The Song achieved consolidation under the third emperor, Zhenzong (reigned 997–1022). A threatening Khitan offensive was directly met by the emperor himself, but a few battles assured neither side of victory. The two empires pledged peaceful coexistence in 1004 through an exchange of sworn documents that foreshadowed modern international treaties. The Khitan gave up its claim to a disputed area it had once occupied south of the Great Wall, and the Song agreed to a yearly tribute: 100,000 units (a rough equivalent of troy ounces) of silver and 200,000 rolls of silk. It was a modest price for the Song to pay for securing the frontier.

The emperor thereafter sought to strengthen his absolutist image by claiming a Daoist charisma. Prompted by mystics and ingratiating high officials, he proclaimed that he had received a sacred document directly from heaven. He ordered a grand celebration with elaborate rites, accompanied by reconstructed music of ancient times, and he made a tour to offer sacrifices at Mount Tai, following precedents of the Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties.

After the emperor’s death, friction arose between his widow—the empress dowager, who was acting as regent—and Renzong (reigned 1022–63), Zhenzong’s teenage son by a palace lady of humble rank. Following the death of the empress dowager, Renzong divorced his empress, who had been chosen for him by and had remained in sympathy with the empress dowager. However, the divorce was unjustifiable in Confucian morality and damaged the imperial image.

By that time the bureaucracy was more highly developed and sophisticated than it had been in the early Song. Well-regulated civil service examinations brought new groups of excellent scholar-officials who, though a numerical minority, dominated the higher policy-making levels of government. The sponsorship system, which discouraged favoritism by putting responsibility on the sponsors for the official conduct of their appointees, also ensured deserving promotions and carefully chosen appointments. Many first-rate officials—especially those from the south whose families had no previous bureaucratic background—upheld Confucian ideals. These new officials were critical not only of palace impropriety but also of bureaucratic malpractices, administrative sluggishness, fiscal abuses, and socioeconomic inequities. Respecting absolutism, they focused their attacks on a veteran chief councillor, whom the emperor had trusted for years. Factionalism developed because many established scholar-officials, mostly from the north, with long bureaucratic family backgrounds, stood by their leader, the same chief councillor.

A series of crises seems to prove that the complaints of the idealists were justified. After half a century of complacency, peace and prosperity began to erode. This became apparent in the occurrence of small-scale rebellions near the capital itself, in the disturbing inability of local governors to restore order themselves, and in a dangerous penetration of the northwestern border by Xi Xia, which rejected its vassal status and declared itself an independent kingdom. The Khitan took advantage of the changing military balance by threatening another invasion. The idealistic faction, put into power under these critical circumstances in 1043–44, effectively stopped the Xi Xia on the frontier by reinforcing a chain of defense posts and made it pay due respect to the Song as the superior empire (though the Song no longer claimed suzerainty). Meanwhile, peace with the Khitan was again ensured when the Song increased its yearly tribute to them.

The court also instituted administrative reforms, stressing the need for emphasizing statecraft problems in civil service examinations, eliminating patronage appointments for family members and relatives of high officials, and enforcing strict evaluation of administrative performance. It also advocated reducing compulsory labor, land reclamation and irrigation construction, organizing local militias, and thoroughly revising codes and regulations. Though mild in nature, the reforms hurt vested interests. Shrewd opponents undermined the reformers by misleading the emperor into suspecting that they had received too much power and were disrespectful of him personally. With the crises eased, the emperor found one excuse after another to send most reformers away from court. The more conventionally minded officials were returned to power.

Despite a surface of seeming stability, the administrative machinery once again fell victim to creeping deterioration. Some reformers eventually returned to court, beginning in the 1050s, but their idealism was modified by the political lesson they had learned. Eschewing policy changes and tolerating colleagues of varying opinions, they made appreciable progress by concentrating on the choice of better personnel, proper direction, and careful implementation within the conventional system, but many fundamental problems remained unsolved. Mounting military expenditures did not bring greater effectiveness, and an expanding and more costly bureaucracy could not reverse the trend of declining tax yields. Income no longer covered expenditures. During the brief reign of Yingzong (1063–67), relatively minor disputes and symbolically important issues concerning ceremonial matters embroiled the bureaucracy in mutual and bitter criticism.

Reforms

Shenzong (reigned 1067–85) was a reform emperor. Originally a prince reared outside the palace, familiar with social conditions and devoted to serious studies, he did not come into the line of imperial succession until adoption had put his father on the throne before him. Shenzong responded vigorously (and rather unexpectedly, from the standpoint of many bureaucrats) to the problems troubling the established order, some of which were approaching crisis proportions. Keeping above partisan politics, he made the scholar-poet Wang Anshi his chief councillor and gave him full backing to make sweeping reforms. Known as the New Laws, or New Policies, these reform measures attempted drastic institutional changes. In sum, they sought administrative effectiveness, fiscal surplus, and military strength. Wang’s famous “Ten Thousand Word Memorial” outlined the philosophy of the reforms. Contrary to conventional Confucian views, it upheld assertive governmental roles, but its ideal remained basically Confucian: economic prosperity would provide the social environment essential to moral well-being.

Never before had the government undertaken so many economic activities. The emperor empowered Wang to institute a top-level office for fiscal planning, which supervised the Finance Commission, previously beyond the jurisdiction of the chief councillor. The government squarely faced the reality of a rapidly spreading money economy by increasing the supply of currency. The state became involved in trading, buying specific products of one area for resale elsewhere (thereby facilitating the exchange of goods), stabilizing prices whenever and wherever necessary, and making a profit itself. This did not displace private trading activities. On the contrary, the government extended loans to small urban and regional traders through state pawnshops—a practice somewhat like modern government banking but unheard-of at the time. Far more important, if not controversial, the government made loans at the interest rate, low for the period, of 20 percent to the whole farming class during the sowing season, thus assuring their farming productivity and undercutting their dependency upon usurious loans from the well-to-do. The government also maintained granaries in various cities to ensure adequate supplies on hand in case of emergency need. The burden on wealthy and poor alike was made more equitable by a graduated tax scale based on a reassessment of the size and the productivity of the landholdings. Similarly, compulsory labor was converted to a system of graduated tax payments, which were used to finance a hired-labor service program that at least theoretically controlled underemployment in farming areas. Requisition of various supplies from guilds was also replaced by cash assessments, with which the government was to buy what it needed at a fair price.

Wang’s reforms achieved increased military power as well. To remedy the Song’s military weakness and to reduce the immense cost of a standing professional army, the villages were given the duty of organizing militias, under the old name of baojia, to maintain local order in peacetime and to serve as army reserves in wartime. To reinforce the cavalry, the government procured horses and assigned them to farmers’ households in northern and northwestern areas. Various weapons were also developed. As a result of these efforts, the empire eventually scored some minor victories along the northwestern border.

The gigantic reform program required an energetic bureaucracy, which Wang attempted to create—with mixed results—by means of a variety of policies: promoting a nationwide state school system; establishing or expanding specialized training in such utilitarian professions as the military, law, and medicine, which were neglected by Confucian education; placing a strong emphasis on supportive interpretations of Classics, some of which Wang himself supplied rather dogmatically; demoting and dismissing dissenting officials (thus creating conflicts in the bureaucracy); and providing strong incentives for better performances by clerical staffs, including merit promotion into bureaucratic ranks.

The magnitude of the reform program was matched only by the bitter opposition to it. Determined criticism came from the groups hurt by the reform measures: large landowners, big merchants, and moneylenders. Noncooperation and sabotage arose among the bulk of the bureaucrats, drawn as they were from the landowning and otherwise wealthy classes. Geographically, the strongest opposition came from the traditionally more conservative northern areas. Ideologically, however, the criticisms did not necessarily coincide with either class background or geographic factors. They were best expressed by many leading scholar-officials, some of whom were northern conservatives while others were brilliant talents from Sichuan. Both the emperor and Wang failed to reckon with the fact that, by its very nature, the entrenched bureaucracy could tolerate no sudden change in the system to which it had become accustomed. It also reacted against the over concentration of power at the top, which neglected the art of distributing and balancing power among government offices, the overexpansion of governmental power in society, and the tendency to apply policies relatively uniformly in a locally diverse empire.

Without directly attacking the emperor, the critics attacked the reformers for deviating from orthodox Confucianism. It was wrong, the opponents argued, for the state to pursue profits, to assume inordinate power, and to interfere in the normal life of the common people. It was often true as charged that the reforms—and the resulting changes in government—brought about the rise of unscrupulous officials, an increase in high-handed abuses in the name of strict law enforcement, unjustified discrimination against many scholar-officials of long experience, intense factionalism, and resulting widespread miseries among the population—all of which were in contradiction to the claims of the reform objectives. Particularly open to criticism was the rigidity of the reform system, which allowed little regional discretion or desirable adjustment for differing conditions in various parts of the empire.

In essence the reforms augmented growing trends toward both absolutism and bureaucracy. Even in the short run, the cost of the divisive factionalism that the reforms generated had disastrous effects. To be fair, Wang was to blame for his overzealous if not doctrinaire beliefs, his low tolerance for criticism, and his persistent support of his followers even when their errors were hardly in doubt. Nonetheless, it was Shenzong himself who was ultimately responsible. Determined to have the reform measures implemented, he ignored loud remonstrances, disregarded friendly appeals to have certain measures modified, and continued the reforms after Wang’s retirement.

The traditional historians, by studying documentary evidence alone, overlooked the fact that scholar-officials rarely openly criticized an absolutist emperor, and they generally echoed the critical views of the conservatives in assigning the blame to Wang—a revisionist Confucian in public, a profound Buddhist practitioner in his old age, and a great poet and essayist.