official, and would be forced to make the arduous and costly journey there and back at the height of the growing season to hand over maybe five coins.

Even in more urban areas, corruption and bribery proved to be rife, with reports of minor fees being accompanied with unofficial but necessary surcharges of anywhere between $300 and $500 cash on the spot, paid simply to stay on the clerks and their attendant guardsmen's good sides. This was made even worse when the government, attempting to plan ahead, it must be said, tacked on an additional percentage to be stored away as a surplus emergency fee. Though this fee was supposed to only be an added 10%, in practice, overzealous officials eager for promotion pushed the surplus much higher, as high as 45% of the collected in some areas, and the surcharges just kept piling on. By 1076, for example, the empire as a whole spent only 60.7% of its service exemption fees on actually paying for service salaries. What was more, officials and administrators continued to magically find yet new and more innovative ways of streamlining the government service system by either eliminating outright such positions that they deemed superfluous, or transferring formerly civilian posts to the military service system by either eliminating outright such positions that they deemed superfluous

or transferring formerly civilian posts to the military service. Thus, even as more and more of the population paid increasingly steep taxes to ostensibly pay for the civil service posts, there were fewer and fewer actual recipients of those salaries. The rest of the other 40%, nearly 4 million strings of cash, either molded in government slush funds or lined the pockets of officials at all levels. When remember, the whole purpose of these reforms was to get the money out of such useless repositories and make it work for the people. Speaking of the military, how was that whole sea change going, that effort to phase out

the costly mercenaries and imperial troops in favor of local Baojia guardsmen and militia? Well, by 1076, that had been at least partially realized. In the five northernmost circuits of China, for instance, those directly abutting Xixia and Liao, censored data shows that hired soldiers had been cut by between 70-80%, and replaced with Baojia rotated through each county on half-month-long tours of duty. Which meant that, if my calculations are correct, the government was now taxing the peasantry to pay for the service positions, but then filling those service positions with conscripted baoja militiamen, those same peasants but now with a sword in hand rather than a plow, and paying them less than what they'd have made as a civilian to fulfill the same function, in addition to having to pay them less than a regular soldier.

Just roll both those positions into one, and all at less cost than either, and pocket the difference. Add on to this growing surplus the equally well-capitalized winery and ferry toll services monopolized by the government, netting a cool 2.1 million per year in profits. In 1084, the last full year of Shenzong's reign, the government collected 18,729,300 strings of cash in service exemption fees alone, and an additional 5,050,090 strings in wine and ferry fees. And in the face of all these strings of meaningless but big-sounding numbers, let's just throw this all into some kind of perspective once again. Largely as a result of Wang Anshu's new policies and their phenomenal ability to extract revenue, the Song imperial government commanded a GDP of between 25 to 30% of the total global economy by

this point, which makes it about 40% larger than the combined economies of all of Europe during the same period, and easily placing Emperor Shenzong, in terms of overall value, in the top 10 richest people ever, possibly only behind Genghis Khan. The policy reform probably most successful in being transformed into an engine of state revenues, though, was the insertion of the state into direct trade. If the Greensprouts had primed the pump, the service exemption tax had sucked the tube, and the Baozhou system minimized the cost, then the transformation of the state trade bureau from a regulatory agency aimed at promoting individual commerce into a

nationwide credit and wholesaling operation dedicated to amassing revenues was striking the motherlode. The state was able to seize control of the markets by requiring commercial permits from sellers of many products, plus direct taxation on goods sold, as well as the profits generated from the direct buying and selling of its own products at market. This was further augmented beginning in 1073 with the rollout of the so-called guild exemption fee, which in effect forced all commercial guilds in the capital to pay a cash fee in lieu of actually providing direct goods and services to the government. It wound up as a flat tax levied against all vendors,

all the way down to basic water sellers, the vast majority of whom had never been obligated to pay any such fee to the government for applying their wares up until this point. The excess cash generated was largely funneled into, yes, yet more loans to the public, which once again rapidly devolved into practices just as predatory as the most rapacious of the private engrossers. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy. He was a man of contradictions, a tyrant and a reformer,

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One counselor of state named Feng Qing complained that he had observed the widespread practice of officials encouraging the poor to pawn their grain in order to get emergency cash loans, without them really understanding what they were exactly agreeing to. He wrote, quote, they just see that the government is handing out money, and there are none who can turn away. So they pile up debt, and when the time comes, they cannot repay, end quote. Nevertheless, the system would prove to be so ridiculously profitable. In 1076, for instance, it returned a 1.41 million cash surplus on its investment of 5 million into the program, that by the end of Shenzong's reign, the practice had been expanded to at least 20 provincial level

bureaus established in every corner of the empire except for Sichuan, which remained dominated by the powerful superintendency for tea and horses. Smith writes that, quote, Even as late as the fifth month of 1085, two months after Shenzong's death, the Ministry of Finance recommended that loan stations be set up in all but the most commercially backward areas of the empire. By the end of Shenzong's reign, the agency that was meant to curb the power of the engrossing monopolists had itself turned into the largest engrosser in the empire, To get somewhat more specific about the profitability of the new policies as a whole under Wang Anshu's oversight, we can turn to Japanese monetary historian Kei Miyazawa, who details that in 1076,

the new policies had collectively added some 33% additional profits to the Song state's baseline income of 54 million strings annually, to a total of more than 72 million strings of cash. By the time of Shenzong's death, that revenue had grown to something in the range of 100 million strings or more per year. Now, you'll remember that one of the initial center points of Wang Anshu getting the emperor on board with all of this was that he sold it as essentially free money, some kind of win-win-win for the emperor, the government, and the people at large. The new policies, he said, would massively expand state revenues, and the populace would receive no additional taxes because something something hand-wavy-um, don't worry about it. Well, I'm sure we've all heard enough of my ominous foreshadowing

by now to know that it didn't exactly pan out the way that Wang had promised it would. As opponents of the time continually argued, yes, the new policies did massively enrich the government in the short term, but it wound up doing so by, quote, sacrificing the long-term stability and productivity of the state by sundering the bonds of the natural community, confronting the natural economy with the demands of a hyper-monetized state, and wound up harming most the relatively poor and unprotected classes they were intended to assist, end quote. Rather than Wang's pie-in-the-sky vision of a perfectly open economy, with perfect monetary fluidity and unencumbered by financial bottlenecks such as quota demands, the critics of Wang Anshu were saying that the system was not perfect, and thus, neither were its outcomes,

and that rather than reducing the burden on the people while enriching the state, it had become a series of new and increasingly heavy yokes placed upon their necks in the form of de facto higher taxes, currency crisis, and economic stagnation. And as time went by, and the more the state squeezed the revenues out of the people, the less effective those new policies actually became. After all, one can't wring water from a dry sponge, no matter how hard you squeeze. The first wide-scale event that would lay bare the disruptive and heartlessly commercialized machine the new policies had transformed into would come in 1074, when widespread famine struck large swaths of northern China,

brought on by prolonged drought. The chaos and suffering this crisis would cause, and just as much Wang Anshi's ill-advised efforts to downplay what it was actually doing to the people, to the emperor, would become the first nail in his career's coffin. Thousands upon thousands of peasants, facing starvation as well as thirst, were forced to abandon their homesteads and head to the capital to redress the central government of their predicament. In response, in addition to publicly rebuking Wang for his misrepresentation of the crisis, Shenzong opened the route of remonstrance,

and called upon all officials to memorialize to him personally on the failings of the government, the first time he had allowed such criticism in four years. Lo and behold, who should spring forward to take up the challenge but Sima Guang, who at last broke his vow of public silence on the matter following his embarrassment in 1070, and issued a comprehensive and scathing critique of Wang's little experiment that I've quoted from already. Far more damaging, though, were the reports that were secretly delivered via back channels to the court by the disaffected one-time protege of Wang Anshi, named Zheng Xia, that painted a stark and shocking portrait of the misery inflicted upon the victims of the drought, tax gouging by officials, and unprecedented military conscription and mobilization. From Smith, quote, Zheng sought to convince his mentor, Wang, that in spite of their

good intentions, the economic reforms exacerbated by military adventurism had turned into cruel and oppressive burdens on the people. Meeting nothing but silence from Wang, Zheng Xia decided to take his case directly to the emperor. With the encouragement of Wang's younger brother, who resolutely opposed the new policies, Zheng vividly portrayed the weak, sick, and naked refugees who thronged the roads out of the northeast with their families and possessions in tow, driven along by the wind and sand." Zheng summed up his report with the contention along by the wind and sand, end quote. Zheng summed up his report with the contention that while the drought and famine were the proximate causes of this desperate situation, the actual source of this unfolding disaster was the wrath

of heaven itself at, quote, a government that filled its storehouses to overflowing through the new policy's rapaciousness, end quote. Zheng Sha concluded, quote, the drought is Wang Anshi's doing. Cashier him, and the heavens will give rain, end quote. Wang Anshi had by this point already gotten himself on pretty thin ice with Emperor Shenzong, owing largely to the fissures that had opened within his coalition that smelled an awful lot like factionalism developing in the court to the monarch. This was made worse when charges were filed against the finance commissioner, Shui Xiang, of his agency routinely beating and imprisoning merchants who bypassed the commission in pursuit of their businesses. Wang Anshu stood

by Shui, but any hope of suppressing the scandal was dashed with the publication of Zheng Xia's report that portrayed petty traders hauled off in kangs for defaulting on their state trade fees. By the way, I had to look this up when I read it, but a Kang is a device very similar to the stocks or the pillories in which someone convicted of a crime is punished by having their head and sometimes hands locked into that hinged wooden board with their crimes posted right next to them. Unlike the stocks, though, a keng was typically not fixed to the ground, but rather simply worn about the neck like a yoke. It served not only as a means of public humiliation, but could sometimes even prove fatal to the person

being punished, since in addition to being an immense weight upon the neck and shoulders, it was usually designed to ensure that the convict could not reach his own mouth to feed himself, forcing them to rely on passersby or family to get simple food and water. In any case, after reading Zheng's report, Shenzong had had enough. The worst of his nagging fears about the new policies had evidently come to pass, and worse yet, it seemed clear that Wang Anshu had both known about such abusive practices and attempted to hide them from the emperor's knowledge. The day after the memorial was delivered to the court, Shanzong ordered the green sprouts and service exemption taxes to be temporarily suspended, a halt of the Baojia survey in progress,

and steep reductions to the fees imposed on the guilds and merchants. As for Wang Anxue himself, his fate was yet to be determined, until less than a week later when, just as Zheng Xia had prophesied, the heavens opened up over northern China, releasing a quenching rain over the parched land. That was more than enough for the emperor. In the fourth month of 1074, he ordered Wang Anshu to be relieved of his post as chief minister of the central government and to be reassigned as a mere prefect in Nanjing. Wang was out. Or so it seemed.

Curiously, though he followed through on ousting Wang, Shanzong also allowed him to choose his own successor, which Anshu did in the person of his stalwart supporter Han Jiang. Moreover, with the immediate crisis relieved and heaven's ire apparently sated, he quickly reversed himself on the suspension of the reformist policies. Zheng Xia, just now the hero of the hour, would quickly feel the tide turn decisively against him when Shenzong not only closed the door on official remonstration against the reforms, but declared that any attempt to capitulate to conventionality

and try to undermine the laws would be deemed by the state as an unpardonable offense. Zheng, having defeated Wang Anshe, had already set his sights on the new heads of the new policies, Han Jiang and his lieutenants. This abrupt reversion left him suddenly in the extremely vulnerable position of being on the wrong side of the imperial will, a fact that was capitalized on immediately by the reformists. Zheng was quickly brought up on charges of operating against the government and attempting to Jiangnan out of the imperial limelight for his troubles for good. Even with their immediate enemy out of the way, lacking the decisive authority figure of Wang Anshu proved to be highly corrosive to the reformist faction at all levels. By the following year, the infighting and backbiting by erstwhile political allies had heated up to the point where Han Jiang, the nominal head of state,

felt so unable to keep even his own underlings in line, and had in practice lost the role of most powerful minister to his nominal second-in-command, Lu Huixin, who himself was bent on supplanting Wang Anshu as the leader of his party and the government as a whole. Feeling himself up against a wall, Han turned to the emperor, begging him to recall Wang to the capital and back into service. Though Shenzong had been rightly angry with An She for having beguiled him about the effects of the drought, he nevertheless still greatly respected and desired the counsel of the man the 24-year-old saw as his mentor. And this provided just the excuse he needed to justify summoning the 54-year-old visionary back to Kaifeng. Wang was himself clearly chomping at the bit to get back in action,

as he made the more than 600-kilometer return journey from Nanjing in a mere seven days in the second month of 1075. As it turned out, though, ten months of Wanglessness in the capital had had something of a dampening effect on the ongoing rollout of the new policies. In spite of the rainfall that had saved the north and doomed Wang Anshi's first tenure, drought and famine continued to intermittently grip the north, stymieing government efforts to implement further reform measures or reap their economic returns. Many officials, moved by the plight of the peasantry, had begun advocating for government handouts and debt cancellations, to the point that, in a rather stunning reversal of his initial high-mindedness, Wang complained that the court ministers seemed to be, quote, competing to indulge the commoners

with sympathy, end quote, without thinking about how such measures would affect their long-term fiscal returns. You do remember what this whole thing was supposed to be all about, don't you, Anshu? Just as much as the North China problems, the emperor himself had also undergone a significant change in personality that hemmed in Wang's ambitions to a new and unwelcome degree. Now 25, Shenzong had grown in the past several years, rather more immune to Wang's often facile arguments and hand-waving about the true complexity of an empire-spanning economic overhaul. Maybe things weren't quite as simple as, oh, it'll all just work out in the end. And then, heaven struck again. Not with weather this time, but with a portent in the sky itself. A comet appeared in the southwestern sky that for weeks on end lit up both day and night.

This may have been, according to David Sargent in The Greatest Comets in History, a so-called sungrazer that sailed as close as a few thousand kilometers from the sun at its perihelion, resulting in a truly spectacular display. For us in the modern world, that would be quite the amazing sight to behold, and little more. But as we know well by now, for most pre-modern societies, and certainly not least of which the ever-astronomically conscious Chinese, such irregularities in the heavens were cause for panic rather than amazement, since they foretold doom. The comet of 1075, appearing in the constellation Chen in particular, was interpreted by imperial astrologers to indicate a sweeping away of the old order. Shen Zong, stricken with terror, immediately reopened

the channel for official remonstration about governmental failures in hopes to appease the heavens and save himself. Wang Anshi, however, reverted to his usual tactic of dismissing any and everything that spoke against his vision, apparently even if it came from heaven itself. Comet shmamit, he said, you should crush your critics, your majesty, just like before. This time, though, Shenzong was having none of it, retorting that the people are seriously troubled by the new policies. Wang again attempted to minimize the problem, saying, the people resent all manner of things, like intense cold, heat, and rain. Why does their resentment of the new policies merit special sympathy?

But Shenzong's word on the matter was final, and he ended off with, I wish they did not even have that to resent. In response to this unexpected imperial chutzpah, Wang Anshi almost literally picked up his ball and went home. He, with all high melodrama, retired to his bed with a sickness for two weeks thereafter and would not come out. Smith writes, quote, In fact, Shenzong was growing weary of his mentor and of the disorder in Wang's faction.

End quote. Moreover, Wang's return to power meant that those who'd been seeking to replace him, particularly Lu Huixin, now had to fairly dive for cover or potentially face official backlash against their own excesses in Wang's absence. Han Jiang, the nominal head of state, finally had had enough of the circus and retired. But as for Lu, he and his lackeys had to face down the dogged investigation of Wang Anshi's son, Wang Pang, into their extracurricular activities while daddy had been out of town. When Peng's investigation began targeting members of his extended family, though,

Liu too threw in the towel, begging the emperor to have Peng called off the case and have an official investigation opened up instead, and to be allowed to resign his post in Kaifeng and be dispatched to Chenzhou as prefect in a kind of self-imposed exile. Before he left, though, Liu launched one final counterattack. As the official investigation turned up little real evidence in spite of the mountain of indictments Wang Peng and his cronies had leveled against him and his family, Liu lashed out with a scathing denunciation of Wang Anshi himself, who had until this point been trying to stay above the fray. Taken aback, Wang asked his son what would have prompted such a damaging defection from his fold,

to which Peng was forced to admit that he had ordered the manipulation and fabrication of evidence in order to successfully prosecute Liu. Father angrily reproached son, but it soon devolved into a shouting match of such intensity that Wang lashed out at those he deemed responsible, but it proved to be too much for the emperor who had tolerated this clown car for long enough. As virtually every source on the topic echoes, and so why should I be any different, quote, the emperor was increasingly weary of Wang Anshi's behavior, end quote. In the 10th month of 1076, Shenzong allowed Wang Anshi to offer his second retirement and request to return to Jiangning, which the throne accepted. He would spend the rest of his life in the city, on the southern bank of the Yangtze, composing poetry and other works of literature until his death in 1086 at the age of

64, only a year after Emperor Shenzong's death the prior April. Following Shenzong and his own death, the new policies that had been his political legacy underwent significant change and rollback, but in spite of the controversy surrounding them, they would, in at least a modified form, continue on as state policy for the remainder of the Song regime. Wang's own political legacy would remain the subject of contentious debate and revision for the millennium to follow. For virtually all of the rest of the Chinese Imperium, Song through Qing, Wang's legacy would be dictated by the Confucian ministers he had so challenged and railed against. Unsurprisingly, he was viewed largely as an Icarus, an undeniably brilliant and singular figure who challenged the status quo

of both economy and government in the loudest, most strident, and most daring way possible, who would not bend and thus ultimately broke. The right-hand man of the emperor who made political enemies like a baozi shop makes dumplings, until he finally got on the government's last nerve to his own downfall. And you know, now that I think about it, rather a bit like a Song dynasty Alexander Hamilton. Maybe we can start a campaign to get him on the Tan Yuan bill. Harvard professor Peter Bull had this to say about Wang Anshi. Quote, By and large, Wang Anshi remains an example of what not to do. There is this radical turn against increasing the state's role in society and the economy, and it doesn't happen again until the

20th century. Because in the 20th century, the communists picked up some of Wang Anshi's ideas and resuscitated his reputation, end quote. He never could back down. He never learned to take his time. Oh, Wang Anshi, when down. He never learned to take his time. Oh, Wang Anshu, when China sings for you, will they know what you overcame? Will they know you rewrote the game? The world will never be the same. Now that we've completed our trinity on Wang Anshu and the new policies, next time, with the world turned upside down, we'll finish out the reign of Emperor Shenzong, before moving into the final three emperors of the Northern Song, and toward its stunning and climactic destruction.

Thanks for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.