5.7: Wang Mang’s “New” Dynasty, AD 9-23

Han Wudi had reigned for half a century; over the next half century, his policies were retracted, then put back in place, but the rich steadily got richer and the poor fell into tenancy and even slavery. In AD 9, the nephew of Empress Dowager Wang Zhengjun, Wang Mang, took the throne, declaring a “New” (Xin) regime. Wang was both too radical and not radical enough to succeed. On the one hand, he issued some measures for environmental conservation, and he tried to redistribute land and outlaw slavery, for a reboot of the smallholder economy. That won him the determined enmity of the wealthy clans, who by that time also held many bureaucratic positions. On the other hand, he lost popular support by enslaving thousands of people, including innocent families and members of mutual responsibility groups, as punishment for the desperate measures some had taken when a terrible frost destroyed crops in AD 21. Han had used the mutual responsibility groups only administratively, not arresting people for the crimes of other families; Wang Mang revived this quintessentially Legalist system – which does not stop historians from describing him as a Confucian.

Wang Mang was talented and hardworking, so his regime might have lasted, nevertheless, had it not been for an unavoidable environmental catastrophe. The Yellow River carries an enormous amount of silt from the Gobi desert and the mountains: hence its name. Its bed constantly rises, and high dikes keep it in the channel. What with the expenses of the Xiongnu war, even Wudi had not really maintained the dikes, and the regimes after him had still less money, as the big clans stopped paying taxes. In AD 3, the river flooded so dramatically that it shifted to debouch into the sea south of the Shandong peninsula, rather than north. This geological shift that happens about once every 600 years. Wang Mang’s regime was hit with flooding, refugees, disease, and famine. Rebels, including one called “Mother Lü” and a group called the Red Eyebrows, caused further suffering. Then the rain stopped and drought set in. Like the Second Qin Emperor, Wang refused to take advice, and became increasingly bizarre. Han loyalist troops and the Red Eyebrows battled it out in the capital when Wang died in AD 23.

The winner was – or claimed to be – a distant relative of the Liu imperial line.¹⁹ If he had not chosen to re-use the Han dynastic name, we would consider the Latter or Eastern Han as separate from the Former Han as the Former Han was from Qin.

In the re-established Eastern Han, Emperor Guangwu released all those whom Wang Mang had enslaved – but not those enslaved by the former Han. Eleven million people had died or dropped off the population registers, but wealth reform was dead, too. In Latter Han times, the clans dominated local society as landowners, and they dominated the central state by sending sons into office. This was a new kind of power – rather than rank power based on birth, it is class power, based on the ownership and control of capital, of land and labor. A new kind of power requires a new ideology and new forms of organization. The clans needed ideology and organization to hold their clan property, the basis of their power, together. They needed a system of beliefs to counteract the legal and common values associated with family division and to justify their power to the state, their neighbors, and themselves. They turned to reimagining Confucius, and created a new kind of Confucianism.