A brief history of Wang Anshi

I have recently come across the legacy of Wang Anshi 王安石, one of the most (in)famous names in Song Dynasty history. A Confucian scholar-official from a family of Confucian scholar-officials (jinshi 進士), born in what is now Jiangxi Province in the south of China, from a very early age he demonstrated his talent for governance, as well as an exceptional literary talent (being considered by the end of his life one of the Eight Great Prose Masters of Tang and Song 唐宋八大家). When he was 20 years old, he placed fourth in the national civil service exams, and spent most of his early career in regional government in the south of China. It may be safely assumed that he saw a great deal of corruption during his time in the local and regional levels of the civil service, and felt outraged and disgusted by it, feeling a bond with the common people the served as they faced evermore crushing tax burdens and struggled against a national government paralysed by abuse, nepotism and graft. Whilst serving in the provincial government, he repeatedly refused all manner of promotions; the more he did so, the more fame he earned as a selfless and principled official. He gained a steady friend and advocate in Han Wei, a secretary to the young heir apparent to the Song throne, who introduced his young pupil favourably to Wang Anshi’s policy ideas.

Wang Anshi had already formed the primary basis of his thinking by the time he arrived in Kaifeng in 1058 to present his ‘Ten Thousand Word Memorial’. Upon attaining his post as second privy councilor under Emperor Song Shenzong at the age of 47, he quickly embarked upon designing a set of sweeping institutional reforms (新法, New Policies; also called 一條鞭法 the One Whip Policies by his many political enemies) of: state finances and trade; defence and military policy; and education and governance. These included a number of policies aimed at combatting corruption: cash wages, fair wages for low-level officials, standardised weights and measures, standardised prices on basic goods, and what might be considered the first policy of issuing short-term, low-interest state microloans to needy farmers and small merchants. Though some of his reforms were ‘modernising’ (the substitution of cash wages for the corvée system, for example), he defended many of his policies (like his plan to pay low-level officials a decent wage) by asserting that they had been used during the Tang Dynasty and before: in particular, he referred often to the Rites of Zhou as justification for many of his reforms. In general, he advocated for strong state interventions in Song Dynasty’s economic and social life, though there were a couple of important exceptions.

One was the baojia system 保甲制度 of local militias which Chancellor Wang invented. This system radically devolved military affairs and law enforcement, and assigned greater responsibilities to the most local level and to the lowest ranks, and it met with resounding success where it was implemented. (When it was reintroduced during the Qing Dynasty, however, it met with far less.) Under the baojia system, ten families would be organised into a bao, and one family would be given a wooden placard designating them as the baozhang 保長 (the bao captain). This placard would rotate amongst the families on a regular basis, theoretically ensuring that each family was mutually responsible to all the others. Chancellor Wang wanted to reduce the Song Dynasty’s dependence on mercenaries, but this system was practically distributist in the way it delegated authority - tasks were directed to the lowest competent level of authority, and government was directly involved only in cases that required the organisation of a large number of bao. This system, the way it was originally designed, was very much in line with the social doctrine of subsidiarity; it also located the primary unit of social organisation as the family.

Another aspect in which his thinking was in line with distributism (even if his methods may not have been) was in his hostility to monopolies: he detested the exorbitant prices and speculative lending engaged in by the powerful merchants of his era; as a result, he set firm restrictions on lending practices and prices of basic goods. His educational reforms, which not only broadened the curriculum but also attempted to reduce the influence of patronage and guanxi in the education system, also made it possible for students from lower-class backgrounds to compete more fairly with their peers who had grown up in literati or wealthy merchant families. And his reforms followed in broad strokes the ideals of Zhang Zai 張載 (another Song Dynasty official) who wanted to restore the Mencian well-field system, break up the huge land holdings and create a relatively egalitarian society of coöperatively-organised smallholders: one might even say this looks distinctly like Chesterton’s land-reform ideal of ‘three acres and a cow’.

Chancellor Wang’s reform programme met with a good deal of support from the literati, in particular from Song polymath Shen Kuo, and from Emperor Song Shenzong. However, his enemies, led by the historian Sima Guang, proved even more powerful in the end. A famine which struck northern China managed to create a minor credit crisis with farmers leaving their lands; local officials insisted on collecting the microloans many of these farmers owed. Sima Guang and his Conservative faction pounced on the incident and portrayed the entire situation as being Wang Anshi’s fault. Of course, many of the later studied critics of Wang Anshi’s lending policies (including the neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi, who was then serving as prefect of Nankangjun 南康軍) took aim only at the implementation, whilst at the same time saying that the basic idea was sound and even expanding on it. But at the time, Wang Anshi was thrown into prison, and his reputation even after his rehabilitation and appointment as governor of Jiangning 江寧 (now Nanjing 南京) by Emperor Shenzong was irrevocably tarnished. He was banished from court upon Shenzong’s death in 1085, but continued writing and engaging in scholarly debates until his own death a year later.

Here we have an official who was very roundly ‘progressive’ in a number of ways, whilst being steadfastly conservative in several others. His reform programmes, particularly those to do with education, trade and official compensation, were justified through his interpretation of the Rites of Zhou and of the history of preceding dynasties. It became a fashion of sorts amongst Confucian literati after he fell from favour to denigrate his record as Chancellor, much in the same way as it became fashionable after the demise of Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 to portray her as a maniacal power-hungry she-devil (often by the same people, particularly Sima Guang and his students). However, my wife says she more highly esteems Wang Anshi, largely because, in her words, ‘it was far easier to stay conservative during that time, but much harder to be brave and creative, while still remaining true to Confucian principles [the way Wang Anshi was]’.

A late reply to Erik Loomis on LGM

My dear Dr Loomis, let me just first say right off the bat that I am a great fan of your writing on Lawyers, Guns and Money generally, and that I appreciate the point you are trying to make with this post. That said, my absentee ballot has been written up and is waiting to be mailed in, and my fill-in-the-blank for President / Vice-President does not read Barack Obama / Joseph Biden, but rather Jill Stein / Cheri Honkala. I do this with my eyes wide open to the implications, and with full appreciation of the meaning of my act and its place in the broader scheme of American politics. Because of this, I must respectfully demur from the conclusions you are drawing. First of all, you quote djw:

The moral purpose of democracy is not to keep my hands clean and feel good about myself, no matter how much politicians and other demagogues claim otherwise. The moral purpose of democracy is the reduction of abusive power in the world. Unfortunately there’s a lot of it, and democracy’s pretty clearly an insufficient tool to address it, but that’s no reason not to use the tool, when and where you can.

Let us stipulate that this definition of the moral purpose of democracy is correct. Who is presently abusing that power in the United States with regard not just to drone strikes, but also with regard to civil liberties and economic structures at home? I agree that Mitt Romney will be far, far worse - indeed, I have explicitly said so right here on this blog multiple times. But the person whose abusive power we need to curb, ultimately, is that of Mr Obama. In the American political system, there are two ways of influencing a politician’s behaviour in the public sphere, which really ultimately boil down to one: a politician is after votes, and a politician uses money to buy advertisements in order to essentially buy votes. So we can either choose to not favour Obama with our pocketbooks (in which case he merely goes to the nearest investment banker who will give him orders of magnitude more than we could have hoped to do in the first place), or we can choose the more direct method of not favouring him with our votes.

If we continue voting for him, all the protests and all of the strongly-worded letters to the editor and comments on news websites, that is all merely (as economists like to put it) cheap talk. The institutional Democratic Party knows this, and indeed banks on it. It is an oft-bemoaned fact that the Democratic Party does not respect left-wingers: the reason is, because we left-wingers are always won over with the same logic - and that is, where else can you go? You know the only other ‘viable option’ in our current system is far worse! So, instead of campaigning to change the rules of the system, we merely buy into it more, with both our pocketbooks and our votes. Behaving thus on the grounds that it is the only ‘realistic’ option on the table has gotten us... where, exactly? A Democratic president who behaves only superficially differently on the world stage than the last Republican president did.

That’s completely messed up. But there’s nothing I can do about that with my vote. There are other issues where I wish greater differences separated the parties. Agricultural policy, defense spending, etc. But on these issues, I have to accept that I sit in a deep minority here. I could file a protest vote but that’s pure narcissism unless one is truly committed to building party structures that would transform American politics.

However, there are very real differences between the two parties and their candidates on a whole host of issues where my vote might matter.

Hear that thumping? That was the sound of my head hitting the desk. Repeatedly. Dr Loomis, I expected better of you than this sort of argument.

Like you, I am a Rhode Islander. And I am sure that someone as well-educated and well-spoken as you is not unaware of the fact that Romney’s chances of winning Rhode Island are somewhere south of zero. Yes, the election is close, but there is not a single thing either you or I can do about it with our votes! If I were still voting in Pennsylvania, sure, I would be taking the above logic into account and voting for Obama, because Pennsylvania is a battleground state. It would indeed be reprehensibly selfish of me to vote the way I am voting - if I were still a registered PA voter. But really, Dr Loomis - pretending, as a Rhode Islander, that ‘your vote might matter’ is truly more narcissistic (not to mention delusional) than anything I am doing over here. In Rhode Island, the only thing I can do is file a protest vote. And there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that my vote will count as half a vote for Romney; not here, nor in a good three dozen other states where I might register. So why not file it to help someone from a third party gain more prominence, and perhaps a greater airing for views on changing electoral institutions and campaign finance rules in the United States such that we are not always faced with this dilemma of voting for the lesser of two evils?

This is not about making myself feel morally pure or holier-than-thou. I have said already that the way my vote goes would largely depend on where I live and what my situation is. This is a legitimate question: what is wrong with casting a protest vote in an election district where the outcome is already a foregone conclusion?

A couple of cartoons...

Daniel Nichols over at Caelum et Terra has been on a roll lately. Here are a couple of his excellent finds (click to enlarge):

Enjoy!

Still her true character

Over the ten-minute break between classes, I was having a conversation with a fellow teacher at Baotou Teachers’ College, Vivian, which managed to be quite broad-ranging. We started off discussing student behaviour in class: though a number of my classes are quite well-behaved and attentive, this one in particular is rather… shall we say, ‘active’. This being still basically my first month, we still need some time to get used to one another, though this certainly isn’t as fubared a situation as Peace Corps was for me. Vivian remarked that when she was a student, they would still treat the teacher with some measure of the deference due to age and status, but that that respect was slowly disappearing. I remember saying that it was a similar situation in the United States, where teachers were often, in spite of having a very difficult job (a fact which it took me entering and leaving Peace Corps to truly appreciate), blamed for all of their students’ failures and underappreciated for having supported those same students’ achievements.

We ended up talking about labour rights in both countries. Vivian remarked that although in China all teachers do have the benefit of union representation, the union system does not really work in favour of the teachers. I told her that the situation in the United States was better in some respects but not in others: teachers’ unions are under concerted siege in the popular press, and their legal rights are being steadily eroded. Moreover, the welfare of teachers, students and families varies widely from district to district – you can have a perfectly functional, healthy district situated right next to a district where the union, the administration and the parents are at each other’s throats. Vivian indicated that such a system might still be preferable, given that the unions actually do something, but was nonetheless appalled that teachers might be fired at the drop of a pin, despite having taught for most of their adult careers, on the basis of their students’ rote performance on a standardised test.

And then we talked about the nature of education, at which point I made a reference to how Confucius would not necessarily have endorsed the culture of standardised tests and rote learning, whether in China or in the US (the Analects has it that 「誦詩三百，授之以政，不達；使於四方，不能專對；雖多，亦奚以為？」 - ‘Though a man may recite three hundred Songs by heart, yet if when trusted with a task of governance he cannot achieve it; or if he is sent to any of the four corners of the world, but cannot reply without assistance; though his learning is great, what real good does it do?’ [13:5]), and she was surprised (as a number of my colleagues are) that I was familiar with the Analects. She noted that in spite of all of the recent changes, most Chinese people still respect and appreciate Confucius, and hold to traditional ways, particularly in Baotou. In Beijing or Shanghai or Guangdong, she said, people might be ‘a little more cosmopolitan, a little more “open-minded”’ (I could hear the quote-marks), but most of China still espoused (at least publicly) a far more traditionalist ethic. At that point our ten-minute break was over and we went back to class.

Much is made of how China is changing. Much more is made of how terrible the Cultural Revolution was. Let us not deceive ourselves – it was indeed a terrible tragedy for Chinese culture and education, let alone for the Chinese people. But as Mao himself acknowledged, he only managed to change Beijing and perhaps the areas around it through the Cultural Revolution – and Mao was nothing if not determined to change China’s institutions. So, indeed, were his successors Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, who were determined to ‘modernise’ China by adopting all of the norms and vices of gangster capitalism. But have they succeeded in winning minds and hearts, either the old laoban or the new? In Beijing and Shanghai and Guangdong, perhaps. But if what Vivian told me is to be credited, they have faced an uphill battle in China’s countryside these past sixty years – a battle which it seems has yet to be won or lost.

Confucianism promotes an ideal of education which produces virtuous people: in that, it is comparable to the classical Greek ideal of paideia, of liberal education; and stands opposed to the functionalist techne ideal which sees education as merely a toolbox of skills to be acquired (on the cheap, if necessary). Confucianism also promotes an ideal of moral economy: in that, it is comparable to the radicalism of Catholic social teaching when it insists upon fair wages, strong unions, just regulations and opposition to monopolistic business practices; and stands opposed both to Marxism and to neoclassical economics, both of which discount any role of moral behaviour in the marketplace, and both of which reduce the human being to homo oeconomicus. And the true character of the Chinese people in places like Baotou is apparently still very much sympathetic to these ideals, despite all that they are taught by their own media and by the behaviour in their own public spaces to believe otherwise. I do not deny that there are still massive hurdles to overcome in creating a civic space in China, but I am not an unshakeable pessimist about the moral state of Chinese society; far from it.

There is yet quite a good deal of room for hope.

Pointless music post - ‘Happiness Machines’ by Revolted Masses

Been listening to a bit of Greek anarcho-punk and thrash lately; one of the better examples of the latter has been the (relatively) new group Revolted Masses, whose album Seeds of Revolt is actually quite stunning. They enthusiastically layer near-Eastern melodies and death vox over a basic structure of deep, heavy, grooving thrash riffs; the closest comparison I can think of at the moment is Suffocated, though Suffocated tends to be given a bit more to weirdness for weirdness’ sake than these guys are. Also, their politics are quite overt, and they are well to the left of mine. It’s something of a shame (though, as mentioned before, not uncommon in the metal world) that they are also opposed to theism, but given that they sing primarily about society and economics, I have no problem rocking out to them.

Also, any song which samples Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator this effectively gets an eager thumbs-up from me. Enjoy!

The other half of the ‘Southern strategy’

Population cartogram of the US showing Republican and Democratic bases of popular support

Before I had gone over the wall, both John at EifD and David Lindsay linked a very interesting article from Hamiltonian historian Michael Lind at Salon on the real dimensions and aims of the ‘Southern strategy’, an economic arrangement devised by that region’s elites which emphasises wage slavery, low corporate tax rates and little to no regulation on big business. Read the article in its entirety; it is a good one. Most people are familiar with the election maps which demonstrate a complete role reversal of the Democrats and the Republicans between the 1920’s and the 1960’s in terms of which regions and which ideologies they represented; Mr Lind shows that the states which comprised the erstwhile Confederacy are essential to the Republican constituency. As such, it is to be expected that the Republican platform will reflect the political will of the elites in the region.

There are some notable exceptions to the rule, of course: Lind’s map shows that the ‘tidewater states’ of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina are becoming ‘bluer’ rather than ‘redder’. Possibly this is because they retain an Anglican character from the days when they were settled by Jacobite exiles, and though they do tend to have a more aristocratic mindset, they also value classical education: in my experience many Virginians and other highly-educated near-Southerners are appalled by the anti-intellectualism that defines the modern American ‘conservative’ movement.

For many of the same reasons, the soft spot that many of my fellow palaeoconservatives harbour for the antebellum South still utterly baffles me. I take them at their word that they value an organic order and natural hierarchies; that they prefer the local over the global; and that they prefer the logic of the community over the logic of the market. But the actual structure of the antebellum South (and the proposed structure the current Republicans champion), flies in the face of every one of these things. Yes, the Old South was hierarchical. But it was a total mockery of the natural hierarchy, as it involved the destruction and rape of organic communities in Africa, the soul-harrowing and culture-destroying Middle Passage forced upon them by early capitalists, and ultimately the wholesale commodification of human beings. And far from being an idyll of rural life, the plantation was every bit as much a soulless mechanical monstrosity, a part of the global capitalist system of the time, as any Northern factory or sweatshop: it consumed human lives for the sake of a raw material (cotton) which was then exported around the globe. Not only that, but the South didn’t ‘just want to be left alone’, as all too many of its apologists claim: they actively sought the exportation of their economic system to the American West, to the Caribbean and to South America (where, as slavery was still practised in Brazil, they hoped to be ‘greeted with open arms’), and they deliberately forced their political will upon a North which was all too reticent to return escaped slaves. So much for ‘states’ rights’, I guess.

On close inspection, the economics of the pre-war South were startlingly close to what would now be considered neoliberalism. Indeed, why else would so many libertarians (like Ron Paul, like the Ludwig von Mises Institute and so forth) so readily embrace the so-called Lost Cause? Even more troublingly from a palaeoconservative point of view, why would openly neoliberal politicians like Bill Clinton actively patronise the neo-Confederate cause by laying wreaths at the Confederate Memorial in the Arlington Cemetery and sending supportive letters to neo-Confederate organisations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy? Hmmm...

Indeed, if one looks for assertive expressions of local culture and community in the United States, I have long had the sneaking suspicion one is as likely (if not more) to find them in small-town petty-bourgeois New England, in the farming and mining communities of the Midwest, and (of course) on the Native American reservations of the American West as one is to find them in the South (the birthplace of Walmart and the strip mall). So why is palaeoconservatism so readily drawn to the prima facie conservative (but actually neoliberal) obsequies of neo-Confederate politics?

Possibly it is because of the coalition politics that arose out of reaction to the New Left in the 1960’s which aligned the economic left with social liberalism, and conversely the economic right with social conservatism. Indeed, you are likely to find as much of culture-warrior politics in the popular defences of the Confederate legacy as anything else. But those coalition politics are in the process of dying a long, drawn-out and likely very messy death. The Democrats are rediscovering a politics which aligns economic populism with everything the palaeoconservatives claim to value: respect for life, respect for locality and respect for a transcendent order. Meanwhile, the neoliberals and libertarians amongst the Republicans are winning (with the faux pro-life Romney and the Ayn Rand-worshipping Paul Ryan heading their presidential ticket), and their socially-conservative supporters are being rather blind about the writing on the wall.

A real, effective palaeoconservative politic has to take a careful account of its basic priorities before entering into such alliances. As, it probably goes without saying, should a real, effective left-wing politic. As Michael Lind states, the working class of the South, black, white and Hispanic, may be very responsive to either sort of politics, but first we have to mount an effective opposition to the opportunistic elites who wish to take advantage of anti-union, low-wage, low-corporate tax, low-regulation neoliberal economics whilst pretending to be conservative.

Of cheeky Chinese, randy Russians, bawdy Brazilians and hedonic Hellenes

Sadly, along with the common canard that Christians are inherently misogynistic comes the equally common and equally misguided canard that Christians fear and hate sex - that Christian morality sees sex as unclean or sinful, and that we are taught to be ridden with feelings of sexual guilt, envy and repression. The facts, however, show this to be more than a rather silly charge. Though I may have several deep disagreements with the overall editorial slant of the New York Times, they do indeed have a significant amount of quality reporting, some of which even manages to be fairly interesting: a recent op-ed they ran linked to a blog called Ranking America, which is devoted (just like it says in the title) to all manner of statistics which determine America’s ranking along various metrics and indicators. One of these worth note was the frequency of sex indicator. Without looking at the indicator, which countries would you think were the most sexually active? The Netherlands, with its liberal outlook on prostitution and drugs? Or perhaps the pornography capital of the world, Japan? Or the good old U S of A, which consumes so much of said material?

In fact, the most sexually active country in the world, according to this survey, is Greece, with a whopping 87% of adults unleashing the beast with two backs on a weekly basis, followed by Brazil (82%), Russia (80%) and China (78%), then Italy (76%), Poland (76%) and Malaysia (74%). Greece, of course, is overwhelmingly Orthodox (being the third most pious country in Europe behind Malta and Cyprus), as is Russia. Brazil, for all it may encompass Rio de Janeiro, still retains a Lusitanian-flavoured Catholic piety unmatched anywhere else in the Southern Cone, with over 85% of adults reporting some form of Christian belief (Italy and Poland are also solidly Catholic, and Malaysia devoutly Muslim). China is rather the exception to the rule given that most people are still officially atheist, but it is currently experiencing an under-the-table boom in religious fervour, after it had been banned for decades under Communist rule.

So the question stands: if traditional (Catholic, Anglo-Catholic and Orthodox) Christians are as neurotic about sex as our reputation might suggest, how come we are having so much of it? Conversely, if agnostics, atheists and other such free-thinking folk are more liberated, what gives with these figures? In the Netherlands, where only 34% of people profess to believe in a God, only 63% of adults are getting in their weekly hokey-pokey. In the UK (38% theistic), that figure is an anemic 55%. In the US (which looks pious at first glance, but where less than 40% of people attend regular services and which has never been particularly friendly to Catholicism or Orthodoxy), that figure falls to a pathetic 53%. And we’re not at the bottom of the barrel yet: Hentai Central itself is sporting a completely dysfunctional 34% rate of regular raunch.

It is true that the study itself has some rather glaring design flaws, one of which being that it is an online survey (which, like telephone surveys, reaches only a highly specific and specialised audience in some countries). It would be nice to know, also, the actual questions that were asked. Even so, the data are quite tantalising (so to speak). Even more so when one accounts for divorce rates. If one leaves out Russia (the third-highest divorce rate of any country in the world), an inverse pattern holds true. Greece and Italy, along with Spain, Ireland and the former Yugoslavia, sport the lowest divorce rates in Europe. China ranks just slightly below Poland. The Netherlands falls just below the EU average, and Japan falls just above that line, but the UK and the US have sky-high divorce rates.

But why is this? Why is it that Christians in devout countries, with our archaic norms concerning sexual conduct, are generally going at it like crazed rabbits? It could be argued along Nietzschean lines, as many are wont to do, that it is merely a case of sexual repression that has snapped: the degree to which we censor and suppress and regulate sex reflects the degree to which we have inverted (but not quashed) our carnal desires, which are then redirected in unhealthy ways. This is a possibility, certainly more than likely in some cases. But it is not a particularly fair representation of Christian doctrine or practice (and at any rate, it is hard to imagine the Mediterranean cultures as being to any excessive degree censored, suppressed and inverted in their desires or indeed in anything else). It bears repeating that Christian doctrine holds that sex is an intrinsically good thing, following from the Old Testament imperative to ‘go forth and multiply’. But it follows from that that Christianity treats sex with something approaching a sacramental reverence: an act of both great creative and destructive potential. By linking it with love, with marriage and with childrearing, Christianity is not trying so much to limit sex or to discourage it, but acknowledging its power and attempting to ensure that its ability to cause hurt, whether physical or spiritual, to people (whether the partners or the potential offspring), is reduced.

There is also a distinctly Chestertonian (or arguably Kierkegaardian) dimension to this seeming-paradox. Where sex is treated as a holy and transcendent act, people tend to have healthier and more robust appetites for it, and indeed seem to enjoy it more. But where it is treated merely as appetite, it has a tendency to gorge itself, and then bore itself, sickening and withering away.

An interesting tidbit of information, anyway. I would like to get a second opinion on these tendencies, though.