The Economy of The Song Dynasty or The Experience of Failed Modernization: The Boundaries of Institutional Corridors

The article contributes to institutional matrices theory (Kirdina, 2011). On the reforms carried out in China during the Song Dynasty in the second half of the XI century, the hypothesis of the existence of so-called "institutional corridors" is considered. The "institutional corridor" implies a space limited by a set of certain institutions that define the principles of decision-making and the boundaries of institutional environment reform. The article briefly describes the economic situation of China during the Song dynasty, analyzes the main reforms carried out by the first Minister of the empire Wang Anshi and the reasons for their failure. The concept of jing ji is analyzed. Jing ji assumes an integrated approach to regulating the economy in China, based on Confucian ethics' moral and ethical concepts. The concept of jing ji has become the main one in regulating the economy in China. It is concluded that Confucian ideology during the implementation of the Wang Anshi reforms became the defining boundary of the "institutional corridor" of the variable that predetermined the failure of the reforms. The reforms of Wang Anshi, often called a Proto-Keynesian, went beyond the ideological "institutional corridor" and were therefore doomed to failure.

Imperial Temple in the New Learning

Chapter 5 deals with the general intellectual background where the ritual debates of the 1070s were rooted. It focuses on how Wang Anshi and his admirers in the name of New Learning scholars interpreted the Imperial Temple in their ritual commentaries. Among these scholars, the chapter devotes special attention to Wang Zhaoyu’s 王昭禹‎ and Chen Xiangdao’s 陳祥道‎ understandings of the Imperial Temple and categorizes them into two major conceptions of ritual relations between ancestors. The chapter also illustrates how Wang Anshi’s admirers as ritualists elaborated and revised Wang’s ritual theory, thereby contributing to the revival of ancient rituals under Emperor Huizong’s reign.

Conclusion

This book provides a missing link in the history of the Middle Period of China. It demonstrates how ritual in the Song dynasty intertwined more with scholar-officials’ intellectual endeavors than with their political stances. Based on their own interpretations of imperial ritual traditions and related ritual commentaries, Northern Song ritual officials sought monarchical support to initiate a campaign of reviving ancient temple rituals. In particular, officials and scholars under the influence of Wang Anshi’s ritual scholarship emphasized the necessity of revising the layout of the Imperial Temple, in order to conform to the ancient setting that was recorded in the ritual Classics. Scholar-officials outside the New Learning circle also championed the New Learning advocacy of an idealized ancient Imperial Temple. Some of them were adamant opponents of Wang Anshi’s New Policies. The disjunction between scholar-officials’ political stances and their ritual interests provides a counterexample to the conventional understanding of Song factional politics as polarizing political groups. As I have demonstrated in my discussion of the 1072 debate on the Primal Ancestor of the temple, it was quite understandable for some late eleventh-century ritual officials to share a common interest with Wang Anshi and Emperor Shenzong in promoting ritual reforms—despite the conservative stances of these same ritual officials on the political level. In this light, this book illustrates how Song debates and discussions over the Imperial Temple and temple rituals differentiated scholar-officials’ ritual interests and shaped their identities on the intellectual dimension....

The Limits of “Civilianization”: The New Policies and Shaanxi’s Territorial Administration in the Late Northern Song

Previous scholarship has examined various aspects of the origin, development, and eventual collapse of military programs under the New Policies introduced by Wang Anshi (1021-1086), but less attention has been paid to them within a framework of regional analysis. The manuscripts discovered in 1907-1909 at Khara-Khoto in Inner Mongolia contain a wealth of information on daily administration and legal disputes in the military regions of Shaanxi during the early twelfth century. They show that by the early twelfth century, military establishments under the New Policies had become an integral part of Northern Song territorial administration. Therefore, if we confine our analysis to the usual three-tiered hierarchical arrangement of circuits, prefectures, and counties, we will not be able to fully discern the spatial organization of the Song state and the changes it underwent over time.

Foreshadowing Major Reforms

Chapter 2 considers the extent to which the Imperial University inherited earlier trajectories of development to lay the foundation for future political reforms. Ouyang Xiu’s high-handedness in banning the Imperial University writing style (taixue ti 太學體) on the departmental examination (shengshi 省試), I would argue, represents a response to the pluralistic intellectual atmosphere at the University that the lecturers Hu and Sun had pushed to newer heights. The manner in which Ouyang advanced his intellectual agendas in the dual arenas of examination and education very likely inspired Wang Anshi to adopt similarly high-handed tactics two decades later.

Intellectual Trends in Imperial China

In a letter to his friend Wang Hui王回 (1023–1065), the great Song dynasty (960–1279) politician, scholar, thinker, and writer Wang Anshi王安石 (1021–1086) makes a distinction between the golden age of the ancients and the less-than-desirable world of the present. More importantly, it claims that the golden era was marked by a commitment to unity. Not only were morality and customs of the world made the same, but the learned were united in their learnings and opinions. The periods after the golden age, on the other hand, were marked by diversity and confusion arising from how the truth is understood. Wang believed that he had found the truth about unity and how it could be achieved from reading the Classics. His ambitious political reform (called New Policies) was a grand program that sought to bring the ideal of unity to the world through government. Wang Anshi was of course not the only major thinker in Chinese history to ponder the question of unity. In fact, a dominant and enduring theme in the history of Chinese thought is the search for unity. Faced with uncertainties arising from a diverse and complex world, thinkers in different periods and with different intellectual orientations saw it as their main mission to discover the true nature of unity and ways of realizing it for attaining a harmonious world. The process began when Confucius (551–479 bce) was confronted with the chaotic reality following the gradual collapse of the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 bce) and its institutions and cultures. It ended with the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the last imperial regime, when new ideas of nation-state began to drastically transform the Chinese worldviews. During the two millennia in between, the search for unity spanned distinctive intellectual trends often labeled as Confucian, Daoist, or Buddhist. But such loose and often retrospective labeling cannot do justice to the complexity of history. It is therefore important to go beyond the labels and examine the common assumptions about unity among the major thinkers during a given period and how that changed over time. In doing so, we will be able to trace the emergence, development, and sometimes decline of distinctive intellectual trends before the 20th century.