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During the war and turmoil between the two Song Dynasties, politics took precedence over economy and culture, and autocratic imperial power expanded into dictatorship. Some intellectuals who tended to be conservative turned to Confucianism and regarded moral reconstruction as the way to save the nation. This conservative thought was finally established as national orthodoxy. This was the "Neo-Confucianism" that influenced later generations of China for nearly a thousand years. However, for the development of thought and culture, this was a Pyrrhic victory. Chinese intellectuals and the ideas they created, which were once unbridled, brilliant, and full of extroverted vitality in the 11th century, became inward, conservative, closed, and introspective under the influence of orthodoxy, and lost the power to innovate.

Based on existing research results, this book re-explains the key points of Wang Anshi's reform and the reasons for its failure. The book takes Wang Anshi's reform as the main line, divides the history of the middle and late Northern Song Dynasty into three stages: reform, counter-reform and post-reform, and completely describes the evolution of the overall political situation of the scholar-bureaucrats in the late Northern Song Dynasty. Wang Anshi's ideal was to realize a Confucian moral society. In this regard, Wang Anshi was no different from his opponents. The problem is that Wang Anshi hopes to realize this ideal by transforming and establishing a new bureaucracy. The author focuses on analyzing Wang Anshi's bureaucratic system reform, focusing on the sub-bureaucracy system, examining the government operations of the New Deal, and using the recruitment law, the core system of the New Deal, as a case study to summarize the characteristics of the New Deal. The focus of this book is not only on Wang Anshi's reform itself, but also on the contradictions and entanglements between the Confucian moral idealism represented by Wang Anshi and the real political power structure.