New Policies (Song dynasty)

Song dynasty Chancellor Wang Anshi (1021–1086) implements a series of reforms in 1069 upon his ascendance to office.

Wang promulgates a community-based law enforcement and civil order known as the Baojia system.

Wang attempts to diminish the importance of landholding and private wealth in favor of mutual-responsibility social groups that share similar values and can be easily controlled by the government.

Just as scholar-officials owe their social prestige to their government degrees, Wang wants to structure all of society as a mass of dependents loyal to the central government.

He uses various means, including the prohibition of landlords offering loans to tenants; this role is assumed by the government.

Wang establishes local militias that can aid the official standing army and lessen the constrained state budget expenses for the military.

He sets up low-cost loans for the benefit of rural farmers, whom he views as the backbone of the Song economy.

Since the land tax exacted from rural farmers fills the state treasury's coffers, Wang implements a reform to update the land-survey system so that more accurate assessments can be gathered.

Wang removes the mandatory poetry requirement in the civil service exams, on the grounds that many otherwise skilled and knowledgeable Confucian students are being denied entry into the administration.

Wang also establishes government monopolies for tea, salt, and wine production.

All of these programs receive heavy criticism from conservative ministerial peers, who believe his reforms damage local family wealth which provides the basis for the production of examination candidates, managers, merchants, landlords, and other essential members of society.

Historian Paul J. Smith writes that Wang's reforms—the New Policies—represented the professional bureaucratic elite's final attempt to bring the thriving economy under state control to remedy the lack of state resources in combating powerful enemies to the north—the Liao and Western Xia (Smith, Paul J.

(1993) "State Power and Economic Activism during the New Policies, 1068–1085' The Tea and Horse Trade and the 'Green Sprouts' Loan Policy," in Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China, ed.

Robert P. Hymes, 76–128.

Berkeley: Berkeley University of California Press)

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