Three Lessons to learn from Wang Anshi

Read carefully and apply to your own work.

Based on《王安石全集》(“The collected works of Wang Anshi”, Chongwen Book Publishing, Beijing, 2020), more specifically《临川先生全集》(“The collected works of the gentleman from Linchuan county”)

First lesson one ought to learn from Wang Anshi is that the minority aristocracy can always be dispossessed and attacked on a legal basis in order to secure the prosperity of the majority of the state’s population. This can mean curtailing of rights and privileges of the aristocracy, literal nationalization of wealth, reorganizing institutions to dismantle the aristocracy’s stranglehold on the state, using political power to force the market and the economy to serve the needs of the population rather than its own profit oriented greed and so on. One huge example of this was Wang Anshi literally dismantling the corvée system through his reforms, making all labor paid labor, which was later rolled back by the reactionary conservatives.

Second lesson one ought to learn from Wang Anshi is that man’s relation to nature is dialectical, rather than a dominating one as is often thought in the west. Wang held that though the natural circumstances might constrict what people can do, it is up to the people to decide on the balance and eventually on how to govern based on the given circumstances at any given point in time. He gives the example of any piece of metal through forging - i.e. compelling the metal to man's will - can be shaped into any number of useful items. Although this is the case, metal - or any other material - cannot infinitely and limitlessly be worked on by people because man cannot and does not dominate nature. Due to man's dialectical relation to nature, nature is not to be dominated, but respected, cherished, protected and used RATIONALLY.

Third lesson one ought to learn from Wang Anshi is ultimate pragmatism. He once remarked that dealing with state affairs is effectively only ever dealing with financial affairs and nothing else. To make a state function as it should, all aspects of a state need financing: to him this was the main reason that the state needs to dominate the economy and not the other way around. The state should use its political power to force the economy to underpin state projects for the welfare of the people, regardless of status, wealth, standing, rank and so on. Also: for this goal to be achieved, economic actors can and should be trampled under state legislation allowing them only as much freedom as needed to achieve the above mentioned goal. Wang was destroying the free market before the free market belatedly ever became a thing.

(unkind reminder that Wang Anshi lived between 1021 and 1086)