PROVINCIA L AN D LOCAL ADMINISTRATION 697would have to be approved by the Ministry of Taxation or state councilors in
the capital and submitted for royal approval. In the provinces, district magis-
trates would have to obtain permission from the provincial governor, and the
provincial governors would be required to submit annual reports of their deci-
sions to the Ministry of Taxation. Ever-normal granaries would also he estab-
lished by governors, provincial army and navy commanders.^41
Unlike Ssu-ma Kuang of the Sung, who attacked official loans because they
were a means of repressing the rich (by forcing loans on them) in the name of
welfare for the poor, Yu did not talk about the plight of the rich and focused
completely on the plight of the poor under the government-administered hwanja
grain loans. He acknowledged that some believed that hwanja loans were essen-
tial to "save the people from poverty" and that some method was necessary to
provide this function, but he argued that the ever-normal system would perform
that function without the adverse side-effects of loans. Echoing the conserva-
tive critics of Wang An-shih, he claimed that loans and the requirement of repay-
ment only converted civil debts into criminal action, and failure to repay loans
on time led not only to persistent dunning for repayment by clerks and runners,
but to the arrest, heating, and imprisonment of debtors. Sensing the chance for
greater profits, officials in the districts would force loans on the people, and if
the reluctant debtors chose to flee the district rather than repay, the officials would
simply declare their neighbors and relatives liable for the debt (a practice that
had already become endemic in the collection of unpaid military cloth support
taxes). The existence of loans would, in short, trigger a number of mechanisms
for corruption: collusion between clerks and citizens, bribes and payoffs, and
arbitrary exploitation by government functionaries:
So many evils will arise that you will not be able to describe them all, so much
so that the prisoners will fill the jails, and whippings and heatings will take
place everywhere. It will only lure people into the net lor criminal action I with-
out doing anything to restore the original purpose of henefiting the people ....
How could this he a good method? How could this have been the intention of
the father-and-mother of the people [the king]?44Yu's exposition of the evils of the hwanja system was certainly not innova-
tive because it echoed the standard complaints of the conservative opponents of
Wang An-shih in eleventh-century China. While some of Wang's conservative
critics like Ssu-ma Kuang explicitly defended the interests of the landlords and
the rich and attacked the purpose of the expansive, reformist state for interven-
ing in private affairs in the name of welfare for the poor, there was also a gen-
eral doubt among idealistic reformers as well as conservatives about the capacity
of the bureaucratic state for honesty, probity, and justice in the administration
of the law.
The capacity of the hureaucratic state for good or evil need not he regarded
as fixed and stalic because it worked well in some periods and badly in others,