Chapter 20 "Book of Ten Thousand Words" in the second section

In the spring of the seventh year of Emperor Gong Xiande of the Later Zhou Dynasty (AD 960), Zhao Kuangyin, the commander-in-chief of the Forbidden Army, launched the "Chenqiao Mutiny" and established the Song Dynasty, known as the "Northern Song Dynasty" in history.The regime of the Northern Song Dynasty was established on the basis of the long-term separatist melee at the end of the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.In order to prevent the reappearance of the separatist situation in the feudal towns, Zhao Kuangyin and other rulers formulated the founding strategy of "guarding the inside and ignoring the outside".Just as Emperor Taizong Zhao Guangyi said to his courtiers: "If there is no external worry in a country, there must be internal troubles. External troubles are nothing but side affairs, and all of them can be prevented. The help of treacherous evil is an internal trouble, which is deeply to be feared." ("Song History·Song Shou Biography" ) According to this spirit, the Northern Song Dynasty regarded preventing internal strife and usurping power and suppressing people's resistance struggles as an important part of consolidating the rule.However, with the passage of time, various measures to strengthen the rule of feudal absolutism have many disadvantages.In the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, after nearly a hundred years of development, various social contradictions were intertwined, and the Northern Song Dynasty regime was facing a severe challenge.

The land is highly concentrated, and farmers lose their fields and cannot endure the suffering of a poor life, which has become a serious social problem.In the mid-Song Dynasty, "powerful officials with rich surnames occupied unlimited land, merged and counterfeited, and became accustomed to it" ("Song History Shihuo Zhi").The land occupied by bureaucrats, gentry, and monastery landlords accounted for more than 70% of the country's arable land.It can be said that "the rich have promising land, the poor have no land, the strong have no land to plant, and the rich have no power to cultivate" (Volume 27 of "Continued Zizhi Tongjian Changbian").Tenants all over the world pay most of their harvest as land rent.The majority of peasants were suffering from hunger and cold, and fled to other places, or were trapped to death in the wilderness.Wang Anshi pointedly pointed out: "There are many merged families, the property of the rich is all over the state, and the poor will inevitably die in the ravine." The contradiction between the peasantry and the landlord class.

Huge bureaucracy, full of redundant officials and redundant staff, and a sharp increase in the number of mercenaries caused the country's financial crisis and intensified social conflicts.In the Song Dynasty, there were two main ways to select officials. One was to grant officials with kindness, and the sons, relatives, and retainers of the clan and bureaucrats could be appointed as officials through this method.The second is the imperial examination, through which most people enter official careers.In the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, in order to prevent officials from holding the power of a certain department for a long time and forming a party for personal gain, a system of officials, positions, and dispatches with different official positions and separation of names and realities was implemented.Officials and positions are all false titles, and only dispatched people have titles and powers, which are worthy of the name.In this way, the bureaucracy of the central government is huge, and the number of officials has increased dramatically.Bao Zheng once wrote an article pointing out that when Zhenzong Zhao Hengshi had a total of 9,785 civil and military officials, by the time of Renzong Zhaozhen, the number had reached 17,300.In just over 40 years, the number of officials has nearly doubled.The local officials are "not as wide as the prefectures and counties, but the officials are five times the old", and it is impossible to count.They use their power to embezzle and accept bribes unscrupulously, speculate in business, and reap high profits.The army of the Northern Song Dynasty was mainly the forbidden army and the Xiang army (local troops).At the beginning of the Song Dynasty, there were only 200,000 troops in the army, but in the reign of Emperor Renzong Huangyou, the number soared to 1.4 million.Most of the soldiers were recruited starving people and idle city scoundrels.The country has to support a large number of redundant officials and a large standing army. The government's finances are very difficult, and the people's economic burden is heavy.The entire country is "exhausted of national funds, ten houses and nine empties of the people" (Volume 150 of "Continued Zizhi Tongjian Changbian").

At this time, Liao and Xixia Chen Bing Northwest, they often harass the interior, robbing people and livestock property.Because the Northern Song Dynasty implemented the policy of "strong stems and weak branches", the central forbidden army was strengthened in terms of quantity and equipment, and the strength of the local Xiang army was excessively weakened, so as to achieve the goal of "reserving more and controlling less".This resulted in the local inability to resist the killing and looting of Liao and Xixia.The "weakness" in the military has led to the rise of ethnic conflicts in the border areas.The sharpness of class contradictions has prompted peasant uprisings, soldier mutinies, and resistance struggles of ethnic minorities to "surge everywhere", covering Henan, Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and other places.From the third year of Qingli (AD 1043), peasant uprisings became more and more powerful.In May of this year, the Wang Lun uprising broke out in Yizhou (now Linyi, Shandong); in August, in Shangzhou, Shaanxi, Zhang Hai and Guo Miaoshan led the uprising again.There was also an uprising by Wang Ze in Beizhou, Hebei (now Qinghe, Hebei), and an uprising by the Yao people in Guiyangjian, Hunan.Just as the courtier Ouyang Xiu said, the armed uprisings of the people, "every year is like a year, and a fire (group) is as strong as a fire" ("Ouyang Wenzhong Gongwen Collection" volume 100).This shows that various social contradictions in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty reached a feverish level.

"The mountain rain is about to come and the wind is full of the building".Song Renzong has already felt the crisis of the situation. If he does not change course, the country and society will be in danger of collapse.In the early years of Qingli, Renzong successively appointed Fan Zhongyan, Han Qi, Fu Bi, Ouyang Xiu and others as political advisers, deputy privy envoys, and admonishers, and authorized them to make innovations and "have peace of mind".In September of the third year of Qingli (1043 A.D.), Fan Zhongyan presented a booklet of "Responding to Shouzhao Tiaochen Ten Things" to Renzong, and proposed ten reform proposals. The main contents include rectifying the administration of officials, selecting and training talents, developing agricultural production and strengthening military .The central issue of Fan Zhongyan's "New Deal" is to rectify the ruling institutions, improve the administration of officials, eliminate redundant officials and select talented officials.He believes that as long as this is done, the society can "get peace for everyone and prevent chaos."However, the improvement measures of Fan Zhongyan and others violated the actual interests of the bureaucratic landlords and were strongly opposed and slandered by them.In the second half of the fourth year of Qingli (1044 A.D.), Fan Zhongyan, Han Qi, Fu Bi, Ouyang Xiu, etc. were excluded from the imperial court one after another, and the "Qingli New Deal" that had been implemented for less than a year died prematurely.Fan Zhongyan's well-known and well-known novel "The Story of Yueyang Tower" was written when he was exiled from Beijing and passed by Dongting Lake in Yueyang, Hunan. "Worry about the world's worries first, and enjoy the world's joy later!" "Hey, Weisi people, who am I going to return?" Expressed his melancholy heart after worrying about the country and the people and the failure of the New Deal.

Wang Anshi has been an official in the local area for many years, and he has witnessed the corruption of officials and the phenomenon of oppressing the people, as well as the tragic situation that the people can hardly survive in the face of natural disasters and man-made disasters.He described this tragic scene many times in his poems: The vulgar officials don't know the formula, so they are talented if they are overwhelmed.In the third year of Zuohuang Prefecture, there were abandoned hungry babies in the city. These poems profoundly exposed social contradictions and corruption of officials, sympathized with the sufferings of the broad masses of the people, and reflected his political views of "suppressing mergers".

In the third year of Jiayou (1058 A.D.), Wang Anshi, who had served in prefectures and counties for 16 or 17 years, was called to go north to the court and served as the third division judge (an official of the highest financial institution in the central government).Not long after he came to Kaifeng, the capital city, he condensed his thoughts on social change over the years into his pen, and wrote a letter to Emperor Zhao Zhen, "Emperor Renzong's Words and Events", clearly putting forward the suggestion of "changing and changing".Wang Anshi pointed out: "Today's financial resources are getting poorer day by day, customs are getting worse day by day, and the trouble is that we don't know the law."Otherwise, it will be difficult to become "the entrustment of the community and the protection of the frontier", and there will be a situation in which Zhangjiao in the Han Dynasty, thirty-six parties rose on the same day, Huangchao ran rampant in the world in the Tang Dynasty, and the situation of "changing the community".As soon as this "Wan Yan Shu" came out, although it did not attract the attention of Emperor Renzong and Yingzong, it rekindled the fire of reform that was about to be extinguished after the Qingli New Deal.