40 Chapter Twogols demonstrate that these devices could be used to break down city
gates and walls as well as to defend them.^33
Successful administration of an army that grew to count more than a
million men in its ranks, and that relied on complex weaponry to fend
off more mobile attackers, obviously depended on the prior articula
tion of Sung China’s economy through market relationships, transport
improvements, and technically competent administration. New pat
terns of recruitment into officialdom through examinations helped to
assure a relatively proficient civilian management;^34 but despite all the
mandarins’ skills and wiles, the tasks of supplying the army may have
strained the precarious balance between military and civilian com
mand elements in Chinese society on the one hand and the newly
ebullient market behavior of private persons on the other. The famous
reform minister, Wang An-Shih (d. 1086) could write: “The educated
men of the land regard the carrying of arms as a disgrace”; yet in the
1060s an official calculation revealed that 80 percent of the govern
ment’s income, fifty-eight million strings of cash, was necessary to
support the million and more despised soldiers who garrisoned
China.^35 Concerned officials, seeking to economize on military ex
penditure, were in a position to throttle the ferrous metallurgy of
Honan and Hopei simply by setting prices at uneconomic levels; but
no one now knows whether this is actually what happened or whether
something else disrupted the industry.
However costly their policies may have been in the long run, west
erners in the twentieth century can surely sympathize with the prob
lem Confucian officials faced in trying to balance one disturbing ele
ment—professionalized violence—against another equally disturbing
element—professionalized pursuit of profit. Neither conformed to
traditional propriety. Indeed, merchants and military men frequently
flaunted their moral deficiencies with brazen unconcern for others.
Uninhibited linkage between military and commercial enterprise,
such as was to take place in fourteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe,
would have seemed truly disastrous to Chinese officials. As long as
men educated in the traditions of Confucian statecraft retained politi
cal authority, such a dangerous confluence would not be permitted.
Instead, systematic restraints upon industrial expansion, commercial
- For a detailed account of how machines and men were mobilized to defend a pro
vincial city against the Jürchen see Hana, Berichte über die Verteidigung der Stadt Te-an. - Kracke, Civil Service in Early Sung China.
- The quotation and figures for the army’s cost come from Hsiao Ch’i Ch’ing, The
Military Establishment of the Yilan Dynasty (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 6–7.