Wang Anshi and the New Policies

01Fat offices, fat armies, fat costs

When Emperor Shenzong took the throne in 1067, Song commerce was prosperous but state finances faced heavy demands. A large bureaucracy, the imperial armies and provincial garrison forces required continuing support. Payments to Liao and Western Xia, together with frontier defence, consumed further resources. Rural debt, concentrated landholding and harvest failures sharpened the tension between raising state revenue and easing household burdens.

The young emperor wanted change, and found it in Wang Anshi — an official famous for obstinacy, who had repeatedly declined capital promotions to test his ideas in the provinces. In 1069 Shenzong made him deputy chancellor and established the Finance Planning Commission: the reforms began.

Wang’s motto expressed the philosophy: “without increasing the people’s taxes, make the state’s revenue ample.” The method: financial and administrative means to make the economy yield.

02The new laws at a glance

The reforms came as a coordinated set:

Green Sprouts: the state offered seasonal agricultural loans at about 20 percent interest per lending cycle, with two cycles possible in a year, not a flat annual rate of 20 percent — designed to undercut private usury at double rates, so farmers would not go bankrupt before harvest. Exemption service: compulsory rotating local service replaced by workers hired by the state, the cost apportioned by household grade — even exempt official households now paid. Market Exchange: state offices bought unsold goods at fair prices and sold when scarce — stabilizing prices, lending at the same time. Land survey: fields measured and graded for tax, closing hidden acreage. Waterworks: irrigation encouraged, costs shared by the benefited. Baojia: farmers organized into units and drilled in slack seasons — cutting military costs by embedding the army in the villages.

03The opposition’s logic

Nearly every law had fierce opponents, led by Sima Guang — and the case was not mere self-interest: in execution Green Sprouts did deform. Local officials, chasing lending quotas, imposed compulsory loans (the “forced allocation”), and state credit became state usury; exemption fees were a new burden on the poor.

Sima Guang’s logic: the wealth heaven and earth produce is fixed in quantity — if not in the people’s hands, it is in the state’s; state finance is extraction. Wang’s rebuttal: good finance enriches the state without taxing the people more — the cake can grow. Their dispute sharply exposed a question of political economy: should the state enter the economy, and how far?

Both men’s characters deserve respect: political enemies as fire and water, privately mutually respectful; Su Shi, buffeted by both factions and punished by each, met the retired Wang at Jinling in their late years and let the quarrels go.

04Faction war, dismissal, and history’s reversals

Debates over the New Policies continued for decades. Wang Anshi first left the chancellorship in 1074, returned in 1075 and departed again in 1076 to administer Jiangning. After leaving that local post in 1077, he continued living and writing at Jinling. Shenzong died in 1085 and Grand Empress Dowager Gao became regent. Sima Guang became chancellor in 1086 and worked to repeal or alter major New Policies in the Yuanyou reversal. Wang also died in 1086.

Later factional struggles involved new participants and distinct political stages. After Zhezong took personal control, a restoration of his father’s policies brought Zhang Dun to the chancellorship in 1094. Cai Jing became chancellor under a different emperor, Huizong, in 1102. The exclusion of Yuanyou officials bound policy to personnel, but measures adopted after Wang’s death cannot all be treated as his own proposals.

Judgements continued to change. Some writers connected Northern Song’s political failures with the New Policies, while the modern reformer Liang Qichao praised Wang highly. Compulsory lending under Green Sprouts exposed a gap between institutional aims and their implementation. How could a state provide credit, public works and security without administrative pressure harming the people it intended to help? That remains a central question raised by the reforms.