China’s policy of withdrawal was not pursued out of set purpose, but was imposed upon it by necessity.
When, after the era of the Seven Kingdoms, the general who was destined to become the first ruler of the Song Dynasty had himself nominated as emperor by his soldiers in 960, [3] and had established his authority over almost the whole of China, his successor’s principal task was to complete the unity of his realm by incorporating into it the last provincial state that remained, that of Beijing, ruled by a Mongol people known as the Khitan (Qidan). But in spite of two campaigns against them, he failed to do this. [4] Moreover, a little while later, the Khitan themselves took the offensive, which led them almost to the gates of the imperial capital.
It was from this time (1004) that the Song abandoned the policy of making war and decided to leave the barbarians undisturbed, not only in their steppes beyond the Great Wall, but also on the inner side of it, in the Chinese territories of the far north, in their Kingdom of Beijing. It was also from this time on that Beijing began to play an important part in the history of China, though that city was not the creation of the Chinese themselves, but of the barbarians.
Thus a century passed during which the Song ruled over the whole of China except Beijing. Their capital could no longer therefore be one of the old capitals of the marches – Chang'an or Luoyang in the mountains, but Kaifeng, a city situated scarcely more than 200 kilometres east of Luoyang, but in the very heart of the Great Plain – that plain which is the land of peace.
The equilibrium thus achieved was destroyed in 1126. At that time, the Mongols, who were represented no longer by the Khitan, but by another tribe that had freshly emerged from barbarism, the Nüzhen, whom the Song Emperor Hui Zong had the imprudence to rouse against the Khitan, made themselves masters first over the Khitan in Beijing, and then over the Chinese in Kaifeng. [5]
Pacifism, like every other policy, must be undertaken as a whole. It cannot be practised partially. If it is to succeed, it must be total, without the slightest deviation. By having attempted to reconquer Beijing by means of the Nüzhen and thus having adopted a policy of war by proxy, the Song were thenceforward deprived not only of their capital, but of the whole of northern China. The history of Byzantium and of Nanjing was to be repeated; the Chinese now reigned only over the Blue River, the Yellow River remaining entirely under the domination of the Nüzhen.
We have thus returned to the situation of the fourth century, when the north was united into a single kingdom under the barbarians, instead of being divided into several kingdoms, and the counterpart of Byzantium would no longer be Nanjing, on the banks of the Blue River, but Hangzhou, to the south of the river and on the coast. The centre of Chinese civilisation thus continued to shift from north to south, and from mountain to sea.
As for the capital of the Nüzhen kingdom, it remained Beijing, the old capital of the Khitan, which also implied a shift nearer to the sea, because in ancient times it was Shaanxi in the bend of the Yellow River that was the barbarians’ favourite territory; now it was the coastal province of Jilin.
This last move, however, did more than reveal the increasingly commercial and maritime character of the Chinese economy; it is also to be explained by the origin of the new occupiers.
The barbarians who dwell along China’s frontiers are really of two different kinds. Some, of whom we have almost exclusively spoken so far, are shepherds of the Mongolian steppes; but to their east there is another country, Manchuria, which owing to its proximity to the sea is much better watered, and instead of steppes possesses great stretches of forest. The nomads who inhabit it belong to the Mongol branch – the Tungus, who also populate the forests of eastern Siberia. It is these who now penetrate China, and who naturally penetrate it by means of Jilin, the closest Chinese province to Manchuria. The Khitan were Tungus, and so were the Nüzhen, and it was Tungus who were to rule China from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
The loss of northern China as a consequence of their attempt to reconquer Beijing was a lesson for the Song that they did not forget. At the court of Hangzhou, it was the pacifists, thoroughgoing pacifists, who held undivided sway in the emperor’s councils. They wanted peace at any price to such an extent that they did not hesitate to disgrace and even execute generals found ‘guilty’ of gaining a victory. Such was notably the fate of general Yue Fei. [6] The dreams of the poet Du Fu were now indeed more than satisfied.
What was it that caused this Chinese withdrawal in the face of the barbarians – a withdrawal that began then and has lasted down to our own day? Like all such withdrawals, it was occasioned by an arrest in technical progress. It is technical progress that is the great factor of disequilibrium in human societies. Technical revolutions and the economic developments that follow them disturb the state of equilibrium of a society, and set in motion all the political and social processes that make up its history. They are as much the cause of conflicts with people abroad as they are of internal ones.
Now at the time with which we are dealing, Chinese technique and the economy had attained their full development. We have seen that it was under the Tang that Chinese industries acquired a complete mastery of their technique, and that it was at the same time that the colonisation and assimilation of the south had been completed, whilst maritime commerce had established itself upon the largest possible scale on the basis of the navigation then available. Thenceforward, in the absence of any new technical revolution, the Chinese economy was bound to stagnate, but a stagnant economy is incompatible with political expansion. Political expansion, even a purely defensive one, can only be brought about under the stimulus of economic expansion, which at one and the same time demands and permits it. If the Song resigned themselves first to the loss of Beijing, and afterwards to the loss of the Yellow River, it was because the Chinese technique and economy were themselves already in a state of ‘retreat’.
The Song era was certainly a great one for those who pursued the arts. Precisely because technique had completed its development and attained perfection, it was bound to produce masterpieces; the products of the Song pottery are marvels of craftsmanship. It was also the great era of painting. Even so, pottery and painting are but minor arts beside the architecture and sculpture that flourished under the Han and Tang dynasties.
It was above all in the domain of economic and social policy that the stagnation of technique produced its most remarkable results.
As abroad, so also at home it was a policy of peace that the Song pursued. The refusal to expand abroad was accompanied by a corresponding refusal to expand within. This refusal to expand within found expression in the pursuit of a total economic equilibrium by means of a controlled economy.
The end of the first Song period – the period during which they had held Kaifeng as capital and ruled both the Yellow and the Blue Rivers – was a great era of ‘reforms’. For more than half a century, from 1069 to 1126, the ‘reformers’, the most famous of whom was the scholar Wang Anshi, [7] had the direction of Chinese policy almost without interruption.
Their policy consisted of the application of two great measures, each complementary to the other.
The first, by which any controlled economy begins, was the fixing of prices. It was necessary to stabilise the economy, and to that end to stabilise prices, because it was the variation in prices that led to economic disequilibrium. The mandarins were accordingly charged with the task of fixing the prices of all commodities in every region, and these prices were made rigorously obligatory for everyone.
Nevertheless, stable as technique might have been, and insignificant as progress might be, there is a class of variations in production that cannot be avoided, and this is variations in production due to irregular atmospheric conditions. In China, as everywhere, and even more often in China than anywhere else, harvests may be very good or very bad. In order to avoid the consequences of this irregularity, two methods were simultaneously adopted.
In the first place, the state put in reserve the surplus harvests of the good years, and released them on the market during the bad years. But this method was very dangerous, for it is undialectical: unlike the variation of prices, it tends not to allow the balance between production and consumption to be re-established. In a nutshell, after the farmer has reaped a good harvest and made a considerable amount of money (since the unit prices did not vary), he is tempted to sow a great deal more, and the surplus tends to become excessive. The opposite happens in the event of a bad harvest: since the low yield is not compensated for by a rise in price, the farmer was unable to recover his expenses, and so became disposed to abandon or neglect the cultivation of a product that was manifestly in short supply. With the object of overcoming this second and most immediately dangerous phenomenon, the Chinese reformers proceeded to complete their system of fixed prices by establishing a great credit institution by means of which the state made yearly loans to agriculturists, enabling them to sow and grow their crops when there had been a shortfall in the harvest of the previous year.
This credit to agriculture was followed by credits to commerce and industry. A country’s economy is all of a piece. If we want to direct one branch of it, we are led inevitably to direct the whole lot.
When a poor harvest leads to a lessening in the demand for industrial products by the cultivator, the manufacturer, not being allowed to go below the fixed prices, is unable to put his goods within reach of his customer’s purse, and so he cannot sell them. If he is then to continue in business, he must borrow. So the state was obliged to lend money to industrialists as well as to cultivators.
Fixing of prices by the state, stockpiling of goods by the state, and granting credit by the state, these were the three measures by which Song China attempted to stabilise the national economy, thereby ensuring that, come what may, commodity production would always be on an even level, and always at the same rhythm.
These methods are to be found at the roots of any controlled economy in any country and in any era, for ways of controlling the economy are not unlimited. State-fixed prices, state purchases and state loans were the measures, as we have seen, that were even decreed by the Emperor Wang Mang in the first century of the Christian era; they were also the measures adopted in the Egypt of the Pharaohs; they were the measures adopted by Diocletian [8] when he inaugurated the lower empire, those that were practised by the Incas, [9] and those which states sometimes still try to adopt even in our own day.
It goes without saying that this stabilisation of the economy can only succeed in eras in which technical innovation is dormant, because the variations in production engendered by technical progress would break through the strong strait-jacket aimed at preventing their existence.
On the other hand, in times that immediately follow periods of great progress, it is quite clear that a controlled economy arouses the liveliest interest, for the simple reason that, wearied by continual upheavals and the constant insecurity that technical progress brings into everyday life, people everywhere are eager for a respite.
So it came about that as the creative genius of China had not been exhausted at the time of the Emperor Wang Mang, the controlled economy remained at the planning stage, a state in which the laws were never enforced. With Wang Anshi, on the other hand, this policy was really put into practice, and for several centuries, with adjustments of one kind or another, it continued to influence not only the last Song emperors, but even their successors – those of the Mongol Dynasty. [10]
This policy of directing the economy was accompanied by a democratic policy. Not only were measures adopted to advance education, examination fees being reduced in the proportion of 100 to two, but there was also the most ambitious attempt made since Athenian times to suppress the two great pillars of the state – the army and the administration – as distinct bodies separated from the people.
In 1070, Wang Anshi in effect decreed the arming of the people; all able-bodied men were to be armed on the spot as a popular militia. In addition, a three-year period of compulsory service in government offices was imposed on everyone. With the application of these two measures, the state was united with the people. It was none other than the key concept propounded by Lenin when he wrote State and Revolution. [11] But this daring attempt by the great Chinese reformer miscarried, just as nearly a thousand years later the similar attempt miscarried in the case of the Russian Revolution. The state remained distinct from the people.
On the other hand, the policy as a whole succeeded in achieving the principal aim of all controlled economies: tranquillity. The Song era does not appear to have been troubled by great popular uprisings, as were the Han and Tang epochs.
The arrest in technical progress, confinement within national frontiers, a controlled economy, the appeasement of the class struggle – all these things between them together formed a complex interconnection representing diverse manifestations of the same state: a state of lethargy. The disposition to leave things as they were, the fear of change, the fear of growth, a fear even of defending oneself – this was the general inclination. China had come to a state of deadlock.
Deadlock, however, does not imply an absence of prosperity. On the contrary, the controlled economy vigorously introduced by the Song of Kaifeng and continued more moderately by the Song of Hangzhou, combined with the pacifism resolutely practised by the latter, was conducive to a state of general ease and well-being which expressed itself in the highly characteristic fact that at the end of the twelfth century it was one day noticed that the prisons were empty.
But it was also, and precisely for the same reason, a bleak and melancholy era, an era of ‘melancholy refinement’, as the Sinologist Soulié de Morant [12] described it. Melancholy bleakness is in essence the price of tranquillity. Consider the Sweden of today, for example, where people are reduced to drunkenness in an effort to escape from the bleakness and boredom of their lives. A melancholy bleakness is the inevitable accompaniment of material well-being. It springs from an unsatisfied need for action and adventure.
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