In the Sung dynasty (960-1278) the Chinese state faced challenges that in their combination and intensity were without clear precedent. Inside China, massive population growth and a swiftly growing private commercial economy threatened to outstrip, and in the long run would outstrip, the administrative and extractive capacities of both inherited and newly improvised institutions. Outside, a succession of powerful new non-Chinese states grew up on the northern and western borders, posing a threat of war and loss of territory that haunted the dynasty from its founding till its final conquest by the last state in the series, the Mongol Yuan. The threat, and the need to maintain huge standing armies against it, vastly aggravated a need for revenue that made it crucial to come to terms with the changes at home. These changes themselves, however, presented not only problems but opportunities. New sources of revenue offered themselves. New wealth and more accessible education bred a larger and confident elite. Intellectual life took on new energy, and new political visions became available.

For the problems and the opportunities confronted not only the state itself, but any among the educated elite who tried to deal in thought, writing, or action with questions of government and politics and their relation to society, who tried to understand or to influence what government was and what it should or could do in and to the world around it. This is the subject of our volume: How, in a time of marked and often threatening change,Sung statesmen and thinkers saw the relation of state and society—or, more broadly, how they saw the place in society of organized political action and institutions, even when these fell outside the state. The chapters in this volume differ in approach and topic, but all bear on this central problem. This volume joins with other recent work in the field to show, we think, that Sung men's views on the state and its proper place changed dramatically over time. We will argue further that an issue that was to occupy statesmen and political thinkers centuries later under the Ch'ing dynasty, the problem of a distinct "public space" lying between the state and the private or familial sphere, was perhaps first confronted in articulate Chinese political discourse in the latter half of the Sung. The project that led to this volume began by seeking Sung ideas of "statecraft," a term which, when used to translate the Chinese ching-shih , has a distinct significance in the history of later Chinese political thought. For reasons that will emerge, we have moved away from the term; but we do maintain that Sung connections or parallels to the later discourse are there.

Our concern lies where political or institutional history meets intellectual history. But although we and our contributors are variously intellectual, institutional, or social historians, our emphasis in this setting is, in a broad sense at least, intellectual. These studies aim, not at institutions for their own sake, though some do treat institutions; not even at social and political change in themselves, though almost all take these into account; but at how institutions were seen, imagined, or occasionally invented; at how social and political change were interpreted, blamed, welcomed, reacted against, and sometimes planned for. The question of the relation of state and society is central for us because we believe that it was, in one guise or another, central for the men of Sung. They themselves thought and argued about it, though in vocabularies and within frameworks that differed strongly not only from our own but at times from each other's.

We began by suggesting directions and kinds of social and political change within which the Sung state and its advocates or critics had to find their way. It is worth dealing with these more fully: they are important background for all that follows. Work in the social and economic history of China suggests three major processes of change (not all, as yet, of equal certainty) that the state and political actors would have had to confront. Longest in time of the three is an apparent secular decline in the power of the Chinese state stretching across a millennium. G. William Skinner argued some years ago that the state grew progressively, though not necessarily steadily, weaker in China from roughly the T'ang (618-906) through the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911). While the population grew about tenfold across this stretch of time, Skinner pointed out, both the number of administrative centers from which the state directly governed and the size of the bureaucracy itself grew little or not at all.

………………