Reporter | Lin Zi people
Edit | Yellow Moon
1
On December 18, 2021, on the day of the English level 4 and 6 exams, a meme about Wang Anshi spread in some colleges and universities in Beijing, Shanghai and even overseas: because of Wang Anshi's character "Jiefu", college students affectionately called this thousand-year-old political and literary master "Jeff", and it was rumored that with Jeff's blessing, the fourth and sixth level exams and final exams could be passed. This day is also the 1,000th anniversary of Wang Anshi's birth, and the jokes circulating among young people are just a small example of Wang Anshi's important place in our cultural and historical memory today. Zhang Yuhan, the responsible editor of "Wang Anshi: The Man Standing in the Turbid Stream" and the translator of "The Transformation of Song Dynasty China: Wang Anshi and His New Deals", noted that among the millennium birth anniversaries of Song Dynasty historical figures that have appeared in recent years, including Ouyang Xiu in 2007 and Sima Guang in 2019, Wang Anshi's millennium birth commemoration activities are the most powerful, from media reports and related works to academic seminars. In the view of Liu Zijian, author of "The Transformation of Song Dynasty China," "In the long course of China's history, few people are as important as Wang Anshi, the outstanding reformer and most controversial politician of the Northern Song Dynasty." ”
Wang Anshi (王安石), a native of The First Dynasty in Huainan and Anhui provinces in his early years, entered the central imperial court during the reign of Emperor Renzong in Linchuan (present-day Fuzhou, Jiangxi Province), and in the early years of his reign as a magistrate in Huainan and Anhui, and entered the central imperial court during the Jiayou period, and because he felt that the northern Song Dynasty's national strength was weakening and the people were displaced, he presented the "Letter of Speech of Emperor Shangrenzong" to demand a comprehensive reform of the law since the beginning of the Song Dynasty. In the second year of Xi Ning (1069), Wang Anshi was promoted by Emperor Shenzong of Song to the position of governor of the government, and the following year he paid homage to the chancellor and began to preside over the change of law. Due to the opposition of the conservatives, Xi Ning resigned in the seventh year (1074), was re-activated a year later, and then again in the ninth year of Xi Ning (1076). After that, Wang Anshi lived in Jiangning until his death in the first year of the Yuan Dynasty (1086). Wang Anshi's transformation law involves political, economic, cultural, and educational aspects, including rectifying the state finances, introducing agricultural loans (the "Qingmiao Law"), optimizing state revenues, management and national defense measures (the "Equal Loss Law", "Recruitment Law", "Baojia Law"), increasing the circulation of money, promulgating the national trade system (the "City Easy Law"), and reforming the education and examination system, etc., and its depth and breadth can be called the most reformed in China's imperial period.
However, the change of law not only failed, but also profoundly changed the political pattern of the Song Dynasty, and to a certain extent laid the groundwork for the collapse of the Song Dynasty. The Japanese sinologist Ieo Miura wrote in "Wang Anshi: The Man Standing in the Turbid Stream", "He appeared like a comet in the sky of 11th-century China, and his unprecedented great reforms attempted to uproot the old social system." But without waiting for him to do his best, Wang Anshi suddenly disappeared from the sky of history. To this day, Wang Anshi's achievements and deeds are still the topic of discussion among historians and ordinary history enthusiasts. A few days ago, at a new book sharing meeting entitled "Ruining the Reputation of the Millennium: The Multifaceted Wang Anshi", Yu Yunguo and Zhang Yuhan shared their understanding of "Wang Anshi's Transformation Method and Its Impact" with the audience.
"Discredited Millennium: Multi-faceted Wang Anshi" New Book Sharing Meeting Site (Courtesy of the Organizer) Rich Countries And Strong Soldiers or Legislative Degrees change customs: What is Wang Anshi changing the law?
The background of wang anshi's change of law is a variety of accumulated defects that have begun to appear since the time of the Renzong Dynasty. At the beginning of the founding of the Song Dynasty, the policy of free land trading was established, and as the rich-pocketed families continued to buy land, the small people had to sell their land because of natural and man-made disasters, and the problem of land annexation intensified. The huge administrative and military apparatus caused the problem of redundant officials, redundant soldiers, and redundant expenses, and although the level of economic development in the Song Dynasty was significantly improved compared with that of the Tang Dynasty, the state failed to grasp sufficient financial resources. At the same time, the Liao and Western Xia in the north posed a constant threat to the border security of the Northern Song Dynasty. Realizing that the system formulated at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China was no longer in line with the trend of social and historical development, Fan Zhongyan launched a reform during the Qing calendar of Emperor Renzong, known in history as the "New Deal of the Qing Calendar". Yu Yunguo pointed out that the Qingli New Deal was a conscious self-reform of the political system, bureaucracy and a series of other systems by the elite scholars at that time, and although the Qingli New Deal died quickly, we can see the continuity and isomorphism of Fan Zhongyan's Qingli New Deal and Wang Anshi's transformation law on many issues.
Wang Anshi's ability to promote the change of law was closely related to the full support of Song Shenzong at the beginning of his reign. Yu Yunguo believed that Song Shenzong was perhaps the most eager emperor of the Northern Song Dynasty besides Song Taizu, who was only in his twenties when he succeeded to the throne, which was the age of ambition and eagerness to show his ambitions. Song Shenzong, who had the wish of a rich country and a strong army, and Wang Anshi immediately hit it off and launched a change of law. When it comes to the relationship between Song Shenzong and Wang Anshi, Yu Yunguo roughly divides it into three stages. The second year of Xi Ning to the fourth year of Xi Ning can be said to be a "honeymoon period", and in order to fully support the reform of the law, Song Shenzong set up a temporary legislature to "establish the Three Divisions Ordinance Division", in fact, he bypassed the usual procedure of promulgating major government decrees and directly introduced the policy of changing the law through the Regulation Department of the Three Divisions. With the support of Emperor Shenzong of Song, about 14 reform measures were pushed aside without much resistance, and many of the core figures in the opposition to change the law were forced to leave the court, when a minister commented that "Shang and An Shi are like one person, this is Tianye".
However, the implementation process of the new law exposed various shortcomings, and the new law and regulations also had various deviations in the implementation process, which caused strong opposition from the government and the public, so that Song Shenzong could not consider the opinions of the opposition, so after four years of Xining, the pair entered a more delicate stage - on the one hand, Wang Anshi hoped to continue to deepen the reform with vigor, but Song Shenzong used his monarchy to make a correction or even a suspension in some aspects. This stage ended with Wang Anshi's first resignation in the seventh year of Xining. After that, there was a dispute within the Fa-Changing Sect, and Wang Anshi soon returned to the court. In the following year, Wang Yunying, one of Aizi and one of the important assistants of the Transformation Law, died young, and Wang Anshi was hit hard, coupled with the deepening of the rift between the monarchs and the courtiers, and finally a second resignation occurred.
Jiangxi Fuzhou Wang Anshi Memorial Hall (Source: Visual China)
Zhang Yuhan pointed out that from the perspective of Song Shenzong, supporting Wang Anshi's transformation of the law also has selfish considerations. At the beginning of his succession, the actual political affairs were presided over by Han Qi, Fu Bi, and Ouyang Xiu, who had experienced the Renzong Dynasty and the Yingzong Dynasty, and to improve his imperial power, Song Shenzong needed to use another force to compete with these old ministers. Wang Anshi's thought precisely has the tendency to strengthen the absolute monarchy: Wang Anshi believes that in the political system, the emperor is the most powerful, and all subjects need to look up to the emperor, which is a great help to Song Shenzong's strengthening of imperial power.
Wang Anshi was the only minister who supported Song Shenzong's policy of enriching the country and strengthening the military, but Zhang Yuhan reminded us that Wang Anshi himself actually had a different vision of the change. For Wang Anshi, the ultimate goal of the change was to restore the perfect political order of the ancient Yao Shun era and let the "way of the first king" reappear in the human world. Therefore, the core of the change of law is the "degree of legislation" and "change of customs", the so-called degree of legislation, that is, to restore the practice of the ancient saint kings at the level of various rules and regulations; the so-called change of customs refers to changing the bureaucratic system and the customs of scholars, and then influencing ordinary people through scholars, and ultimately changing the whole society. Although from the perspective of the actual measures to change the law, there are more contents involving finance and rich countries and strong troops, and it is the aspect that has the widest impact on the whole society, Zhang Yuhan believes that "(Wang Anshi) does not have too many theories and thinking in the economic aspect, and many levels actually need to rely on Lu Huiqing, Zeng Bu and others to help implement it."
Liu Zijian's Theoretical Contribution: Studying song history using administrative and political science methods
Liu Zijian was an expert in Song history in the 20th century, and nearly 20 years after the introduction of his "China Turning Inward: Cultural Introversion at the Time of the Two Song Dynasties", his early masterpiece "The Transformation of Song Dynasty China" was finally translated and introduced to the market. Liu Zijian's academic trajectory is very special: before he went to the United States in 1946, he studied Western history and diplomatic history, and at the beginning of his visit to the United States, he still studied modern Sino-Japanese relations, and in 1950 he received a doctorate in history from the University of Pittsburgh with a dissertation entitled "Sino-Japanese Diplomacy in the Period of Appeasement Policy from 1933 to 1937". From the 1950s onwards, Liu Zijian shifted the focus of his research from modern Sino-Japanese relations to song history. Yu Yunguo believes that this makes Liu Zijian good at using the research methods of other social disciplines in historical research. In "The Transformation of China in the Song Dynasty", he used the methods of administrative science and political science to analyze a series of problems in Wang Anshi's transformation method, providing many new ideas for subsequent researchers. Zhang Yuhan pointed out that many of Liu Zijian's insights — such as the Fa-change school is mostly from the south, the conservative school is mostly from the north, the former is mostly influenced by Buddhism, the latter is mostly influenced by Taoism - leaving us with a lot of room for thinking and further study. Therefore, although this work has been published for more than 60 years, it still has academic vitality.
Reforms in Song Dynasty China: Wang Anshi and His New Deal
Liu Zijian by Zhang Yuhan translated
Century Wenjing | Shanghai People's Publishing House 2022-1
In Yu Yunguo's view, "The Transformation of Song Dynasty China" has three commendable highlights. First of all, Liu Zijian conducted a typological study of the bureaucracy during Wang Anshi's reform, dividing the bureaucracy into three types: the first is the conceptual type, that is, idealists like Wang Anshi, Sima Guang, Cheng Yi, Su Shi, and Su Rui, no matter what their attitude towards changing the law, they all hope to restrain the monarchical bureaucracy and are a rare outstanding representative of the bureaucrats; the second is the Shijin type, which accounts for the vast majority of the bureaucracy, and they realistically put career promotion as the primary consideration. Among them, there are both conformist bureaucrats (who can only passively implement the rules of their superiors, and have no motivation and ability to innovate and improve their business, they are the vast majority in the official arena), and there are also talented bureaucrats (who have outstanding talents and enterprising spirit, and spare no effort to implement the New Deal), Zeng Bu and Lu Huiqing belong to this category; the third type is the worst type of dereliction of duty, this type of bureaucracy is unprincipled, immoral, and does everything for their own selfish desires - malfeasance bureaucrats can also be divided into corrupt types and power-grabbing types, the latter is worse than the former, because they are ambitious and eager to forge ahead. But it will gain power through unconventional means and immoral tactics, and then embezzlement. There is sometimes a blurred area between the talent type and the power type, such as Zhang Wei and Cai Qing, who are the pioneers of Cai Jing. As the party struggle between the new and old schools intensified, the bureaucracy was gradually dominated by malfeasance-type bureaucrats.
Second, Liu Zijian conducted an in-depth study of the sub-bureaucracy of the Song Dynasty. He pointed out that the operation of the civil service system in the Song Dynasty was inseparable from a large number of lower-level bureaucrats, who were isolated from the politics of scholars and doctors based on the imperial examination system, and they could not enter the ranks of officials, but they took root at the grass-roots level for a long time and had an important impact on the operation and governance of local society. Because of the hopelessness of their careers, many lower-level bureaucrats went up and down their hands in the face of the people, enriched themselves, and sometimes joined forces with higher-level officials to fish and flesh the people. Yu Yunguo said, "This class of Xu officials became an important lubricant for the operation of the (imperial) Chinese bureaucracy after the Song Dynasty, and it was also an important reason for the corruption of the (imperial) Chinese bureaucracy." ”
In addition, Liu Zijian revealed that the failure of corporal politics in the monarchical totalitarian system was doomed. Although the Confucian political ideal was to regulate the entire monarchy and bureaucracy, scholars could only carry out reforms if they relied on the monarchy. Therefore, Wang Anshi's transformation of the law has a tendency to strengthen authoritarianism at both the conceptual and political level, and the stronger the monarchy, the greater the promotion of reform. However, this will constitute a contradiction: on the one hand, the strengthening of the monarchy's centralization can promote reform, but after the reform is promoted, the monarchy's centralization has become more and more powerful. When the monarchy grows, it is bound to clash with the power of the monarch, and the monarch will have doubts about the bureaucratic leaders who lead the reforms, and then question the purpose of the reforms. "Any reform in ancient times can only be abandoned halfway," Yu Yunguo said, "from after Wang Anshi to before the Western powers opened the door to China, any bureaucratic reform can never succeed, which is the biggest enlightenment left to us by Liu Zijian." ”
How to evaluate Wang Anshi? Providing historical resources cannot be conclusive
Wang Anshi faced many objections and criticisms during the period of presiding over the reform of the law, and the evaluation he received after his death has been inconclusive, and even different views have been different in different dynasties and periods. At the time of the two Song Dynasties, because Cai Jing was still playing the banner of changing the law before the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, after the change of Jing Kang and the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, the Song people at that time equated Cai Jing with Wang Anshi, and had a great misunderstanding of Wang Anshi, believing that the demise of the Northern Song Dynasty originated from Wang Anshi's transformation of the law.
Zhang Yuhan believes that from the perspective of historical latecomers, this kind of blame is certainly untenable, but Wang Anshi's transformation of the law does mark a turning point in the political ecology of the Song Dynasty. At the beginning of the founding of the Northern Song Dynasty, a relatively perfect political environment was formed, the monarchy was relatively restrained, and the power held by the scholars could effectively balance it. However, Wang Anshi strengthened the power of the monarch during the period of presiding over the change of law, and he himself did gain power over ordinary prime ministers, but this abnormal power was actually part of the autocratic monarchy, which caused great damage to the political ecology of the Northern Song Dynasty. During the period of YuanYou's reformation, the conservative faction came to power, but instead of reversing this trend, it treated its human body in the same way as a person, and in turn suppressed the reform school. This exacerbated the trend of political deterioration, which eventually led to the formation of institutional bureaucratic corruption during the Reigns of Emperor Huizong of Song and Cai Jing.
Yu Yunguo pointed out that since Wang Anshi's transformation of the law, extraordinary power has become the first domino to shake the bureaucratic system of the Song Dynasty monarch. The aforementioned Establishment of the Three Divisions of Regulations undermined the administrative decision-making process in Zhongshu Province; during Wang Anshi's reign, he also expelled the Taiwan counselors who criticized the New Deal and selected officials who fully supported the reforms of the New Deal into the supervision system, and the supervision system's restriction and balance of monarchy and power existed in name only. After that, some high-ranking officials of the imperial court borrowed Wang Anshi's ideas to gain power, for example, Cai Jing, who worshiped the chancellor in the early period of Emperor Huizong's reign, set up a lecture department at the behest of Emperor Huizong of Song, and directly formulated and implemented the policy of governing the country like the Regulation Department of the Three Divisions during Wang Anshi's reform period. In the late Southern Song Dynasty, there were constantly powerful ministers, such as Han Nongxin, Shi Miyuan, and Jia Xiangdao, also because they received extraordinary power from the emperor. Wang Anshi's reform proposal emphasized "fixing on one", that is, only when opinions were unified could reform be vigorously promoted with the support of imperial power, and this idea became more and more serious in the process of changing the law, which had a negative impact on the official style—the shijin bureaucrats who occupied the majority of the official field would only act according to the wishes of the rulers. "If the upper liang is not right and the lower beam is crooked, the official style is not correct, the world style is not correct, and how can the world style be correct and the people's style be correct; this is the negative impact brought about by Wang Anshi's leading idea of fixing one, and this is also the biggest lesson for our political culture."
In Yu Yunguo's view, Wang Anshi's transformation method is not only the most attractive research topic in the history of the Song Dynasty, but also the entire History of China, but it is also like a Sphinx mystery, which can never be conclusively determined - in fact, history has never existed to cover the coffin, and the interpretation of history by future generations is bound to be integrated into the values and methodologies of later generations. Looking back at the significance of Wang Anshi's transformation method, we actually think about how it enlightens our current social changes, and provide some kind of ideological resources for it. "Whenever a reform reaches the point where it is required to further deepen and move forward, we will constantly ask Wang Anshi about the success or failure of the transformation of the law. This is probably the biggest enlightenment that Wang Anshi's reform has given us. He said.