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Posted on 06/06/2025 11:29:02 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
For 4,000 years, from 2070 BC to 1911 AD, one imperial family after another ruled China. The longest period in which a single family exercised power was 790 years, while the average tenure was 228 years. Most Westerners are familiar with the Tudors, Stuarts, and Windsors of England, or the Romanovs of Russia, but few are aware of the names of Chinese dynasties such as the Zhou, Han, or Ming, let alone the notable figures associated with them.
In this essay, I acquaint the reader with a man named Wang Anshi 王安石. He lived from 1021 to 1086 AD during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). He passed the highly competitive imperial exam that qualified him for the civil service, and began his career in local administration. After gaining a reputation as knowledgeable in what we now call economics, he was appointed chancellor (akin to prime minister) by Emperor Shenzong in 1070. Almost twelve centuries later, Wang Anshi’s fame rivals that of any of the 18 nondescript emperors of the Song Dynasty.
In less than seven years as chancellor, Wang so disrupted the status quo with his “reform” agenda that “turmoil” describes his tenure as much as anything. What kind of change agent was he? Historians sometimes call him “the Chinese New Dealer,” a description I consider apt.
When Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated his “New Deal” program in 1933, he fancied himself an original policy maker, bold enough to try things not previously undertaken. As it turns out, whether FDR ever knew it or not, his interventionist plans for the economy mirrored policies that had been attempted many times in many places.
The 1939 book from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H.J. Haskell,...
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
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Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Konrad Adenauer authored the other: “History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.”
“History is the stuff we know about, or think we do.” — Peter
Song Dynasty, 11th c.
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