II. EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIALISM

Chaos and poverty—The Han Dynasty—The reforms of Wu Ti—The income tax—The planned economy of Wang Mang—Its overthrow—The Tatar invasion

Disorder followed his death, as it has followed the passing of almost every dictator in history; only an immortal can wisely take all power into his hands. The people revolted against his son, killed him soon after he had killed Li Ssü, and put an end to the Ch’in Dynasty within five years after its founder’s death. Rival princes established rival kingdoms, and disorder ruled again. Then a clever condottiere, Kao-tsu, seized the throne and founded the Han Dynasty, which, with some interruptions and a change of capital,*lasted four hundred years. Wen Ti (179-57 B.C.) restored freedom of speech and writing, revoked the edict by which Shih Huang-ti had forbidden criticism of the government, pursued a policy of peace, and inaugurated the Chinese custom of defeating a hostile general with gifts.¹⁵

The greatest of the Han emperors was Wu Ti. In a reign of over half a century (140-87 B.C.) he pushed back the invading barbarians, and extended the rule of China over Korea, Manchuria, Annam, Indo-China and Turkestan; now for the first time China acquired those vast dimensions which we have been wont to associate with her name. Wu Ti experimented with socialism by establishing national ownership of natural resources, to prevent private individuals from “reserving to their sole use the riches of the mountains and the sea in order to gain a fortune, and from putting the lower classes into subjection to themselves.”¹⁶ The production of salt and iron, and the manufacture and sale of fermented drinks, were made state monopolies. To break the power of middlemen and speculators—“those who buy on credit and make loans, those who buy to heap up in the towns, those who accumulate all sorts of commodities” as the contemporary historian, Szuma Ch’ien expressed it—Wu Ti established a national system of transport and exchange, and sought to control trade in such a way as to prevent sudden variations in price. State workingmen made all the means of transportation and delivery in the empire. The state stored surplus goods, selling them when prices were rising too rapidly, buying them when prices were falling; in this way, says Szuma Ch’ien, “the rich merchants and large shop-keepers would be prevented from making big profits, . . . and prices would be regulated throughout the empire.”¹⁷ All incomes had to be registered with the government, and had to pay an annual tax of five per cent. In order to facilitate the purchase and consumption of commodities the Emperor enlarged the supply of currency by issuing coins of silver alloyed with tin. Great public works were undertaken in order to provide employment for the millions whom private industry had failed to maintain; bridges were flung across China’s streams, and innumerable canals were cut to bind the rivers and irrigate the fields.¹⁸*

For a time the new system flourished. Trade grew in amount, variety and extent, and bound China even with the distant nations of the Near East.²⁰ The capital, Lo-yang, increased in population and wealth, and the coffers of the government were swollen with revenue. Scholarship flourished, poetry abounded, and Chinese pottery began to be beautiful. In the Imperial Library there were 3,123 volumes on the classics, 2,705 on philosophy, 1,318 on poetry, 2,568 on mathematics, 868 on medicine, 790 on war.²¹ Only those who had passed the state examinations were eligible to public office, and these examinations were open to all. China had never prospered so before.

A combination of natural misfortunes with human deviltry put an end to this brave experiment. Floods alternated with droughts, and raised prices beyond control. Harassed by the high cost of food and clothing, the people began to clamor for a return to the good old days of an idealized past, and proposed that the inventor of the new system should be boiled alive. Business men protested that state control had diminished healthy initiative and competition, and they objected to paying, for the support of these experiments, the high taxes levied upon them by the government.²²Women entered the court, acquired a secret influence over important functionaries, and became an element in a wave of official corruption that spread far and wide after the death of the Emperor.²³Counterfeiters imitated the new currency so successfully that it had to be withdrawn. The business of exploiting the weak was resumed under a new management, and for a century the reforms of Wu Ti were forgotten or reviled.

At the beginning of our era—eighty-four years after Wu Ti’s death—another reformer ascended the throne of China, first as regent, and then as emperor. Wang Mang was of the highest type of Chinese gentleman.* Though rich, he lived temperately, even frugally, and scattered his income among his friends and the poor. Absorbed in the vital struggle to reõrganize the economic and political life of his country, he found time nevertheless not only to patronize literature and scholarship, but to become an accomplished scholar himself. On his accession to power he surrounded himself not with the usual politicians, but with men trained in letters and philosophy; to these men his enemies attributed his failure, and his friends attributed his success.

Shocked by the development of slavery on the large estates of China, Wang Mang, at the very outset of his reign, abolished both the slavery and the estates by nationalizing the land. He divided the soil into equal tracts and distributed it among the peasants; and, to prevent the renewed concentration of wealth, he forbade the sale or purchase of land.²⁵ He continued the state monopolies of salt and iron, and added to them state ownership of mines and state control of the traffic in wine. Like Wu Ti he tried to protect the cultivator and the consumer against the merchant by fixing the prices of commodities. The state bought agricultural surpluses in time of plenty, and sold them in time of dearth. Loans were made by the government, at low rates of interest, for any productive enterprise.²⁶

Wang had conceived his policies in economic terms, and had forgotten the nature of man. He worked long hours, day and night, to devise schemes that would make the nation rich and happy; and he was heart broken to find that social disorder mounted during his reign. Natural calamities like drought and flood continued to disrupt his planned economy, and all the groups whose greed had been clipped by his reforms united to plot his fall. Revolts broke out, apparently among the people, but probably financed from above; and while Wang, bewildered by such ingratitude, struggled to control these insurrections, subject peoples weakened his prestige by throwing off the Chinese yoke, and the Hsiung-nu barbarians overran the northern provinces. The rich Liu family put itself at the head of a general rebellion, captured Chang-an, slew Wang Mang, and annulled his reforms. Everything was as before.

The Han line ended in a succession of weak emperors, and was followed by a chaos of petty dynasties and divided states. Despite the Great Wall the Tatars poured down into China, and conquered large areas of the north. And as the Huns broke down the organization of the Roman Empire, and helped to plunge Europe into a Dark Age for a hundred years, so the inroads of these kindred Tatars disordered the life of China, and put an end for a while to the growth of civilization. We may judge the strength of the Chinese stock, character and culture from the fact that this disturbance was much briefer and less profound than that which ruined Rome. After an interlude of war and chaos, and racial mixture with the invaders, Chinese civilization recovered, and enjoyed a brilliant resurrection. The very blood of the Tatars served, perhaps, to reinvigorate a nation already old. The Chinese accepted the conquerors, married them, civilized them, and advanced to the zenith of their history.