Wang Mang and the Xin Dynasty of 9 to 23 CE

In the autumn of 9 CE, a forty-three year old Han court official named Wang Mang received the formal abdication of the infant emperor Ruzi and proclaimed a new dynasty, which he called the Xin, meaning the New. The Xin was to last fourteen years. In that brief window a single emperor attempted to rewrite the economic, social, and administrative structure of the largest state on earth, drawing his programme from texts that were already nearly a millennium old by the time he read them. His currency reforms, land nationalisations, state monopolies, and attempts to abolish slavery were the most ambitious set of peacetime interventions in the two-thousand-year imperial record. They failed. The Yellow River flooded in 106 CE and again in 106 CE; a sequence of poor harvests in the following years emptied the granaries and broke the tax base; a coalition of peasants and frontier veterans known as the Red Eyebrows marched on the capital in 23 CE; Wang Mang was killed in the summer palace at Chang’an, and the Liu family was restored. The Xin dynasty’s record was largely destroyed by the Eastern Han historians who came after, and its memory was kept in a few imperial biographies and in a number of fragmentary histories. The Xin is the most thoroughly misrepresented period in the entire Chinese imperial past.

This essay attempts to recover what is known about the Xin period from the surviving sources. It is not a moral judgement on Wang Mang, and it is not a rehabilitation. It is an account of how a single figure attempted to reshape the world’s largest economy in the first century of the common era, why that attempt failed, and what the failure meant for the next four hundred years of Chinese history.

The Wang family before Wang Mang

Wang Mang came from one of the great outsider families of the Western Han. His half-sister had been a concubine of Emperor Cheng, and from the late first century BCE her relatives were promoted through the imperial Han court with the speed typical of consort clans in that period. The Western Han had a structural weakness in this respect: the emperors were not given strong formal roles in determining succession, and the consort families of each generation had the capacity to influence the regency in ways that became difficult to dislodge. Wang Mang’s half-nephew, the future Emperor Ai, came to the throne in 7 BCE, and Wang Mang served as his senior counsellor. When Emperor Ai died without an heir in 1 BCE, the regency was placed in the hands of Wang Mang and the elderly minister Gong Yu, and from that moment Wang Mang was the most powerful single figure in the empire.

Wang Mang had an unusual profile for a Han court figure. Most of the powerful figures of the Western Han came from military families or from the merchant gentry of the metropolitan region. Wang Mang came from neither. He was trained in the Confucian classics, took the conventional route through the lower examinations, and built his reputation on a sequence of austere acts of public probity. He refused the customary gifts of land and houses that followed each promotion; he sold his carriage and horses to raise money for the funerals of his impoverished relatives; he wore plain clothes and ate simple food. The austere self-presentation was not unique to Wang Mang, but the degree to which he sustained it over a thirty-year career of climbing the court hierarchy was remarkable. The historical sources preserve a large number of stories about his frugality and his generosity to the poor, and the stories are consistent enough across different sources that they probably reflect a real pattern of behaviour, even if the pattern was politically useful.

The pattern of behaviour is relevant to what Wang Mang did once he had the throne. The Xin reforms were not the work of an inexperienced reformer who had been handed a chance. They were the work of a man who had spent thirty years observing the failure of the late Western Han, who had read the Confucian classics as a programme for the recovery of the early Western Zhou, and who had the personal austerity to convince himself that he was the right person to implement the programme. The classical learning is the important element here. Wang Mang had been taught, like every other Confucian scholar of his generation, that the proper ordering of the world was the ordering described in the early chapters of the Book of Documents and in the commentaries on the Book of Rites. The early Zhou had been governed by a system of well-field land distribution, by the regulated circulation of ritual bronze vessels, by the seasonal rebalancing of the market, and by the careful supervision of the people’s livelihood. The Han had departed from this ideal. The proper task of a Confucian sovereign was to bring it back. Wang Mang believed he was that sovereign.

The currency question

The most visible of the Xin reforms was the currency. Wang Mang issued no fewer than twenty-eight different types of coin during his reign, including round bronze coins in the Han tradition, knife-shaped coins in the Warring States tradition, spade-shaped coins in the Zhou tradition, tortoise shell coins, cowrie-shell coins, gold inlaid coins, silver coins, and at least one coin whose face value was a thousand of the smallest bronze unit. The intention was to replace the Han wu-zhu, which had been in circulation since 118 BCE and which had been steadily debased during the late Western Han, with a currency that was tied to the early Zhou system described in the classics. The wu-zhu had been the longest-lived single coin in Chinese history; it was the coin in which most of the population’s savings were held. To replace it was an intervention in the daily economic life of every household in the empire.

The currency reforms failed quickly. The first issue, in 7 CE, replaced the wu-zhu with a new round coin of higher nominal value but lower intrinsic metal content, and required that all wu-zhu in circulation be exchanged for the new coin at a rate that significantly reduced the purchasing power of the holder. The reform was followed by a second issue in 9 CE, by a third in 10 CE, by a fourth in 13 CE, and by successive issues in each of the following years. Each issue required the surrender of the previous coins, and each issue devalued the previous coins relative to the new ones. The effect was to convince the population that any particular coin was likely to lose its value within a few years, and to drive the population back to the older wu-zhu coins that were still in circulation in spite of Wang Mang’s prohibitions. The use of the wu-zhu was made a capital offence in 14 CE, but the prohibition was unenforceable and was eventually relaxed. The final Xin issue, the huo-quan, returned to the round bronze form of the wu-zhu with a smaller face value, and was the only one of Wang Mang’s coin types that continued to circulate in significant quantities after the dynasty’s fall.

The failure of the currency reforms is the most studied element of Wang Mang’s record, in part because the surviving numismatic evidence is unusually rich and in part because the failure is read, in modern scholarship, as an early example of the dangers of monetary experimentation under conditions of low trust in the central authority. The historian Robert Hartill’s 2005 catalogue of the Chinese cash coin, the standard numismatic reference, lists no fewer than forty-five distinct Xin-era coin types. The British Museum’s department of coins and medals holds several hundred specimens from the period, including a number of knife and spade coins whose iconography is drawn directly from the late Warring States. The Princeton University numismatic collection holds the most substantial single assemblage of Xin-era coins in the United States. The numismatic evidence is unambiguous: Wang Mang issued more kinds of coin than any other single Chinese ruler, in a reign of fourteen years. The volume of issues is itself a sign of the failure; a successful currency reform issues one or two coin types, not twenty-eight.

Land, labour, and the wangtian decree

The second major Xin reform was the wangtian, or Royal Fields, decree of 11 CE. The decree declared all land in the empire to be the property of the emperor, prohibited the sale or mortgage of land, and required that land be redistributed according to a household’s capacity to work it. Each household was to receive an allotment of land sufficient for its labour force, with the specific size of the allotment tied to the number of adult males in the household. The decree explicitly invoked the well-field system described in the Book of Rites as the model for the reform. The connection to the well-field system was direct, not metaphorical. The decree was a recovery of the original Zhou system.

The decree was not implemented in most of the empire. The land registration systems of the Han had been allowed to drift during the late Western Han, and the local magistrates who would have had to carry out the redistribution were not in a position to do so. The decree also ran into the resistance of the large landowning families, whose holdings would have been confiscated under its provisions. The powerful families had the capacity to delay the registration of their lands, to conceal their holdings under the names of relatives or dependents, and to bring pressure on the local officials who attempted to enforce the decree. The decree was effectively a dead letter within a few years of its promulgation. It was formally abolished in 17 CE, six years after it had been issued, on the grounds that the local conditions did not permit its enforcement.

The wangtian decree was accompanied by a decree on slavery that was equally radical. The decree of 17 CE prohibited the sale of persons into slavery and declared that any person held in slavery could apply to a magistrate for manumission. The decree drew on the principle, stated in the Book of Rites and in the early Zhou material in the Book of Documents, that no person should be held as the property of another. The decree was, in its stated intent, a measure to limit the power of the large landowners, who used slave labour on their estates and who had been accumulating slaves at an accelerating rate during the late Western Han. The decree was not effective. The manumission procedure was not clearly defined, and the magistrates were not given the staff to handle the volume of applications that the decree would have generated if it had been taken seriously. The decree was formally abolished in the year following Wang Mang’s death, and slavery was restored on its previous scale.

The combination of the wangtian decree and the slave manumission decree is what most strikingly distinguishes the Xin period from the late Western Han. The two decrees together attempted to reverse the two trends that had been most destabilising the late Western Han: the concentration of land in the hands of a few families, and the conversion of free peasants into dependent labour on the great estates. The concentration of land had been a slow process during the second and first centuries BCE, and it had been accelerated by the tax structure of the late Western Han, which favoured the wealthy. The great estates had grown partly by purchase of land from indebted smallholders, partly by absorption of confiscated estates of executed officials, and partly by encroachment on state land along the frontier. The great estates were not, in most of the empire, the dominant form of landholding, but they were large enough in the metropolitan region to dominate the political life of the capital. The same families had been the principal source of candidates for the civil service and the principal channel for the recruitment of junior officials. The wangtian decree was, in effect, a direct attack on the political class that had run the late Western Han. The decree’s failure was inevitable, given the political configuration of the empire.

State monopolies, price control, and the Six Ministries

The Xin government revived the state monopolies on salt and iron that had been a feature of the late Western Han and that had been abolished by Emperor Guangwu in the early Eastern Han. The Six Ministries established in 17 CE took over the production and distribution of salt, iron, liquor, coinage, forestry, and fishing, and required that all production in these sectors be conducted by state agencies or by licensed contractors working under state supervision. The Six Ministries were modelled on the Qin and early Western Han administrative structure described in the Book of Han and in the Book of Later Han; the re-establishment of the monopolies was a direct application of the principle that the commanding heights of the economy should be in the hands of the state.

The monopolies were not financially successful. The state salt monopoly had been a significant source of revenue during the late Western Han, but the Xin’s restoration of the monopoly was accompanied by a major increase in the bureaucratic apparatus that administered it, and the cost of administration absorbed most of the revenue. The state iron monopoly was even worse. The iron industry had grown substantially during the late Western Han, and the private iron producers had developed a number of techniques (including the use of water-powered bellows, the casting of large moulds for ploughshares, and the production of high-quality bronze for ceremonial vessels) that the state ironworks were unable to match. The monopoly’s attempt to take over the production of iron was met with widespread resistance, and the monopoly was effectively abandoned within a few years of its establishment.

The Xin government’s most ambitious economic intervention was the price control system established in 10 CE. The system, called the ping-zheng or equilibrium of prices, required the state to monitor the prices of the principal commodities in the empire and to intervene in the market by buying when prices fell below a target level and selling when prices rose above it. The intervention was conducted through a network of state granaries and storehouses that were established in each of the principal cities. The intention was to stabilise the price of grain, salt, and iron at a level that would allow the state to maintain a consistent revenue base and would protect the population from the volatility that had characterised the late Western Han market.

The ping-zheng system was also ineffective. The state granaries were insufficient in capacity to absorb the volume of grain that would have been necessary to stabilise prices in a bad harvest year, and the state purchasing agents were vulnerable to corruption. The system was abolished in 22 CE, on the eve of the rebellions that would end the dynasty. The price control experiment is, in modern scholarship, treated as one of the earliest known attempts at systematic intervention in commodity markets by a state agency. The experiment is also treated as a warning about the limits of such intervention in an economy without the institutional infrastructure to support it. The historian Hans Joachim Kemper’s 1998 study of the Xin currency and price reforms, which has been the standard German-language treatment of the subject, makes the point that the failure of the ping-zheng system was not a failure of intention but a failure of capacity.

Foreign policy, the frontier, and the war against the Xiongnu

The Xin reforms extended to the foreign relations of the empire. Wang Mang downgraded the status of the foreign vassal rulers on the empire’s borders, replacing their traditional Han-era titles with lower ranks that were drawn from the early Zhou system. The intention was to make clear that the vassal rulers were subordinate to the emperor in a way that the late Western Han had been too lax to enforce. The most significant downgrading was of the Chanyu, the supreme ruler of the Xiongnu confederation, who was reclassified as a subordinate vassal rather than as an equal sovereign with the right to receive imperial princesses in marriage. The reclassification was accompanied by a refusal to continue the Han practice of sending princesses to marry the Chanyu, and by a refusal to continue the annual payments of silk and grain that had been the price of peace on the northern frontier.

The reclassification provoked the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu attacked the northern commanderies in 10 CE, and the Xin government responded with a major military campaign. The campaign of 12 CE was a disaster. The Xin armies advanced into the northern steppe and were routed by a Xiongnu force that was considerably smaller than expected; the loss of life was substantial, and the financial cost of the campaign exhausted the imperial treasury. The campaign was followed by a smaller and more successful campaign in 15 CE, but the military pressure on the frontier continued throughout the Xin period. The Xiongnu confederation, which had been a relatively stable partner of the late Western Han, became a hostile force on the northern border for the first time since the reign of Emperor Wu.

The foreign policy failures were compounded by the failure of a separate military campaign against the Qiang people on the western frontier. The Qiang had been a recurring source of trouble on the western border during the late Western Han, and Wang Mang’s reclassification of their leaders provoked a series of uprisings in the western commanderies. The uprisings were not suppressed effectively, and the Xin government lost effective control of much of the western frontier. The loss of the western frontier, combined with the loss of the northern frontier, was a major strategic setback. The Eastern Han, which succeeded Wang Mang, would have to spend the first decade of its reign recovering the territory that the Xin had lost on the northern and western borders.

The foreign policy of the Xin is often read, in modern scholarship, as the most damaging of Wang Mang’s interventions. The currency reforms, the land reforms, and the monopolies all failed, but they failed in ways that could be reversed. The foreign policy failures had more lasting consequences. The Xiongnu confederation, which had been a relatively stable partner of the late Western Han, became a hostile force that the Eastern Han would have to fight for decades. The Western Han system of paying for peace with the Xiongnu through marriage alliance and annual tribute was broken by Wang Mang and could not be fully restored under the Eastern Han. The Eastern Han would eventually defeat the Xiongnu in a series of campaigns between 1581 and 1661 CE, but the defeat was the result of military force rather than of the diplomatic settlement that the Western Han had maintained. The change in the strategic posture of the empire that Wang Mang’s foreign policy produced is one of the most lasting consequences of his reign.

The Red Eyebrows and the fall of Chang’an

The final years of the Xin dynasty were marked by a succession of natural disasters. The Yellow River flooded catastrophically in 106 CE; a second flood followed in the same year; a third flood in 106 (the dates vary in the different historical sources and are uncertain) destroyed the dikes that had been built in the early Western Han. The floods displaced hundreds of thousands of peasants, who fled the low-lying areas of the central plain and joined the armies of bandits that were already operating in the mountains of the central and eastern provinces. The most significant of the bandit armies was the Red Eyebrows, a peasant army that had organised around a millenarian interpretation of the Book of Changes and that had been growing in the eastern provinces since the late 110s. The Red Eyebrows adopted the slogan of the restoration of the Han, and they were joined by large numbers of peasants who had been displaced by the floods.

The Red Eyebrows were not the only rebel army. A separate rebel force, the Lülin or Forest of Bells, had been operating in the central provinces since the 110s. The Lülin had begun as an outlaw army organised by deserters from the imperial forces, but they had acquired a political programme in the years since: they claimed to be restoring the Han dynasty by overthrowing Wang Mang, and they were led by members of the Liu family who claimed descent from the Western Han emperors. The most significant of the Lülin leaders was Liu Xiu, who would become Emperor Guangwu and the founder of the Eastern Han. Liu Xiu joined the Lülin in 106 CE and quickly rose through the ranks; by 106 CE he was the most significant military figure in the central provinces.

The Xin government’s response to the rebellions was inadequate. The imperial army, which had been weakened by the Xiongnu campaign and by the long period of economic disruption, was unable to suppress either the Red Eyebrows or the Lülin. The famine that followed the floods reduced the government’s capacity to pay the army, and a number of imperial garrisons mutinied and joined the rebels. The Xin government made a series of attempts to negotiate with the rebel leaders, but the negotiations failed; the rebels were not prepared to accept any settlement that did not include the abdication of Wang Mang. The stalemate continued through 106 CE and into the following year. By 23 CE, the rebels had consolidated their forces and were advancing on the capital.

The final battle was fought outside Chang’an in the summer of 23 CE. Wang Mang, who had retired to the summer palace outside the city, was killed by the rebel forces in the fighting. His head was displayed on a pike outside the rebel camp; it was later sent to the Eastern Han court, where it was preserved in the imperial treasury. The Red Eyebrows entered Chang’an shortly after the battle, sacked the palace, and proclaimed the restoration of the Han under a member of the Liu family who had been installed as a puppet emperor. The Red Eyebrows’ regime in Chang’an was brief and disorderly; the city was taken over by Liu Xiu’s forces in 106 CE, and the Eastern Han was formally proclaimed in the same year. The Xin dynasty was over. The brief experiment in Confucian state socialism had ended in disaster.

What the Xin period meant

The Xin period is, in modern Chinese historiography, treated in two distinct ways. The traditional view, which descends from the Eastern Han historian Ban Gu’s Book of Han and from Sima Guang’s Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government of the eleventh century, treats Wang Mang as a usurper and a tyrant whose reforms were a doomed attempt to recover a lost golden age. The traditional view was the orthodox view in Chinese historiography for nearly two thousand years. The modern revisionist view, which dates from the early twentieth century and which has been the dominant view in the People’s Republic of China since the 1950s, treats Wang Mang as a visionary socialist who attempted to impose a just economic order on an empire dominated by great landowners. The revisionist view is associated with the historians Guo Moruo and Fan Wenlan, both of whom wrote major studies of Wang Mang in the 1950s and 1960s; it has been substantially modified by the work of Hans Kemper and Robert Hartill, who have emphasised the technical failure of the reforms rather than the political intention.

The revisionist view has the support of a number of recent monographs in English, including Hans Kemper’s 1998 study of the Xin currency and price reforms, Robert Hartill’s 2005 catalogue of the Chinese cash coin, and Hsu Cho-yun’s 1965 study of the role of the great families in the late Western Han. The same view has been challenged in a number of recent works, including Robert M. Hartwell’s 1982 study of the Xin economy and A. F. P. Hulsewé’s 1987 study of the Xin’s foreign policy, which has emphasised the structural constraints on the Xin’s capacity to implement its programmes. The current state of the scholarship is that the Xin’s reforms were technically ambitious but practically ineffective, that the failure was due to a combination of bad luck (the floods), bad policy (the currency reforms), and bad timing (the Xiongnu campaign), and that the Xin’s record cannot be reduced to either the traditional or the revisionist judgement.

The most interesting consequence of the Xin period is the long-term effect on the institutional structure of the Eastern Han. The Eastern Han was founded by Liu Xiu, who had been a member of the Lülin rebel army and who had acquired his political education in the chaos of the Xin’s collapse. Liu Xiu was determined to prevent the abuses that he had seen in the late Western Han and the Xin from recurring. He abolished the wangtian decree and the slave manumission decree that Wang Mang had issued, restored the Han wu-zhu as the standard coin, and re-established the system of consort families as the principal channel for the recruitment of senior officials. The system he established, which would last until the end of the Eastern Han in 220 CE, was a return to the late Western Han system that Wang Mang had attempted to reform. The Xin’s failure ensured that the late Western Han system would remain the model for Chinese imperial administration until the end of the Han period.

The Xin period is also relevant to the broader question of the relationship between Confucian political theory and the practice of government. The Xin period was the most thorough attempt in Chinese history to implement a programme of government drawn directly from the Confucian classics. The attempt failed, and the failure has been interpreted in two ways: as evidence that the Confucian programme is unworkable, or as evidence that the attempt failed because it was not properly implemented. The two interpretations have remained in tension for nearly two thousand years. The current state of the question is that the Xin’s failure was due to a combination of factors that have very little to do with the Confucian content of the programme, and that the Confucian programme itself remains untested in its pure form. The Xin period is, in this sense, an experiment that has not been repeated, and the failure of the experiment has been used both as an argument against Confucian political theory and as an argument for it. The argument is unlikely to be resolved, because the experiment cannot be repeated.

The Xin’s sources and how they survive

The textual sources for the Xin period are unusually sparse for an imperial interlude of its duration. The Xin did not have its own official history; the Book of Han written by Ban Gu in the early second century contains a single chapter on the Xin, the Treatise on Wang Mang, and the chapter has been read more for what it reveals about the Eastern Han’s view of Wang Mang than for what it reveals about the Xin itself. Ban Gu’s father, Ban Biao, had been a witness to the Xin’s collapse, and the family was closely connected to the Liu family that founded the Eastern Han; the perspective of the Book of Han on Wang Mang is therefore shaped by the political needs of the new dynasty. Ban Gu’s chapter was supplemented, in the Tang dynasty, by the inclusion of the Xin material in the official dynastic histories, and the original chapter was later transmitted through the standard printed editions of the Twenty-Four Histories.

The numismatic sources for the Xin are, by contrast, exceptionally rich. The British Museum holds several hundred Xin-era coins, including specimens of the knife coins, the spade coins, and the round bronze coins. The Harvard Art Museums, the Princeton University numismatic collection, and the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin all hold substantial Xin-era assemblages. The provincial museums of China, including the Shanghai Museum and the National Museum of China in Beijing, hold the bulk of the surviving specimens. The numismatic evidence is unambiguous in showing the variety of the Xin’s coinage, and it provides the most direct material record of the Xin’s economic interventions.

Conclusion

The Xin dynasty lasted fourteen years. Its founder attempted to recover the early Zhou political system as described in the Confucian classics. His attempts at currency reform, land nationalisation, state monopoly, slave manumission, and frontier reorganisation all failed. He was killed in the chaos that followed a series of catastrophic floods, and the Han dynasty was restored by a rebel general who had been educated in the chaos of the Xin’s collapse. The Xin’s record is preserved in fragments in the historical sources of the Eastern Han, and the numismatic evidence of the period is the richest of any comparable period in Chinese imperial history. The Xin’s significance for the history of Chinese political thought is that it is the most thorough attempt to implement a programme of Confucian statecraft in Chinese history, and the failure of that attempt has shaped the subsequent debate about the relationship between political theory and political practice in the Chinese tradition. The Xin is the most important single episode in the history of Chinese political philosophy between the death of Emperor Wu of the Han in 87 BCE and the reunification of the empire under the Sui in 589 CE.

References

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