The Chinese FDR – FEE

June 6, 2025

Reshaping the economy in Imperial China.

For 4,000 years, from 2070 BC to 1911 AD, one imperial family after another ruled China. The longest period in which a single family exercised power was 790 years, while the average tenure was 228 years. Most Westerners are familiar with the Tudors, Stuarts, and Windsors of England, or the Romanovs of Russia, but few are aware of the names of Chinese dynasties such as the Zhou, Han, or Ming, let alone the notable figures associated with them.

In this essay, I acquaint the reader with a man named Wang Anshi 王安石. He lived from 1021 to 1086 AD during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). He passed the highly competitive imperial exam that qualified him for the civil service, and began his career in local administration. After gaining a reputation as knowledgeable in what we now call economics, he was appointed chancellor (akin to prime minister) by Emperor Shenzong in 1070. Almost twelve centuries later, Wang Anshi’s fame rivals that of any of the 18 nondescript emperors of the Song Dynasty.

In less than seven years as chancellor, Wang so disrupted the status quo with his “reform” agenda that “turmoil” describes his tenure as much as anything. What kind of change agent was he? Historians sometimes call him “the Chinese New Dealer,” a description I consider apt.

When Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated his “New Deal” program in 1933, he fancied himself an original policy maker, bold enough to try things not previously undertaken. As it turns out, whether FDR ever knew it or not, his interventionist plans for the economy mirrored policies that had been attempted many times in many places.

The 1939 book from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H.J. Haskell, The New Deal in Old Rome, recounted stunning parallels between FDR’s tax, spend, centralize, and regulate policies and those of the ancient Romans 2,000 years ago. See Are We Rome? for more on that. And almost a millennium before FDR’s theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Wang Anshi gave it a go in China. Instances in which politicians meddle are, sadly, far more common than those rare occasions when they leave us alone. This fact recalls two of my favorite quotes about the past. One is from Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Konrad Adenauer authored the other: “History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.”

The Song Dynasty governed China for a little over three centuries (960–1279), although northern invaders forced its territory and capital city to the south in 1127. In keeping with the “light touch” that Confucian ideals taught, the regime allowed considerable economic freedom, producing remarkable advances in the arts, sciences, and engineering. Inventions of the period include banknotes and paper money, gunpowder, and astronomical clocks. Rice production soared, and so did China’s population. The country began building a navy for the first time in its history.

One-family rule, however, carries with it the same dangers and temptations that accompany one-party rule. Over time, corruption and bureaucracy grow. Privileges extended to the politically well-connected perpetuate inequalities that foster resentment and restrict upward mobility. Calls for “reform” increase. This describes China in the late 11th century.

Emperor Shenzong appointed Wang Anshi chancellor in 1070 because he sensed changes were needed. Wang, widely regarded as a “reformer,” promised to shake things up. He raised the standards of civil service examinations to improve the quality of officialdom. He sacked or demoted state employees who were incompetent or dishonest. So far, so good. But a man whom historians regard as an early economist should have known better than to implement some rather dubious economic changes he dubbed “New Policies.”

FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s was not a carbon copy of Wang Anshi’s New Policies of the 1070s, of course, but they share an activist, centralizing tendency. Both men enjoyed experimenting with the economy. The description of Wang’s governing philosophy in historian Mary Nourse’s 1942 book, A Short History of the Chinese, fits that of FDR like a glove: “The state should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being ground into the dust by the rich.”

FDR’s Agriculture Secretary (and one-term Vice President) once referred to Wang Anshi as “a Chinese New Dealer who lived 900 years ago” and said this:

Under very great difficulties, he was faced…with problems which, allowing for the difference between historical periods, were almost identical with the problems met by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. The methods which he employed were strikingly similar.

Under Wang’s New Policies program, the state extended low-interest loans to farmers, despite farm indebtedness already being a significant issue in China. Taxes were raised to help fund large-scale public works programs such as irrigation canals and public granaries. “The system,” writes James A. Mitchell, “demanded a highly centralized bureaucracy capable of accurately assessing land, resolving disputes, and enforcing regulations across the vast empire—a task that proved exceedingly difficult in practice.”

No doubt Henry Wallace had this in mind when he claimed Wang’s policies were “strikingly similar” to his boss FDR’s. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, the Roosevelt administration paid farmers not to grow crops or raise livestock. Wallace himself, as Agriculture Secretary, once ordered the killing of six million healthy baby pigs to reduce supply and raise the price of pork. Wang would likely have applauded such bold policy initiatives.

FDR demagogued against monopolies, but his National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was a brazen attempt to cartelize American enterprise. It imposed industry-wide price codes so that one business couldn’t undercut another with lower prices. Nine hundred years earlier, Wang “reformed” the Chinese economy in part by controlling the price, production, and distribution of salt, tea, iron and other commodities. It was, as noted by Mitchell, a “level of government intervention which frequently led to corruption and inefficiency within the state-run monopolies themselves.” Even critics in Wang’s day charged that “the emphasis on monopolies…stifled innovation and competition, harming overall economic growth in the long run.”

In a 2018 article in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, author Xuan Zhao argues that Wang’s fiscal policies bear strong resemblance to the Keynesian policies of the New Deal. Both were rooted in the dubious notion that “government should pro-actively spend to stimulate the economy.” He quotes Wang himself, who is recorded as having said that one of his aims was “to take from the rich to aid the poor.” Moreover, writes Zhao, by injecting government more than ever into matters of investment and consumption, “Wang Anshi forged or restored the Chinese state into a countervailing power to the private sector.”

Though FDR is still hailed in dwindling quarters as an economic savior, the record strongly suggests that his New Deal was a flop, riddled with counterproductive expense, debt, and corruption. It likely prolonged the Great Depression by at least seven years.

After seven years of Wang Anshi as chancellor of China, the Emperor had had enough. The Great Experimenter was dismissed, and spent his remaining days writing poetry. China scholar Wolfgang Drechsler notes that today in China, consensus regards Wang as a failure.

All of which reminds me of another quote, this one attributed to writer Wynne McLaughlin: “Maybe history wouldn’t have to repeat itself if we listened once in a while.”