When Shenzong ascended to the throne in 1068, the Song Dynasty began its descent:
The guy was 19 years old. If 3000 years of Chinese monarchy have produced any lesson, the lesson is that young monarchs are trouble. They always are. Young people are by definition inexperienced, so they tend to do stupid stuff. And generally, young men like to fight. They are eager to fight. It’s in their blood. Sometimes that turns out well, as Han Wudi who basically tripled the territory of China in 30 years and crushed every single army around it. But usually young emperors pick fights without thinking, and the outcome is catastrophic.
Huizong’s father was livid at how his dynasty was so small, so much smaller than the previous ones. Vietnam lost! The Northwest lost! [...] You give the reigns of power to a 20 year old kid and of course he wants war.
The mandarins weren’t having it, though. Your majesty, you see, we signed treaties with all these people. We can’t just go and attack them just like that. And you know, your great grandfather weakened the army for this and that reason. Please don’t be so rash. It’ll be ok.
But the young emperor wasn’t having it. If these mandarins didn’t want war, he’d find some who did. By this time the Imperial Examinations had been going on for a 100 years. And for all its benefits, the imperial examination system had been producing more grads than there were official positions available. There was a pretty big cohort of frustrated intellectuals who wanted a government position but couldn’t get that. Interestingly the court paid a salary to all examination grads, even if they didn’t have an official job. But that didn’t help morale either. They wanted to do something, to prove their worth. A textbook example of elite overproduction. Eventually the emperor found a mandarin who was willing to play ball. He found Wang Anshi.
Wang Anshi sent a letter to the emperor telling that he knew exactly what to do to beat the evil barbarians, and that all the problems had been caused by evil mandarins who only thought of themselves. Wang Anshi had a far ranging plan of legal reforms, which amounted to the invention of Socialism. Yes, the Chinese also invented Socialism.
Wang Anshi argued that the tribute to barbarians had caused an increase in taxes which was oppressing the peasantry, and that rich landlords were making all the money. He basically ordered the nationalization of everything. Agricultural loans were to be done by the state; a welfare system was instituted for the old and the poor, prices were fixed, wages raised, speculation and monopolies forbidden by law. The raised revenue were to be used to reform the army and beat the barbarians.
Young emperor of course loved all this stuff. But the mandarins were really not having it. It was against them that all these reforms were aimed to. Landlords made their money by scamming the peasantry, giving them loans to buy seed, then buying grain at bottom rock prices when the harvest came all at once. All those commercial monopolies were also owned by mandarin families. This reform basically destroyed their fancy livelihoods, and they weren’t going to go down that easily. An extremely harsh factional fight paralized the whole government. Most of the mandarinate just wasn’t enforcing the new laws. Wang Anshi responded by removing all traditional checks on power and basically setting a dictatorship, and putting his own people in all important positions, reforming the very examination system so that future grads would be on his faction by default.
But the policies were just not working. Farming loans were being done by the government; so now the local officials became the landlords, and made money under the table for themselves. Local officials weren’t usually people of the land, so they extracted money even more viciously than the landlords, who had to be minimally nice to keep their local reputation. Government loans were set up to be lower than what landlords used to charge; but officials were actually forcing peasants to take loans even if they didn’t need them! Bureaucrats had quotas to meet, you know. So grab this super-low 20% interest loan now, or else. Ah, socialism.
The conservatives of course also took care to sabotage everything that the government was trying to do. They were pretty fond of their privileges, mind you. Eventually a famine happened, the local officials botched it, and the conservatives took the chance to blame it everything on Heaven’s displeasure with the damn socialists. The army reforms also didn’t go anywhere. As the rest of the world learned 900 years later: socialism doesn’t work because government officials are also people. It could have worked out if Wang Anshi had an army of devoted followers and 50 years to implement the whole thing. But he didn’t; all he had was his good prose and the favor of a dumb emperor. The whole thing barely lasted 5 years.
What it did do was completely destroy the stability of government.