Wang Mang and His Economic Reforms

Abstract

Wang Mang was of the cleverest moulders of educated public opinion that China has ever had. By his manipulations of that opinion he was able to take advantage of the fact that three successive emperors had no living sons to succeed them. He thus made himself emperor (9 A.D.). Thereupon he inaugurated certain economic reforms, which, combined with a series of natural calamities and misgovernment, brought about banditry, rebellion, and his own death. He has been praised as one of the greatest statesmen China has ever produiced, a socialist who was ahead of his time and who failed merely because he lacked the modern facilities for government checks and controls 1). Marxists have lauded him as the world's first revolutionist. My own study of the documents, however, has convinced me that Wang really cared little or nothing for the interests of the people; he ruthlessly sacrificed them in furthering his own ends. The credit for his remarkable reforms must be given to the Confucian literati who first propounded these conceptions and incor-