State formation in China from the Sui through the Song dynasties

RICHARD VON GLAHN

The demise of the long-lasting Han and Roman empires marked the defini­tive end of the ancient world, but aspirations to restore a universal empire lived on.

Political legacy of the Northern Wei

Both the short-lived Sui dynasty (581-618) and the succeeding Tang dynasty (618-907) were products of the political consolidation achieved in North China by the foreign-ruled Northern Wei (386-534). The Sui and Tang emperors sprang from the hybrid Taghbac-Chinese aristocratic elite fostered by the Northern Wei and saw themselves as heirs to both the sedentary civilization of China and the nomadic traditions of the Eurasian steppes. In contrast to earlier (and later) Chinese empires, the Sui-Tang ruling class also embraced the cosmopolitan and multicultural society that flourished under the Northern Wei.

The Taghbac rulers of the Northern Wei descended from the Xianbei nomads who had occupied much of the eastern steppe after the demise of the Xiongnu confederation.

Unlike the Xiongnu, who merely sought to extract booty, the Taghbac developed enduring institutions for governing agrarian China, most notably the state-administered land allocations known as the Equal Field (juntian) system. The Equal Field system provided an economic footing for farming families beleaguered by invasion and war and ensured stable revenues - collected in grain, cloth, and labor service - for the state. The Northern Wei emperor Xiaowen (r. 471-99) encouraged intermarriage between the Tagh- bac nobility and the leading Chinese aristocratic clans as well as adoption of Chinese language, dress, and customs. Xiaowen sought to create a hybrid ruling class that would combine the martial heritage of the steppe with the cultural prestige and administrative acumen of imperial China. The reloca­tion of the Northern Wei capital from Pingyang, at the edge of the Great Wall frontier, to the traditional imperial capital of Luoyang in 494 testified to Xiaowen's ambition to rule in the style of a Chinese emperor. However, his policies provoked hostility and civil war between the Northern Wei leaders and the Taghbac tribes in the steppe grasslands, who staunchly resisted Chinese habits and values. In 534 the Northern Wei split into two rival states, which in turn were wracked by internal conflict. Although the incessant warfare caused much misery and devastation, it also further enhanced the military might of the northern states. One of the innovations of this era was the creation of farmer-soldier militias known as Jubing, which reduced the logistical costs of a standing army.

The Sui-Tang reunification

YangJian (Emperor Wendi, r. 581-604) proclaimed his Sui dynasty in 581 after a bloody coup in which he seized power from a child-ruler - his own seven­year-old grandson. Once securely enthroned, Yang launched a multi-pronged invasion of southern China that toppled the Chinese-ruled Chen dynasty there, and completed the project of reunification in 589. Yang moved swiftly to assert his supreme authority as emperor. He rebuilt the former Han capital at Chang' an on an even grander scale - the largest imperial capital in Chinese history, encompassing eighty-four square kilometers, although much land within the walls remained vacant. Yang revived the authority of the central government, distributing executive and legislative responsibilities among three principal organs: the Department of State Affairs, the Chancel­lery, and the Secretariat. At the same time he acted decisively to curtail the independence of local officials, stripping them of military forces and subor­dinating them directly to the central state. Yang also voided the hereditary rights to office that aristocratic clans enjoyed during the period of disunion. As in the Han, local officials recommended candidates for appointment to the civil service, but the Sui instituted written examinations for some nominees - the first sprouts of the civil service examination system that would dominate Chinese government, society, and culture during the late imperial era. Nonetheless, the Sui emperors recruited their senior officials and closest advisers from the hybrid aristocracy cultivated by Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei, which came to be known as the Guanzhong aristocracy.

Steeped in the steppe traditions of the Taghbac and their warrior arts of hunting, archery, and falconry, Yang Jian had scant regard for the moral dictates of Confucian political philosophy and the restraints it imposed on autocratic rule.

By the sixth century, Buddhist beliefs, rituals, and social practices had become deeply implanted throughout the Chinese world. Both the Northern Wei and Chinese rulers in the south had lavishly patronized the Buddhist religion and its clergy. Luoyang reportedly had 1,367 Buddhist shrines and monasteries at the time the Northern Wei fell in 534. Ruling over a multitude of subjects of diverse ethnic origins, Yang Jian consciously strove to instill political and social unity through this common cultural core of Buddhist faith.

Yang Jian's successor, Yang Guang (Emperor Yangdi, r. 604-18), continued his father's project of imperial consolidation. Yangdi's most notable achieve­ment was the construction of the Grand Canal, which became the vital transport link connecting the rapidly developing rice economy of the Yangzi River Delta to the capitals (Chang'an and Luoyang) located in the arid northwest. But Yangdi also entertained quixotic ambitions of restoring Chinese rule over the Korean peninsula. The catastrophic failure of Yangdi's military campaigns in Korea in 612-14 ignited a political crisis at home. In 618 Yangdi was murdered, and shortly afterward Li Yuan, another scion of the Guanzhong aristocracy, declared the founding of a new dynasty, Tang.

In some respects, the establishment of the Tang dynasty in 618 can be seen as one in a series of coups d’etat instigated by military leaders among the close-knit aristocratic clans that had ruled North China since the Northern Wei. Like the Sui, the Tang rulers preserved the basic political institutions developed by the Northern Wei and its successors such as the Equal Field landholding system and the Jubing militias. The early Tang emperors also retained the cosmopolitan cultural orientation of the Sui court. The second Tang emperor, Li Shimin (Emperor Taizong, r. 626-49), seized power by killing his older brother, the heir apparent, and forcing his father to abdicate. Yet Taizong embraced both the warrior heritage of the steppe nomads and the civil virtues of the Confucian monarch. Taizong projected Tang military power over much of the eastern steppe, forcing into submission the Eastern Turks - who acknowledged Taizong as “lord of the steppe” (khaqan) - and imposing colonial rule over many of the Silk Road oasis towns. At the same time Taizong cultivated the support of the rank-and-file bureaucrats imbued with Confucian traditions of statecraft and cultural refinement. By the mid­seventh century the Tang had become the dominant political, military, and cultural force in eastern Eurasia (see Map 19.1).

The genesis of East Asia

The reunification of China under the Sui and Tang dynasties was the catalyst for the formation of a common East Asian civilization and the shaping of East Asia's political order. The power and majesty of the Sui-Tang empires deeply impressed China's neighbors and inspired them to emulate the Chinese model, developing more centralized “national states” and avidly patronizing the Buddhist religion and clergy. By the end of the seventh century, Korea, Japan, and Tibet all had become unified under a single

Khitan

Uighur

Pyu

Bay of Bengal

Chenla

Champa

South China Sea

Yellow

, Sea

) Sea of Japan

East

China Sea

Kyrgyz

Western Gokturks⅛⅛,⅛' ⅛

Eastern Gokturks

"∖-

Mongol Tribes

Kazb∣mιr

⅛⅛⅛⅛' ⁱMTibetan Empire

Map 19.1.

paramount ruler, establishing a multi-state political order that has persisted down to modern times.

The Han Empire had extended its suzerainty over portions of the Korean peninsula and the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam. After the final withdrawal of Chinese colonial governors from Korea in the early fourth century ce, three independent Korean kingdoms emerged. Koguryo, the earliest and most powerful, dominated the northern peninsula and much of Manchuria. Koguryo combined military might based on the heavy cavalry of the steppe nomads with the trappings of Confucian monarchy and bureau­cratic government. Paekche, located in the southwestern peninsula, culti­vated cordial diplomatic relations with the southern dynasties in China and the nascent Yamato regime in Japan. Silla, in the remote southeastern corner of the peninsula, coalesced as a monarchal state somewhat later, but quickly achieved parity in military and political strength thanks to its ample resources of iron and gold. Constant warfare propelled warrior elites to dominance in each of the Korean states.

Beginning c. 400 bce a wave of immigrants from the Korean peninsula had swept into the Japanese islands, introducing wet-rice farming, sericulture, metallurgy, cattle, and horses. This technological infusion stimulated rapid population growth and the formation of regional chiefdoms. In the third century ce a mysterious female ruler known as Himiko - perhaps a theurgic queen - dispatched the first diplomatic mission from Japan to the court of the Wei kingdom in China. The movement of people, goods, and technologies between Korea and Japan intensified in the fourth and fifth centuries, and contingents of Japanese warriors became embroiled in the strife among the Korean kingdoms. Over the course of the fifth-sixth centuries the Yamato “Great Kings” established their rule over much of the Japanese archipelago. Korean monks - principally from Paekche - became the conduit for the transmission not only of the Buddhist religion, but also of vital knowledge about Chinese kingship, statecraft, ritual culture, and administrative expert­ise. In 604, upon the return of an embassy to the Sui court, Queen Suiko and her nephew and co-ruler Prince Shotoku reconfigured the Yamato court, creating (in imitation of Korean practice) a formal ranked nobility subordin­ated to the supreme authority of the monarch and establishing official patronage of the Buddhist church.

Although Emperor Yangdi' s disastrous invasion of Korea was instrumental in the downfall of the Sui, the Tang rulers continued to harbor imperialist designs on Korea. Silla forged an alliance with Tang against its rivals, and in 660 the combined Silla-Tang forces overwhelmed Paekche and deposed its king. After a restoration effort aided by a Yamato naval expedition failed in 663, the remnants of the Paekche court fled to Japan. In 668, the Silla-Tang armies conquered Koguryo. The Tang sought to reduce Silla to a mere client regime, but the Silla kings successfully resisted Tang encroachment and for the first time established a unified state on the Korean peninsula.

The rout of Yamato naval forces by the Tang fleet in Paekche in 663, and subsequent demands that the Japanese recognize Tang overlordship, sent tremors through the Japanese ruling class. In the shadow of this looming threat from China, the Yamato rulers won the acquiescence of the nobility to construct a more centralized state based on the Chinese model of a universal sovereign presiding over a bureaucratic administration with strong fiscal and legal powers. By 700 the Yamato had rechristened themselves as tennδ (“heavenly sovereigns”), formally adopted the Chinese name “Japan” (Nihon, or “Land of the Rising Sun”), and issued a law code that strengthened their control over land revenues, the clergy, and defense. A Chinese-style royal capital was laid out at Nara in 710, followed by the building of an even more elaborate imperial metropolis at Kyoto beginning in 794. At the same time the Japanese court promoted its own distinctive ideology of legitimacy centered on the unique ritual purity of an unbroken line of tennδ descended from the Sun Goddess.

By 700, then, unified states that borrowed heavily from Chinese political institutions had emerged in both Korea and Japan. Yet neither the Silla kings nor the Japanese tennδ, confronted by entrenched aristocratic classes that retained formidable power at the local level, matched the centralized political control of the Chinese empires. The Buddhist clergy and religious insti­tutions also acquired far greater wealth and political clout in Korea and Japan than in China. Moreover, the waning of Tang power after 750 damaged its reputation in the eyes of its neighbors, and Korea and Japan increasingly diverged from the Sui-Tang political model. Nonetheless, this period wit­nessed the genesis of East Asia both as a coherent cultural identity and as a stable multi-state political order.

Perhaps the most powerful force for the creation of an East Asian cultural identity was the use of Chinese as the common written language. The dissemination of Chinese philosophy, ritual, poetry, law codes, historical writing, and the Buddhist religion - especially in its distinctively Chinese forms, such as the Pure Land and Chan/Zen traditions - created a shared cultural vocabulary across East Asia. To be sure, the ideas and values transmitted through texts written in Chinese were remolded in light of indigenous traditions, and eventually Japanese and Koreans developed their own vernacular writing systems (the Japanese kana script in the tenth century, and the Korean han'gul script in the fifteenth century). Nonetheless, Chinese writing enjoyed greater prestige than vernacular languages, and China's philosophical and literary traditions continued to exert a profound impact on the intellectual cultures of its neighbors.

Internal challenges and the decline of Tang power

Despite its peerless supremacy within the East Asian international order in the seventh century, the Tang Empire faced challenges from within that ultimately sapped its power and prestige. The first major challenge was the seizure of the mantle of imperial authority by Wu Zhao (629-705), one of the most controversial figures in Chinese history and the only woman ever to reign as emperor of China. Wu Zhao came to the Tang court in 655 as a consort to Taizong's successor, Emperor Gaozong (r. 649-83), and soon wielded decisive influence over her sickly and compliant husband. A wily politician, Wu Zhao overcame the fierce opposition of the Guanzhong aristocracy through strategic political maneuvers and ruthless use of espion­age and violence. Wu openly presided over the Tang court after her hus­band's death, and in 690 she boldly set aside the Tang dynastic house and proclaimed herself emperor - under the name Wu Zetian (“Modeled on Heaven”) - of her own Zhou dynasty. Wu's usurpation opened deep rifts within the ruling elite, but the empire enjoyed domestic prosperity during her reign as well as continued success against its Turk and Tibetan adversar­ies. In an effort to outflank her aristocratic enemies Wu elevated the stature and power of bureaucratic officeholders by enhancing the use of meritocratic civil service examinations and delegating important decision-making powers to the secretariat and the heads of ministries. But opposition to her rule never abated. In 705, shortly before her death, the elderly empress was forced to relinquish her throne and the Tang dynasty was reinstated.

The full restoration of the Tang house under Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-56) inaugurated a period of imperial splendor and cultural efflores­cence with few equals in Chinese history. But Xuanzong's favoritism toward the Guanzhong aristocracy, which supported the emperor's desire for strong imperial rule, aggravated the examination-bred literati officials cultivated by Wu Zetian and fanned the flames of factional strife. Economic prosperity and commercial growth increasingly came into conflict with the rigid principles of the Equal Field landholding system and threatened to undermine the fiscal foundations of the central government. The Jubing militias also atrophied as effective fighting forces and were superseded by large permanent standing armies stationed along the Inner Eurasian and Korean frontiers. In order to insulate the military from the struggle between the aristocrats and the literati officials, Xuanzong entrusted the major military commands to generals of non-Chinese ancestry whom he deemed non-partisan and apolitical.

Chief among these foreign generals was An Lushan, a Sogdian who enjoyed the full confidence of Xuanzong. The Sogdian merchant network dominated the Silk Road caravan trade at this time, and soldiers-of-fortune like An as well as many Sogdian merchant families settled in the Tang capital of Chang'an. In 755, with the aging emperor enfeebled and An's political enemies in ascendancy at the Tang court, An rallied other frontier generals to launch an armed insurrection against the Tang. In 756 An's armies captured

Chang'an, forcing Xuanzong to flee to Sichuan in the southwest, where he abdicated and died in exile. The attempt to overthrow the Tang foundered, however, when An Lushan was murdered by his son in 757. Nonetheless the rebellion lasted for eight years (755-63) before loyalist forces, with the aid of Uighur Turk mercenaries, could suppress the insurgents and restore Tang rule.

The post-An Lushan transformation of Chinese government and society

Although the Tang dynasty survived, the An Lushan Rebellion had devas­tated North China and permanently crippled the authority of the central government. The post-rebellion transformation of Chinese government, society, and economy constituted one of the key watersheds in Chinese history.

First, the rebellion triggered the final collapse of the fraying institutional order inaugurated by the Northern Wei. The Equal Field landownership system disintegrated, resulting in the emergence of de facto private land ownership. The Jubing militias - already greatly deteriorated as fighting forces - likewise were abandoned. Power gravitated into the hands of military strongmen who entrenched themselves as regional governors and exercised considerable freedom from the central government. The sharply diminished power of the court dealt a fatal blow to the aristocratic clans that had dominated Chinese government and society since the Han dynasty, and the Guanzhong aristocrats in particular. Examination success and adminis­trative expertise displaced aristocratic pedigree as the crucial criteria for appointment to political office. Over the next several centuries the aristoc­racy lost its identity as a coherent social class, and most aristocratic clans faded into obscurity.

Second, the rebellion unleashed a backlash against the cosmopolitan spirit of the early Tang, and especially the Buddhist religion. Confucian critics such as the noted poet and polemicist Han Yu (786-824) vehemently denounced the eclectic multiculturalism of the Tang court. Many of Han's contemporar­ies were persuaded by his claims that the other-worldly orientation of Buddhism had unraveled the moral fiber of the Chinese people and deflected the imperial state from its true mission of providing for the moral and material welfare of the people. With the rise of the new examination-based political elite, Confucianism regained its former primacy as the fount of political, cultural, and intellectual values. Moreover, Confucianism itself was transformed by the revival of an idealist tradition derived from the ancient philosopher Mencius, a revision sufficiently far-reaching to merit the name Neo-Confucianism. Neo-Confucian philosophy achieved its full flowering in the eleventh-twelfth centuries and dominated the Chinese intellectual world down to the late nineteenth century.

Third, the An Lushan Rebellion gave major impetus to a long-term shift in the economic center of gravity of the Chinese Empire, from the traditional heartland in the North China Plain to the Yangzi River Delta. Millions of farming families abandoned war-torn North China and fled to the fertile plains of the Yangzi Delta and the inland valleys of the Yangzi River basin, still a largely virgin frontier. As immigrants settled in the south, they began to tap the region's rich economic resources. The highly productive rice agriculture of South China accelerated population growth, which in turn generated the labor power required for intensive irrigated rice cultivation. Landholding was no longer subject to the constraints of the Equal Field system, and land became a commodity freely bought and sold. Most aristo­cratic estates were broken up. Some local powermongers and nouveaux riches families built up sizable landholdings, but most land was held by smallholder households. Private enterprise flourished in both trade and agriculture. The abundant navigable waterways of South China facilitated commercial and urban growth, while a host of new industries - including tea, porcelain, paper, sugar, and shipbuilding - emerged. However, the full development of a monetary economy was constrained by the state's inability to expand the money supply. Since the founding of the first empires in the third century bce the Chinese state solely recognized state-issued bronze currency as legal tender, but because of the low value of these bronze coins the economy suffered from perennial shortages of currency.

The fiscal structure of the Tang state likewise underwent dramatic changes. The demise of the Equal Field landholding system spelled the end of the taxation system (which combined uniform in-kind payments of grain and cloth with labor service) based on it. In its place the Tang created the Twice-a-Year Tax, a progressively scaled tax levied on the wealth (chiefly measured by landholding) of households. But direct taxes occupied a much reduced place in the fiscal system. Instead, the central government's rev­enues increasingly were drawn from indirect taxation, including a range of commercial taxes and above all the revenues of the salt monopoly. At the same time specialized branches of government - notably a new Finance Commission that controlled the bulk of the new revenues - eclipsed the secretariat and the regular ministries as the centers of state power.

The Five Dynasties interregnum (907-960)

The final demise of the Tang dynasty was ushered in by the Huang Chao rebellion (774-84), which raged unchecked across China for a decade and left the imperial government crippled and bankrupt. In 907 the last Tang emperor, a mere child, was deposed by a turncoat follower of Huang Chao with his own imperial aspirations. But the fall of the Tang was followed by the dissolution of the empire into a panoply of rival regimes incessantly at war with each other. In sharp contrast to the expansive, cosmopolitan empires of Sui and Tang, the rulers of this era focused on building a political base at the local and regional levels. In the north, a series of praetorian coups led to the rise and fall of five dynastic houses in quick succession within the span of a half-century. Amid this political turmoil, actual power devolved to dozens of local warlord regimes. In the south however, a more stable multi­state system of seven regional kingdoms emerged that largely corresponded to the main geographic macro-regions. The multi-state system of South China was preserved in the structure of the Song dynasty's territorial administration and later in the provincial units of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

The pattern of military rule that prevailed during the late Tang continued in the Five Dynasties period. The decay of the Jubing soldier-farmer militias had forced the Tang to rely on professional armies to defend its frontiers. The rulers of the Five Dynasties likewise mustered large standing armies. Provisions of food and clothing and pay (in coin) for several hundred thousand troops consumed the lion's share of state revenue.

Political disunity invited new incursions from aggressive steppe-based states. The Khitan rulers of Manchuria created their own powerful military regime and occupied the territories around modern Beijing. By the 930s the Khitan wielded paramount influence in North China. In 947, after a military triumph over the Kaifeng-based Later Tang dynasty, the Khitan were poised to seize the entire North China Plain. Although the Khitan leaders asserted their imperial dignity by adopting the Chinese-style dynastic title of Liao, they ultimately decided against annexing the rest of North China. In the northwest, another nomad regime, the Tangut kingdom of Xia (later Xixia), sat astride the old Silk Road corridor leading to Inner Eurasia.

Despite the constant political struggles and warfare, South China con­tinued to enjoy robust economic growth. Intense competition among the southern kingdoms prompted resort to mercantilist fiscal and monetary policies and intensive exploitation of mineral and forest resources. Regional specialization in the production of tea, salt, timber, paper, copper, silver, and textiles intensified as the various states sought to capitalize on their compara­tive advantages in resources. Although political fragmentation and rivalry posed obstacles to inter-regional trade, the rulers of these states also depended on commerce to obtain vital supplies - notably iron, salt, sulfur, and alum - as well as now indispensable consumer staples such as tea. The southern regimes eagerly promoted trade with the remote foreign states on the northern frontier, Liao and Xia, principally based on the exchange of tea for warhorses. The coastal kingdoms of Wu-Yue, Min, and Southern Han actively pursued overseas trade with the Liao, the newly established Koryo kingdom in Korea, and Japan as well as Southeast Asia.

At the same time rulers adopted mercantilist strategies intended to strengthen their national economies and prevent the drain of currency - bronze coin and uncoined silver and gold - to neighboring rivals. Like the post-An Lushan Tang central government, the states of the Five Dynasties period relied heavily on indirect taxation for their revenues. The northern states, lacking domestic supplies of copper, suffered from critical shortages of money. A proscription against Buddhism enacted by the Northern Zhou in 955 was a thinly disguised ruse to seize bronze statues and other religious ornaments held by monasteries and private devotees for use as raw material for coinage. Even states with ample copper supplies such as Wu-Yue and Southern Tang ultimately resorted to minting iron coins to discourage the export of coin abroad. Other southern states such as Min, Southern Han, and Chu issued even cheaper lead coins. These monetary policies contributed to a pattern of regional economic autarky that persisted into the Song period.

Prosperity and crisis under the Song Empire (960-1279)

The restoration of a unified empire emerged from the struggle for suprem­acy among the military strongmen of the north. In the 950s the Northern Zhou regime regained the upper hand against its Liao adversaries. Zhao Kuangyin, head of the palace army, overthrew the Northern Zhou ruler and declared the founding of his Song dynasty in 960, but it took twenty years before the Song defeated the last of the regional states. The new geopolitical order was reflected in Zhao's decision to establish his capital at Kaifeng, centrally located along the Grand Canal, rather than at the traditional capitals of Chang'an or Luoyang farther west. Scholars have characterized the Song as a “lesser empire,” hemmed in by the powerful steppe-based states of Liao and Xia that had breached the Great Wall barrier. Throughout its existence the Song repeatedly suffered setbacks when it tried to establish more secure borders along its northern frontiers. Under the terms of the Treaty of Shanyuan, imposed on the Song in 1004 after a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Liao, the Song emperor was forced to accept the Liao ruler as his equal. The treaty obligated the Song to pay substantial tributes of silver and silk to the Liao, but the cost of these indemnities was recouped through lucrative cross-border trade and customs revenue.

The Song emperors, mindful of the disunity fostered by military leaders since the An Lushan Rebellion, strongly championed civil governance. Zhao Kuangyin famously disarmed and retired the generals who had assisted his rise to power, and the Song armies remained subordinated to civilian com­mand. The Song emperors patronized the resurgent Neo-Confucian move­ment, and established examinations based on Confucian classical learning and political ideology as virtually the sole avenue of recruitment to government office. The fiercely competitive civil service examinations effectively pre­cluded the re-formation of a closed political caste like the old aristocratic clans.

Domestic peace and stability - along with an array of technological advances - accelerated the economic trends set in motion by the An Lushan Rebellion, resulting in steady improvement in agricultural productivity, expanding markets for both consumer goods (e.g. silk textiles and tea) and producer goods (e.g. iron and steel), monetization of the economy, and the growth of cities. Mining and metallurgical industries boomed. The Song state greatly expanded coinage, and by the 1070s mint output was nearly twenty times greater than the peak level reached during the Tang. The Song also introduced the world's first viable paper currency, initially (in 1024) as a regional currency in Sichuan and on an empire-wide basis in the late twelfth century. The technical requirements of wet-rice agriculture favored small, intensively cultivated family farms over large landed estates. Most farming families owned at least some land of their own. Thus the economic benefits of rising productivity were widely distributed. The population of the empire doubled, reaching 100 million by 1100, with two-thirds of the population concentrated in the rice-growing regions of South China. As in the late Tang, the Song state depended heavily on indirect taxes; levies from commercial taxes, maritime customs, and monopoly commodities such as salt, liquor, and tea generated substantial cash revenues.

The Arab conquest of Sogdia in 712 and the downfall of the Uighur confederation in the mid-ninth century had disrupted commercial exchange across the Silk Road. With the overland routes largely barred by hostile states

Map 19.2. Xia, Liao, and Song Empires

to the north, China's foreign trade became reoriented to the maritime world. Overseas trade with Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean world boomed throughout the Song period, and the ports of Guangzhou and Quanzhou on China's southern coast became home to large communities of Arab, Persian, Malay, and Tamil traders.

Although the income of the Song state rose sharply during its first century, soaring military expenses continually outran revenues. After a disastrous war with the Tangut Xia kingdom in the 1040s the Song was forced to maintain a standing army of more than a million soldiers to defend its borders. The military threat posed by the steppe-based states and the burden of defense costs severely tested the strategic, organizational, and logistic capacities of the Song state.

The new policies of Wang Anshi

Military setbacks and fiscal exigencies prompted repeated appeals for reform. Confucian scholar-officials, who tended to view all political problems as questions of proper moral leadership, concentrated their reform efforts on the character and qualifications of officials, beginning with school curricula and the civil service examinations. In the early 1040s a cadre of young officials pushed through a reform agenda focused on reducing the privileged access to government appointment granted to relatives of high officials, increasing state investment in public schools, and strengthening military preparedness. But in 1045, conservative opponents succeeded in ousting the reformers and rescinding their initiatives.

An opportunity for more radical reform came two decades later with the ascension of a young monarch, Emperor Shenzong (r. 1067-85), who swiftly promoted an ambitious and brilliant statesman, Wang Anshi (1021-86), to chief minister. Wang sought to circumvent a sclerotic bureaucracy by creat­ing a host of new, task-oriented state agencies headed by upstart officials liberated from many of the constraints of civil service protocols - a political style dubbed “bureaucratic entrepreneurship” by PaulJ. Smith in 1991. Wang also proposed a new examination curriculum centered on public policy and current affairs that de-emphasized literary skills such as poetry composition. Above all, Wang implemented far-reaching changes in fiscal policy, seeking to free up productive energies in an economy undergoing rapid monetization by converting labor services to cash payments, investing state resources in agricultural improvement (the central government initiated over 11,000 irri­gation projects), and pumping vast amounts of currency into the economy.

Under Wang Anshi's leadership, fiscal management became the defining feature of the art of government. But Wang also feared that market exchange created imbalances in the distribution in wealth and was vulnerable to manipulation by merchant cartels. To forestall such inequities he advocated state intervention in commerce and moneylending. Wang created new state agencies to manage wholesale trade at the capital and provide credit for retail businesses, turned private brokers into government agents, tightened the state's control of foreign trade, and extended the existing monopoly on salt production to include much tea cultivation as well. The most controversial - and most reviled - of Wang's fiscal innovations was the so-called “Green Sprouts” program, through which the state offered direct loans to farmers. Intended to provide relief from usurious private lending, the Green Sprouts loans degenerated into a form of confiscatory taxation whereby local officials compelled farming households to assume loans regardless of their ability to repay them, worsening the problem of indebtedness. Under the aegis of Wang's “New Policies” cash payments climbed to 72 per cent of central government revenues, compared to 43 per cent c. 1000.

The majority of Song officialdom stridently denounced Wang's activist agenda, and especially its intrusions into the private economy, as a corrup­tion of time-honored Confucian values. Intellectual opposition to the New Policies coalesced around the Dao Learning circle, which prized ethical knowledge and personal moral integrity as the wellsprings of correct gov­ernance. Wang was forced into permanent retirement in 1076, but his allies continued to direct court policy until Shenzong's death in 1085.

Wang Anshi's New Policies pitched China into a half-century of incessant partisan struggle in which the reform measures were repeatedly done and undone. This factional conflict paralyzed the Song government and left it vulnerable to the invasions launched by the rising Jurchen state of Jin (1115-1234), which displaced the Liao regime in Manchuria. In 1127 Jin armies captured the northern half of the empire, including the capital at Kaifeng, forcing the Song court to flee to the south and reconstitute itself at the “provisional capital” of Hangzhou in the Yangzi Delta. Many blamed the loss of North China on the misgovernment of Wang and his reform-minded successors. Although the causes of the military debacle were far more complex, during the “Southern” Song Chinese statesmen spurned the New Policies programs and Wang Anshi's vision of the central state as the engine of positive social and economic change (see Map 19.3).

The“localist turn” in the Southern Song

The Southern Song (1127-1276/9) period, too, was defined by perennial military threats. An uneasy truce with the Jin was achieved in 1161, but renewed war with the Jin, combined with the outbreak of civil war in 1205-7, precipitated grave military and fiscal crises. The Jin itself was beset by Mongol invasions and finally was conquered by the Mongols in 1234, leaving the Song confronted with an even more formidable adversary. From the inception of the Southern Song period, the state raised revenues by resorting to expedient fiscal policies widely condemned as parasitical by contemporaries. The four regional Military Commissariats created to manage defense logistics largely eclipsed the central government's ministry of revenue, initiating a trend that led to the formation of province-level governments under subsequent dynasties. Local magistrates found

Map 19.3. Southern Song, Xixia, Jin and Dali

themselves caught between the proliferating demands of the central govern­ment and rapid socio-economic changes beyond their capacity to control.

By the end of the twelfth century the Dao Learning movement attained paramount influence in Chinese intellectual life, a dominance that would last for the remainder of the imperial era. The philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200) codified the Dao Learning teachings in a systematic body of philosophical doctrines, commentaries on the canonical Confucian texts, historical inter­pretation, behavioral norms, and ritual practices. In 1241 the Song court inducted Zhu Xi and other leading Dao Learning figures into the official Confucian pantheon, and in 1315 the Mongol Yuan dynasty made Zhu's philosophical and political views the “correct” standard for the civil service examinations.

Dao Learning luminaries like Zhu Xi rejected the state-centered activism espoused by Wang Anshi in favor of community-based initiatives in local governance and social welfare (e.g. famine relief, credit associations, and communal ritual assemblies). Although these programs had a negligible impact on social life, they remained enduring ideals celebrated by all Neo-Confucians as the proper institutions for fulfilling Confucian social ideals. The “localist turn” in Confucian statecraft marked a major reorien­tation in Chinese conceptions of the relationship between state and society, paving the way for the Confucian-educated local elite to assume the leading role in public affairs - in some cases overshadowing the authority of the state-appointed magistrates.

Nonetheless, the Southern Song state remained a robust presence in most regions. Even more striking, however, was the vibrant economic growth and expansion of the market economy. During the Southern Song the Yangzi Delta region flourished not only as the vital economic heart of the empire, but also as the center of intellectual and cultural life.

The Song weathered the military crises of the first decade of the thirteenth century, but in the late 1250s Mongol armies under the leadership of Qubilai Khan (r. 1260-94) mounted sustained attacks against Song territories, culmin­ating in the conquest of Hangzhou and the fall of the Southern Song in 1276. Both contemporaries and later historians identified various scapegoats to blame for the Mongol conquest, which resulted in all of China falling under foreign rule for the first time. But the supremacy of Mongol military logistics, rather than the failings of Song political leadership, provides a more credible explanation for the Mongols' success.

Long-term trends in state-society relations

During the period 500-1300, Chinese governance underwent dramatic changes that redefined the imperial institution, transformed the relationship between the state and its subjects, and engendered a new international political order in East Asia.

First, a revitalized Confucian model of imperial sovereignty displaced the Sino-nomad synthesis created by the Northern Wei and continued by the Sui-Tang states. The Northern Wei, the most powerful of the post-Han successor regimes, had joined the militarized rulership of the steppe nomads with the Buddhist ideal of the “wheel-turning” universal ruler. Under this conception of monarchy the ruler wielded virtually limitless authority as the defender of the faith, even though his power was constrained by the presence of a strongly entrenched nobility and manorial landholding. The Equal Field system and the fubing militias restored some degree of central control over revenues, labor resources, and military power. But it was the rebuilding of a civil bureaucracy drawn from the learned classes in the Tang and Song that shifted the balance of power back to the central government. Neo-Confucian political ideology rested on the ideal of a transcendent emperor who embodied civil virtue but also entrusted actual government to officials schooled in Confucian ethics and statecraft and chosen through highly competitive examinations. In the wake of Wang Anshi's failed reform move­ment, however, faith in the transformative potential of the central state waned. The Dao Learning agenda of literati leadership within local society became the main inspiration for social reform.

Second, the revival of the bureaucratic state altered the relationship between the state and the individual. In contrast to the static socio-economic order on which the Equal Field system was premised, Song leaders sought to mobilize resources through bureaucratic interventions in a surging market economy. The Twice-a-Year tax system - which persisted largely intact throughout the late imperial era - replaced uniform exactions assessed in goods and labor service with a progressively indexed levy on wealth. Military and labor service occupied a much diminished role in the state's system of extraction: the Song relied on paid standing armies rather than military conscription, and many labor services were commuted to money payments. In addition, the state's income increasingly derived from indirect taxes levied on commerce rather than direct taxes on agricultural production. The co­resident household (in essence, the conjugal family) became firmly entrenched as the fundamental economic unit in both the private economy and the state fiscal system.

The household also superseded larger kin groups or village communities as the object of legal and social control. Legal changes erased the distinction between aristocrats and commoners. The growth of the market economy fostered a new social hierarchy defined by wealth rather than ascriptive status. Although families of officials enjoyed some legal and fiscal privileges, “good subjects” (Iiangmin) - the vast majority of the population - enjoyed equality before the law.

Finally, this period witnessed the emergence and consolidation of an enduring multi-state political order in East Asia. The Sui-Tang model of national unification under centralized government provided a powerful impetus for state formation among China's neighbors, including Korea, Japan, Tibet, and later Vietnam as well. But strong centralized government failed to take root elsewhere in East Asia. In Japan, the imperial court steadily relinquished control of land, population, and resources to a resurgent landowning class comprised of aristocrats, religious institutions, and the imperial clan itself. In Tibet, a strong monarchy rooted in the Buddhist conception of the “wheel-turning” king collapsed in the mid-ninth century and political authority devolved to local monastic leaders. Monarchical authority also ebbed in Korea, but from c. 1400 Korean and Vietnamese rulers launched “Neo-Confucian revolutions” modeled upon Chinese polit­ical values and institutions.

In contrast to the stability of China's frontiers and foreign relations with its sedentary neighbors, the steppe-based states remained a constant menace to the Chinese Empire. After 900, nomad confederations vulnerable to the whims of shifting tribal allegiances were supplanted by more durable forms of “dual government” pioneered by the Khitan Liao state that established separate administrations for the nomadic and settled populations. The Jin state and later the Yuan Empire of Qubilai Khan also adopted many features of Chinese bureaucratic government. Ultimately, however, Qubilai's attempt to apply the dual government model to the entire Chinese Empire failed, due in no small part to the predatory exactions of the Mongol rulers and their merchant clients as well as to internecine feuding among the Mongol nobles.

The restoration of Chinese rule under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) completed the Neo-Confucian revolution. The Ming founder embraced the Neo-Confucians' atavistic yearning to restore the autarkic agrarian livelihood and communal village society idealized by Mencius. The Ming state expropri­ated the large landholdings accumulated by entrepreneurial landowners, stifled commercial enterprise and overseas trade, and reverted to in-kind payments of goods and labor services in place of monetized taxes. These policies devastated the thriving market economy of Song-Yuan times. Only in the sixteenth century, with the original Ming fiscal institutions in ruin, did the Chinese economy regain its earlier dynamism.

FURTHER READING

Adshead, S. A. M. T'ang China: The Rise of the East in World History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Beckwith, Christopher. Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasiafrom the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Bol, Peter K. Neo-Confucianism in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Area Center, 2008.

Elman, Benjamin A. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.

Hartwell, Robert M. “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750-1550,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42.2 (1982): 365-442.

Holcombe, Charles. The Genesis of East Asia, 221 b.c.-a.d. 907. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001.

Hymes, Robert P. and Conrad Schirokauer, eds. Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.

Kuhn, Dieter. The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Lewis, Mark Edward. China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Mote, Frederick W. Imperial China, 900-1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Rossabi, Morris, ed. China among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983.

Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001.

Smith, Paul J. Taxing Heaven's Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074-1224. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1991.

Smith, Paul J., and Richard von Glahn, eds. The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.

Wright, Arthur F. The Sui Dynasty. New York: Knopf, 1978.