Though Han Wudi had so warmly recommended the tutelary role played by the long-dead Duke of Zhou, he seems not to have approved of some of the duke’s ideas on imperial authority – ideas such as virtue being essential to legitimacy, moral excellence being the best guarantee of an orderly society, and the Mandate being both contingent and transferable. On the contrary, Wudi, and then Huo Guang, continued to uphold the need for authority to be beyond dispute, for laws to be strictly enforced, punishments vigorously inflicted, and service universally exacted. The severity of Qin and its legalist exponents was invoked without embarrassment, while the Confucian habit of harping on the past and emphasising the ‘magnetic’ attraction of moral rectitude was ridiculed as hopelessly impractical.
But a reaction was soon under way. Han Xuandi, and more especially his son Han Yuandi, presided over a surge in Confucian remorse for the excesses of Wudi’s reign. By the end of the century, appalled by the example of Huo Guang’s exercise in dynastic manipulation and carried along by this swelling tide of reaction, a much-ridiculed figure would be embarking on a unique experiment in what might tentatively be called Confucian fundamentalism.
Evidence for this turning of the ideological tide is to be found both in the Hanshu’s approval of the economies and retrenchments undertaken during the ‘Z-X-Y’ years, and in an almost unique document that recounts an official consultation of the period. As per its unappetising title – ‘Discourses on Salt and Iron’ – this document ostensibly deals with a discussion of the government monopolies in salt, iron and other commodities. True to the traditions of Chinese literature, it is not, however, entirely what it seems. It in fact ranges very much wider, being part of an official inquiry into the plight of the nation. Similarly, though the monopolies in question dated from Han Wudi’s reign, and though the consultation itself was held in 81 BC in Han Zhaodi’s reign, the surviving account of the debate dates from Han Xuandi’s reign. It was thus composed as much as twenty or thirty years after the event.
It could have been based on an original transcript and intended as a belated record of the debate, or perhaps it was simply undertaken as an academic exercise; but much of its interest lies in the mid-first-century BC context in which it was written. Throughout the discusssion, official spokesmen are called on to defend the government’s hard-line policies against the criticisms of articulate opponents. These government spokesmen have since been designated ‘modernists’ and their critics ‘reformists’, although neither can be regarded as advocating an exactly progressive agenda; it was more a case of conservative pragmatism versus reactionary idealism.20
The modernists rehearsed legalist arguments: people are naturally lazy and need to be coerced; laws are worthless if not enforced; monopolies are beneficial to both state and consumer; taxes and labour service are essential for security and social betterment; expansion and trade likewise; and government is about everyday realities, not abstract theories. The reformists, on the other hand, followed Confucian thinking to disagree on all counts: the people should be left to get on with their work, which was agriculture, not state service or manufacturing or moneymaking; foreign adventures, whether military or commercial, were unproductive; state-run industries were inefficient and produced shoddy goods; and the government should step back on all fronts, cut down on extravagance, cultivate a social conscience, and restore the balance between yin and yang by promoting rectitude and emulating the more benign policies of ancient times. Somewhat perversely, then, ‘the modernists’ were defending the status quo and ‘the reformists’ advocating a return to the distant past.
Very little came of the discussion. The state-run monopoly of salt was retained, that of iron withdrawn only in respect of manufactories in Chang’an itself, and that of liquor only in respect of the provinces (where it had probably been ineffective anyway). Yet throughout the debate it was the hard-line modernists who were repeatedly reduced to silence, while the Confucian reformists enjoyed triumph after triumph; they required fewer speakers than their opponents, their arguments received greater coverage, and they usually got the best lines: officials without a good grounding in the classics were described as like landlubbers ‘putting to sea without oars’, and dispatching expeditions against the Xiongnu was as unproductive as ‘fishing in the Yangzi without a net’. The Qin emperors and their legalist advisers were repeatedly rubbished for having fallen beneath the weight of their own oppression; yet the Zhou and their peerless duke emerged unscathed. Thus the whole exercise was portrayed as a victory for the Confucian ‘reformists’, though in 81 BC it had probably been nothing of the sort. But by 40 BC, when this record of the debate was recorded, their arguments were being vindicated and Confucian reformism was indeed about to triumph.
This important trend owed little to the personal influence of the emperors, who followed one another in quick succession during the last half of the century. Han Yuandi (r. 49–33 BC) liked serious music, displayed moderation in all things, and was often ill. The economies associated with his reign were largely the work of his reformist officials. So was the very cold reception accorded to Chen Tang, a military officer in Xinjiang whose prompt action had resulted in a crushing defeat of the Xiongnu in 36 BC. Chen Tang’s escapade had taken him west as far as Sogdiana (Samarkand) and had certainly upstaged Li Guangli’s ponderous successes in the same region seventy years earlier. But because of the urgency of the situation, Chen Tang had had to act unofficially and on forged authority. Given the favourable outcome, this might have been overlooked had opinion still favoured a forward policy. But it did not; central Asia was no longer considered a priority, foreign adventures found no precedent in the now fashionable history of the Zhou kings, and Chen Tang was lucky not to be executed.
The famously abstemious Han Yuandi was extravagant only in the matter of empresses. He had three, all of whom produced male heirs whose descendants would be involved in the succession. Wang Zhengjun, the last of the three and another of those empresses with ambitious relatives and a far more imperious character than her easy-going husband, bore him Han Chengdi (r. 31–7 BC), his successor. Chengdi liked erotic music, had a habit of absconding from his apartments to pass incognito among the low-life of Chang’an, and was content to let his mother’s family run his empire. This the Wangs did; and they being reform-minded Confucians devoted to the interventionist example of the Duke of Zhou, the official bureaucracy found itself increasingly sidelined by an ‘inner court’ or ‘palace secretariat’ that was closer to the emperor and more readily packed with Wang supporters.
Proposals current at this time of revisionist experiment included a suggestion for doing away with the coinage in favour of an economy based on kind, and another for imposing a ceiling on wealth and landholdings so that the surplus could be redistributed to the peasantry. Meanwhile scholars busied themselves with an exegetical sifting of the Confucian classics, in which they doubtless found more clues to life as so gloriously lived a thousand years earlier. Save for the stream of alleged scandals and atrocities emanating from the inner sanctums of the imperial palaces, the dawning of a brave old world seemed imminent.
This received an unexpected setback when in 7 BC the still-heirless Chengdi died and was succeeded by Han Aidi, his half-nephew (r. 7–1 BC). Dowager Empress Wang suddenly found herself powerless. Wang Mang, her impressive great-nephew and currently the fifth Wang to hold the supreme ‘Inner Court’ office of Marshal of State, was relieved of his powers. A new faction comprised of rival dowagers with their own Marshals of State took over. The reformist cause had fallen from favour.
The eighteen-year-old Aidi is credited with much ambition. But he suffered from some chronic form of arthritis and, ominously for the succession, ‘cared neither for music nor women’. ‘At times he watched boxing, archery and military sports,’ says the Hanshu; at others he fawned on a dashing young officer called Dong Xian.21 Made Marshal of State at the age of twenty-one, Dong Xian hosted a reception for a visiting shanyu, who was taken aback by his youth and inexperience. Dong Xian might have risen even farther; at one point the emperor actually proposed abdicating in his favour. This, however, was too outrageous a suggestion even for Aidi’s dowagerial sponsors. All factions for once united in vetoing it.
It would be gratifying to report that Aidi reached ad; sadly he just failed, dying of arthritis in 1 BC. Another successor was rapidly plucked from among the long-dead Yuandi’s descendants by the Grand Dowager Empress Wang, Yuandi’s now eighty-something widow. And on her authority and his own insistence, Wang Mang, her nephew and the Wang family’s leading light, was restored as Marshal of State and regent for Pingdi (r. 1 BC–ad 6), the nine-year-old emperor. The much-quoted precedent for Wang Mang’s ascendancy was of course that of the Duke of Zhou taking young King Cheng under his wing as revised by the glum Huo Guang during Han Zhaodi’s reign.
The zealously ‘reformist’ Wangs were back in control; and thanks to several timely demises, some of them natural, they were now virtually unopposed. Quite by chance, what would have been Christendom’s year 0 (if the Gregorian calendar had not omitted it) would be ‘Year Zero’ for the Confucian ‘commonwealth’. The much-misunderstood Wang Mang was about to introduce an instructive experiment in reactionary reform.