SongDynasty

In960 a new power, Song (960-1279), reunified most of China Proper. The Songperiod divides into two phases: Northern Song (960-1127) and Southern Song(1127-1279). The division was caused by the forced abandonment of northChina in 1127 by the Song court, which could not push back the nomadicinvaders.

The founders of the Song dynasty built aneffective centralized bureaucracy staffed with civilian scholar-officials.Regional military governors and their supporters were replaced by centrallyappointed officials. This system of civilian rule led to a greater concentrationof power in the emperor and his palace bureaucracy than had been achievedin the previous dynasties.

The Song dynasty is notable for the developmentof cities not only for administrative purposes but also as centers of trade,industry, and maritime commerce. The landed scholar-officials, sometimescollectively referred to as the gentry, lived in the provincial centersalongside the shopkeepers, artisans, and merchants. A new group of wealthycommoners--the mercantile class--arose as printing and education spread,private trade grew, and a market economy began to link the coastal provincesand the interior. Landholding and government employment were no longerthe only means of gaining wealth and prestige.

Culturally, the Song refined many of the developmentsof the previous centuries. Included in these refinements were not onlythe Tang ideal of the universal man, who combined the qualities of scholar,poet, painter, and statesman, but also historical writings, painting, calligraphy,and hard-glazed porcelain. Song intellectuals sought answers to all philosophicaland political questions in the Confucian Classics. This renewed interestin the Confucian ideals and society of ancient times coincided with thedecline of Buddhism, which the Chinese regarded as foreign and offeringfew practical guidelines for the solution of political and other mundaneproblems.

The Song Neo-Confucian philosophers, findinga certain purity in the originality of the ancient classical texts, wrotecommentaries on them. The most influential of these philosophers was ZhuXi ( b1130-1200), whose synthesis of Confucian thoughtand Buddhist, Taoist, and other ideas became the official imperial ideologyfrom late Song times to the late nineteenth century. As incorporated intothe examination system, Zhu Xi's philosophy evolved into a rigid officialcreed, which stressed the one-sided obligations of obedience and complianceof subject to ruler, child to father, wife to husband, and younger brotherto elder brother. The effect was to inhibit the societal development ofpremodern China, resulting both in many generations of political, social,and spiritual stability and in a slowness of cultural and institutionalchange up to the nineteenth century. Neo-Confucian doctrines also cameto play the dominant role in the intellectual life of Korea, Vietnam, andJapan.

The Song (pronounced Soong) dynasty ranksup there with the Tang and the Han as one of the great dynasties. Fiftyyears after the official end of the Tang, an imperial army re-unified Chinaand established the Song dynasty. A time of remarkable advances in technology,culture, and economics, the Song, despite its political failures, basicallyset the stage for the rest of the imperial era. The most important developmentduring the Song was that agricultural technology, aided by the importationof a fast-growing Vietnamese strain of rice and the invention of the printingpress, developed to the point where the food-supply system was so efficientthat, for the most part, there was no need to develop it further. Therewas enough food for everyone, more or less, the system worked, and it becameself-sustaining. Because it worked, there was no incentive to improve it;the system thus remained basically unchanged from the Song up until thetwentieth century. In fact, many rice farmers in the Chinese interior andin less-developed regions of south-east Asia are, for the most part, stillusing Song-era farming techniques.

The efficiency of the system not only madeit economically self-sustaining, but also re-enforced the existing socialstructure. Consequently, society and economics were largely static fromthe Song until the collapse of the dynastic system in the twentieth century.

This is important because one of the factorsbehind the Industrial Revolution in Europe was that they didn't have enoughpeople to work the fields. There was an incentive to create better technologyin Europe; there was no need in China. China actually had a surplus ofhuman labor.

While the Song was a time of great advances,politically and militarily, the Song was a failure. The northern half ofChina was conquered by barbarians, forcing the dynasty to abandon a northerncapital in the early 1100's. Then a hundred and fifty years later, theMongols, fresh from conquering everything between Manchuria and Austria,invaded and occupied China.

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