by John Keay
Xia’s further history would be less than tranquil. But the state would outlast both the Khitan empire of Liao and its twelfth-century successor in the north, the Jurchen empire of Jin. For all of 200 years Xia shared control of northern China with one or other of these alien dynasties, plus the Song. The tripartite arrangement proved workable and, however distasteful to Song Confucianists and later historians, may be seen as an example of a sustainable multi-state system. Even the terrible fate that awaited Xia when in 1226–27 it became the object of Chinggis Khan’s last and bloodiest campaign may not have completely extinguished it. Evidence from Koslov’s excavations strongly suggests that, in the sands of Ningxia, ‘the Great State of White and High’ lived on, ghost-like and abuzz with devotion, for another half-century.
REFORM AND REAPPRAISAL
The challenge thrown down by Yuanhao Weiming’s imperial enthronement in 1038 had long-term consequences for the Song too. It was bad enough that the Song had had to make concessions to the Khitan Liao in the 1005 treaty of Shanyuan. Now it was worse: in 1038 they faced the defiance of the long-subject Xia in a far corner of the empire, plus the likelihood of the Khitan making common cause with this upstart. The Khitan Liao would eventually have to be bought off with a 50 per cent increase in the annual tribute paid them. Yet Xia, even without their support, proved strong enough to withstand a long Song offensive combining deployment and diplomacy.
In the Song capital of Kaifeng the resulting loss of face was bitterly felt and occasioned serious heart-searching. Clearly there was something wrong in the great empire of the Song. Like the Han and Tang empires of old, Song China was more prosperous, more advanced, more populous, more organised, probably more urbanised and certainly more culturally refined than any contemporary power in the world. Yet regional supremacy eluded it. It exercised no substantive authority in central or south-east Asia, had lost the north-west, failed to regain the north-east, was liable for heavy subsidies to both, and could scarcely defend its own constricted frontiers. The prestige of Heaven’s Son, now replicated by the Khitan Liao and aped by the Tangut Xia, seemed notably impaired.
Military failure could be put down to the Song dynasty’s early preference for civilian control of the provinces and a reluctance to maintain large frontier armies like those that had turned on the Tang and competed as the Five Dynasties. Officials who urged the reversal of this policy as the only way of avoiding further embarrassment from Khitan Liao and Tangut Xia could all too easily be accused of favouring military deployment for ulterior reasons, such as building a power base of their own from which to overthrow the dynasty. But a way round this objection was found by linking the case for frontier militarisation with the more acceptable cause of moral regeneration and political reform.
To this end Ouyang Xiu, in the 1030s a rising star at the Song court with a reputation for formidable learning, aligned himself with a Confucian idealist called Fan Zhongyang, who was the prefect of Kaifeng. They were an unlikely pairing, the young Ouyang being a notorious womaniser and partygoer while Fan aspired ‘to be the first in worrying about the world’s troubles and the last in enjoying its pleasures’ (his definition of a good Confucian official). But both looked to the idealised past for inspiration in reforming the dysfunctional present – a normal default position for Confucianists. And both identified Buddhism as the latter-day source of all corruption. It was ‘an opiate of the people’ even, and all the more so now that it was central to the pretensions of both Tangut Xia and Khitan Liao. ‘Trumpeting abroad its grand, fantastic doctrines’, as Ouyang Xiu put it, this evil could best be defeated by a return to Confucian ‘rites and rightness, . . . the fundamental things whereby Buddhism may be defeated’.8
Fan Zhongyang’s first proposed reforms were quickly rejected; both he and Ouyang suffered criticism and were demoted. But in 1040, as the threat to the Song empire from Xia and Liao worsened, they were recalled to favour. Ouyang Xiu anticipated a frontier command where he could put into practice his ideas on military strategy; instead he was directed to catalogue the imperial library, all 80,000 volumes of it, an important assignment with access to the emperor but no military responsibilities. Meanwhile it was Fan Zhongyang who was sent to the frontier. More plenipotentiary than general, Fan corresponded at length with Yuanhao Weiming and persuaded him to consider moderating his demands. Back in Kaifeng and now painfully aware of Song’s military weakness, in 1042 Fan proposed a new ten-point programme of reforms. As the confrontation with Xia dragged on, Ouyang Xiu urged the programme at court and Song Renzong endorsed it. By 1043 Fan had a free hand to implement his ten points.
They included improving the quality of the administration by weeding out the incompetent, rewarding the able and outlawing favouritism. There was to be more emphasis on problem-solving and less on literary skills in the examinations. Schools were to be set up throughout the empire to ensure a wider base for civil service recruitment. Local government was to be upgraded with better salaries and more investment in local projects to benefit agriculture. And of course military recruitment was to be boosted, especially in frontier areas. It was an ambitious programme and, encountering vigorous opposition from entrenched bureaucrats, it got nowhere. By 1045 the crisis with Xia had been resolved, Fan Zhongyang was out of favour and his measures were repealed.
Known as ‘the Minor Reforms’ (major ones would follow), the episode is chiefly notable for Ouyang Xiu’s reaction to the downfall of Fan and his associates. It took the form of a written submission ‘in defence of parties’ – in this case the political kind rather than the alcoholic. Fan had been accused of organising his supporters into what amounted to a faction, and to which his critics imputed subversive intent. Ouyang contended that factions, parties and the like were perfectly natural and even beneficial. Those formed by inferior men in search of profit would soon disintegrate, but those formed by like-minded ‘gentlemen who abide by the Way [of Confucius] and rightness, who practise loyalty and good faith, and care only for honour and integrity’ were an asset. United in principle, their members could only improve one another. If the emperor would make use of them, ‘then the state may be ordered’.9
But this ran contrary to long-standing opinion and could be refuted from Confucian texts; nor was it clear how groupings of high-minded gentlemen were to be distinguished from those of self-seeking place-men. Parties, factions, cliques and ‘gangs’ – no distinction was made between informal association and organised lobbying – were a feature of political life. Yet they were not recognised as such. Rather were such groupings condemned as insidious and inherently prejudicial to the authority of the emperor, even when their purpose was to bring order to the state and uphold imperial authority. From the quasi-Daoist associations of Red Eyebrows, Yellow Turbans and Five Pecks in Han times right through to the Triad organisations of the later empire, associations with a political agenda thus found themselves obliged to adopt a code of secrecy, which of course made them all the more suspect.
Ouyang Xiu’s submission was rejected. For his temerity he was again banished to the provinces, and under any but the comparatively indulgent Song might well have been granted ‘the privilege’ of suicide. Although the issue was far from dead, subsequent reformers, and counter-reformers, would repeatedly fall foul of this embargo on political association. At a time when, in Europe, barons were about to mobilise, estates to organise, diets and parliaments to convene and qualified representation to be accorded a legitimacy of its own, in China no concept of legitimate political organisation was permitted to ruffle the stern surface of absolutism. One man’s worth as defined in purely moral terms remained the basic unit of political and administrative society. Opinions might be canvassed and remonstrations invited from individuals so qualified, but any aggregation of like-minded officials remained suspect. Reform would repeatedly falter because, on losing the emperor’s favour, it must languish for want of concerted support; Ouyang Xiu’s plea for the recognition of parties had merely elicited their proscription;
and as F. W. Mote puts it in his Imperial China, ‘China still struggles with the heritage of this eleventh-century political failure’.10
If anything, reform initiatives tended to promote still greater central control and further entrench the imperial prerogative. In 1069 the twenty-year-old Song Shenzong (r. 1068–85), having just succeeded as emperor, called to court Wang Anshi, an unkempt, combative but highly regarded Confucianist who was governor of Nanjing. Wang had earlier submitted a long memorandum urging a return to the principles, if not the practices, to be found in the Zhouli, ‘the rites’ or ‘institutes’ of the Zhou, that ‘fundamentalist’ text which had so entranced Wang Mang a thousand years earlier and to which countless other reformers had since turned. Wang Anshi outlined how, applied to the education system, these principles might work to improve the calibre of recruits to the civil service; he produced his own masterly version of the Zhouli; and from his time in Nanjing he was known to have effective ideas on taxation and agricultural improvement. Now, under a conscientious new emperor, when further trouble was looming with Xia, and following a spate of reformist pleas from other intellectuals, his time had come. Wang Anshi was about to introduce what amounted to the most ambitious scheme of reorganisation ever attempted during the two millennia between the reign of the First Emperor and the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party.
‘The Major Reforms’ or ‘New Policies’ of Wang Anshi included economic and social provisions of which any responsible government could be proud. A system of designedly low-interest loans to tide the cultivator over until harvest time was introduced; and the principle of state granaries buying at above-market rates when prices were depressed, and selling below when they were buoyant, was reactivated. With such measures Wang could genuinely claim – and did – to be serving the interests of the people. New irrigation and canal schemes were undertaken, state intervention in the regulation of market prices was introduced, and the corvée was made subject to commutation so that those liable for it would either be paid for their labour or pay to be exempted from it. These were far-sighted enactments that, in making the well-being of the people a prerequisite for strengthening the state – or in generating the wealth that would enable the taxpayer to meet new and more efficiently collected taxes – won for Wang Anshi the accolade of ‘China’s greatest statesman’.
But whether they were part of a humane and socially responsible master plan is doubtful. Ad hoc enactment, piecemeal implementation and a mixed reception seem to have characterised the whole programme. Moreover the dramatic increase in tax receipts that resulted, though notable and needful, can hardly have eased the taxpayer’s burden. Ouyang Xiu, no longer a rabid reformer and by 1070 in semi-retirement, disapproved; and Sima Guang, the other great historian-statesman of the period, who succeeded Wang Anshi as chief minister, was even more critical. He thought Wang ‘self-satisfied and opinionated, considering himself without equal’; and he condemned his measures as having been ‘aimed at the accumulation of wealth’ and as having ‘pressed the people mercilessly . . . as if they had been cast into hot water and fire’.11
Especially onerous was a new system of militia based on the old legalist idea of grouped households (ten to a group in this case) with collective responsibility for local recruitment, law and order and one another’s good behaviour; the scheme was expensive, claimed Ouyang Xiu, the recruits were useless, and it left frontier commanderies unsusceptible to civilian control. Not much better was a novel idea to ‘adopt a horse’. This was designed to reduce Song’s dependence on its neighbours for cavalry mounts. People could either foster a government horse (it came with its own supply of fodder) or buy their own (with a guaranteed sale to the state when it was full-grown); in either case, the keeper’s responsibility was one of care and he was liable for a replacement if it died. Since little more is heard of the scheme, the take-up was probably as disappointing as the product. Though Song forces briefly penetrated into Xia territory in southern Gansu in the 1080s, neither of these reforms would redeem the dynasty’s dismal military record. Reverting to the expedient of ‘employing barbarians to control barbarians’, by the early twelfth century the Song were looking for allies beyond their frontiers. With catastrophic results, they would find them among the Jurchen, a Manchurian people who were rising against the sovereignty of Khitan Liao.
As was to be expected, Wang Anshi also tinkered with the central government’s administrative machinery, restoring some departments, re-allocating responsibilities among others and reintroducing structures and nomenclatures sidelined by the first Song emperors in their haste to wrest control from the military. Dignified as a Confucian ‘rectification of names’, such manipulation was also a good way of rationalising procedures while ridding oneself of opponents. As for local government, its clerks and other junior ancilliaries were to be integrated into the administration, paid a salary (raised by local taxation) to reduce their dependence on perks and bribes, and encouraged to seek promotion into the ranks of minor officialdom.
Equally predictable, but of much more enduring significance, were Wang Anshi’s numerous educational reforms. Aimed, as ever, at broadening the base of civil service recruitment by attracting men of talent and probity and preparing them for office, Wang’s programme affected all levels of the educational system. At the bottom, school boards nominally established in every district and prefecture to evaluate students from private teaching establishments were themselves to teach. A quota of students, teachers and classrooms was allocated to each; exams were to be held at the prefectural level, leaving the central examining body free to judge and rank only those who had passed; and the criteria for success were adjusted with more emphasis on practical solutions and less on literary composition and rote learning of the Confucianist classics. At the very top, the National Academy, where graduates studied for the highest degrees, including that of jinshi (roughly equivalent to a Doctorate of Letters), was reorganised into a more effective teaching establishment with a wider syllabus; and separate schools were set up in the capital for medicine, law and military science.
How effective all these changes were is hard to judge, for like Fan Zhongyang before him, Wang Anshi fell from favour before fully implementing his programme. The emperor had become impatient for tangible results in the form of military success; opposition from all manner of landowning and bureaucratic interests had mounted; and popular discontent, once directed at moneylenders and merchants, had increasingly attached itself to the state in its new role as agrarian creditor and trade regulator. As of 1076 Wang’s programme became the plaything of others, reversed by counter-reformers, diluted by post-reformers and finally distorted and discredited by Cai Jing, a member by marriage of Wang’s family, who presided over the fall of the Song empire in the north and would subsequently be vilified for it in works of both history and fiction.
Despite that cataclysm, Wang’s reputation would live on. Under the Southern Song (as the dynasty would be known after losing the north, the prior period being known as that of Northern Song), Wang would be revered as an early political exponent of a new and pervasive orthodoxy for which the term ‘Neo-Confucianism’ was eventually coined. But at the time his reforms had only limited success and may actually have been counterproductive. The strong executive powers needed to push them through had the unfortunate effect of ‘making powerful centralisation . . . a permanent feature of the government structure’. Additionally, Wang’s doctrinaire attitude produced the very conformity that his curricular reforms were supposed to frustrate; examination candidates, instead of regurgitating the classics, now simply regurgitated his own interpretation of the Zhouli. And ultimately, in a misguided attempt to protect Wang’s reputation, Cai Jing went so far as to ban all works by anti-reformers and order the re-education of those tainted by them.
This late-eleventh-century crackdown on deviance prompted some mid-twentieth-century writing about the past by way of comment on the present. In the late 1950s the eminent professor J. T. C. Liu dubbed
Cai Jing’s re-education programme ‘political persecution’ and, while conceding that ‘no detail of this [Song] measure has been recorded’, drew clear parallels between it and the denunciations and corrective techniques being employed by the Chinese Communist Party. Song students ‘assigned to self-indicting study rooms’, wrote Liu, ‘were to do further reading and thinking in order to correct their allegedly mistaken opinions’.12 Since Cai Jing is traditionally regarded as a monster and his administration as a disaster, this evidence of his having resorted to ‘study sessions’ could only be taken as a direct criticism of the party. The professor, needless to say, was writing from afar at the time, namely the United States.
Few historians can forgo selecting and emphasising features of the historical record that appear to have relevance to current affairs. But Chinese historiography takes this a stage farther by introducing an admonitory element. As Sima Guang put it, history should ‘include all that a prince needs to know – everything pertaining to the rise and fall of dynasties and the good and ill fortune of the common people, all good and bad examples that can furnish models and warnings’.13 Consulting more than three hundred works and employing the highest critical standards, in his Zizhi Tongjian (‘Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government’) Sima Guang was himself well aware that history was habitually written, and read, as a subtle commentary on current personalities and policies. All texts, even his own, had their agendas. This does not mean that they are therefore less reliable, only that they may reveal as much about the times in which they were written, or rewritten, as about those they actually describe. The ‘mirror’ in the title of Sima Guang’s great work reflected both the then and the now. Completed in the 1070s, it can be read as a blast from the past against Wang Anshi’s disruptive reforms and the demand for military action against the Khitan, as well as a superb chronicle of China’s history up to the year 959.