Wang Anshi’s New Policies

In the 11th century the Song economy was rapidly commercialising, but the state was burdened by the cost of its huge army, while small farmers fell into debt to great landowners and moneylenders, whom Wang Anshi called ‘engrossers’. Wang, born in 1021 in Linchuan and a jinshi graduate of 1042, had urged sweeping changes in a long memorial to Emperor Renzong in 1058. The young Emperor Shenzong, who came to the throne in 1067, made him an assistant chief councillor on 26 February 1069, and on 22 March Wang and Chen Shengzhi set up a Finance Planning Commission to draft the new laws.

The Balanced Delivery law (August 1069) let the fiscal officials of six southern circuits buy and sell goods where they were cheap or dear; the Green Sprouts law (September 1069) lent farmers money or seed from the state granaries before the harvest; the hired-service law turned labour duties into money payments; market-exchange bureaus in Kaifeng and other cities bought surplus goods and lent to merchants; the square-field survey re-registered land for taxation; the baojia system organised households into self-policing groups drilled as militia; and the examinations were rebuilt around the classics, with a new degree in law. Wang was chief councillor from January 1071 to 1074 and again in 1075–1076. Revenues rose — tax receipts in coin by nearly 40 per cent — but officials forced loans on farmers, and the loans carried interest of 20–30 per cent a year; a famine in 1074 drove many indebted peasants from their land.

Opposition was fierce. The historian Sima Guang, leader of the Conservatives, held that the state should not compete with private wealth and that the reforms upset the social order; the poet Su Shi was jailed and exiled for his criticism. Shenzong kept the laws after Wang retired to Jiangning (Nanjing) in 1076, but he died on 1 April 1085. Under the regency of Empress Dowager Gao the laws were abolished one after another — the square-field survey in November 1085, the Green Sprouts loans on 16 September 1086 — with Sima Guang, chief councillor from March 1086, leading the repeal; Wang died on 21 May 1086 and Sima that October. When Emperor Zhezong came of age in 1093 the Reformers returned and revived the New Policies, which Cai Jing carried on under Emperor Huizong; after the Jurchens took Kaifeng in 1127 the reformers were widely blamed for the catastrophe. Modern writers have compared Wang's policies to state economic management of the 20th century — Henry A. Wallace called him a ‘Chinese New Dealer’.