A Crisis in the Literati State: The Sino-Tangut War and the Qingli-Era Reforms of Fan Zhongyan, 1040–1045

In the first lunar month of 1040 the Tangut Xi Xia ruler Weiming Yuanhao (嵬名元昊, r. 1032–1048) launched a devastating attack on the frontier prefecture of Yanzhou that plunged the Song realm into its first protracted war in almost four decades. Three years later the political activist and war hero Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989–1052) was summoned from the Shaanxi—Ordos front to enact the first major institutional reforms of the still-young but dangerously ossifying dynasty. By 1044 the war was over, and with that Fan Zhongyan's reforms were summarily aborted. Much has been written about each of these momentous events, which collectively anticipated the still more dramatic frontier wars and institutional reforms that transformed Song society and the state under Wang Anshi and emperor Shenzong and his sons from 1068 through the loss of North China to the Jurchen in 1127.¹ This essay will highlight how the first war between Song and the newly-proclaimed Xi Xia state on the one hand and Fan Zhongyan's Qingli reforms on the other were inextricably intertwined.²

I take a long perspective on the convergence of war and reform, by exploring how both the reform movement and the Sino-Tangut war emanated from a pair of mutually reënforcing institutional processes set in motion by the Song Founders and given critical momentum by the peace covenant sworn by the Song and the Kitan Liao at Chanyuan (澶淵之盟) in early 1005. These processes entailed demilitarizing³ a polity and society that had been saturated in warfare from the late-ninth to the late-tenth century, and institutionalizing literati dominance of the state by expanding the examination system and transforming the court and its bureaucracy into the paramount source of power and prestige in society as a whole. Part One of this essay traces how political disenfranchisement of the military and consolidation of the literati state intersected around 1040 in an existential crisis for the Song, as an excess of aspiring bureaucrats paralysed the government at the same time that the post-Chanyuan neutering of the military rendered the Song army helpless before a massive Tangut attack. But this war of necessity serendipitously united contending political factions and pulled Fan Zhongyan back from political exile to help direct a successful defense against the Tanguts in Shaanxi. Part Two argues that it was precisely this success at war that gave Fan and his followers a chance to institute political reforms at court. The reforms were quickly reversed however, for reasons explored in Part Three. Reformer attacks on the bureaucracy as a whole antagonized moderate as well as conservative members of the political class and tarred Fan's circle with the factionalist label, while the achievement of a peace accord undermined imperial support for the reform project. At their broadest, the Qingli-era war and reforms are significant not just because of their impact on later Song history, but equally as an example of the ubiquitous influence of war on the political culture of both the Northern (960–1127) and Southern (1127–1276) Song.

One: A Crisis in The Literati State

Because the demilitarization chapter of the story has been thoroughly explored in the scholarly literature it can be briefly summarized it here.⁴ General Zhao Kuangyin, the Song Founder, was a preeminent member of the military elite that emerged with the collapse of the great Tang empire in the late-ninth century and its fragmentation into five short-lived dynasties in the north and ten regional kingdoms in the south. While Taizu (r. 960–976), as the Founder was designated, came out of the Five Dynasties military elite, he insisted that he be the last military hegemon to seize political power, and both he and especially his brother and successor Taizong (r. 976–997) systematically dismantled the warrior class as an independent, self-sustaining elite. In its place, they reimplanted imperial authority throughout the empire through a growing bureaucratic apparatus staffed by the graduates of an expanded examination system, launching the ascent of an...