Choosing Centralization Strategies

Both the Green Sprouts farm loans and the Szechwan tea monopoly grew out of an activist effort to replace private economic actors with public agencies in order to revitalize the economy and generate new revenues for the state. And both were administered regionally by men chosen according to the same entrepreneurial criteria. But while the THA intendants were encouraged to use bureaucratic power in an experimental, entrepreneurial way, their counterparts in the Ever-Normal Granary system were tightly controlled. In the case of the Green Sprouts loan policy the entrepreneurial mandate was located much higher up the administrative hierarchy, in the Court of Agricultural Supervision. The farming loans act promoted state economic control through increased centralization; the Szechwan tea monopoly pursued the same goal through decentralization. How can we understand the choice of two such different strategies for the same goal?

To begin with decentralization, what might be called the frontier factor stands out. Distance alone would recommend for frontier regions a degree of decentralization that would be unnecessary closer to the capital. Transport distance from K'ai-feng to Szechwan rendered all transfers of information, men, and goods costly and time-consuming, making delegation of broad discretionary authority to regional-based agencies the most effective way to govern. And since the tea and horse trade yoked the Shensi economy so strongly to Szechwan's, once fiscal authority had been decentralized in

[73] Investigators included Shen Kua, Chang Tun, Liü Sheng-ch'ing, P'u Tsung-meng, Hsiung Pen, and Hsu Hsi. See HCP 227/11a; 236/2b; 237/14a; 245/2a-b; 247/3a; 248/4b; 271/ 18a-b; 272/6b.

Szechwan, it became advantageous to delegate it to the same agency in Shensi as well. Hence, from 1079 to 1082 Li Chi not only headed the THA but served concurrently as Shensi fiscal intendant.^[74] Closer to the capital, in the center of the political network, so great a delegation of power would have been both imprudent and unnecessary.

Szechwan's political history also commended decentralization as a useful strategy for enhancing state control. Because it was culturally and geographically isolated from the political heartland, Szechwan had proved relatively impervious to centralized taxation policies since the mid-T'ang. But the rebellions of Li Shun and Wang Hsiao-po had fractured multigenerational patron-client bonds, forcing Szechwan's magnate classes to turn to the state for protection and opening them to political recruitment. From the early eleventh century on increasing numbers of Szechwanese adopted bureaucratic careers as their primary mobility strategy, and bureaucratization of the Szechwanese elite gradually fostered integration of the region into the national polity. But even after the rebellions Sung administrators were wary of laying too heavy a hand on the Szechwanese economy: for most of the eleventh century, for example, Szechwan provided only 5 percent of the empire's twice-yearly tax quota, or about half of its percentage of the national population.

With the fiscal and military crises of the 1060s, however, the state felt compelled to increase its claims on the Szechwanese economy. Wang An-shih's "law for appointments to distant offices" enabled the state to maximize fiscal control in Szechwan by recruiting the growing pool of technically skilled and ambitious Szechwanese of low rank, whose chief hope for mobility lay in successful pursuit of a bureaucratic career, into serving in their own region as agents of the state. By grafting native recruitment onto the strategy of bureaucratic entrepreneurship, reform policymakers decentralized operational and personnel authority to the men who had most to gain from state economic activism and thus acquired for the state unprecedented access to Szechwan's surplus product.

But the efficacy of enhancing state revenues by decentralizing entrepreneurial power in distant regional agencies does not explain why, among all other possibilities, power flowed to the Tea and Horse Agency. One part of the explanation has to do with the degree to which the THA satisfied goals viewed as critical by the center. The sociologist James Thompson, in his useful and insightful book Organizations in Action , has supplied an axiom that links an organization's power to its operational success. Thompson writes that "an organization has power, relative to an element of its task environment [those parts of the environment that are relevant to goal setting

[74] At the same time the superintendant's headquarters was transferred from Ch'eng-tu to Ch'in-chou. HCP 297/16b; 299/12b; 330/9a-b.

and attainment], to the extent that the organization has capacity to satisfy needs of that element [in our case state policymakers] and to the extent that the organization monopolizes that capacity." During the New Policies era the state's greatest needs in Szechwan and the Northwest frontier were for tea, horses, and revenues, and the THA was a generous (and in the case of tea and horses a monopolistic) supplier of all three. In order to keep tea, horses, and revenues flowing, policymakers granted THA intendants extraordinary power and autonomy. But however much the THA might resemble a private monopolistic enterprise, ultimately its power flowed from the state. And to the degree that changes in the task environment—particularly changes in policy objectives and marketing opportunities—undercut THA effectiveness, the state withdrew its support. In 1102, for example, Ts'ai Ching's reclamation of eastern Shensi for southeastern tea in 1102 created a surplus of Szechwanese tea and a doubling of the price ratio between tea and horses; and the Jurchen conquest of North China in 1127 deprived the THA of not only the rest of its extraregional markets, but most of its horse suppliers as well. Each shock progressively undermined the THA's capacity to supply the revenues and horses on which its power had been built, prompting successive administrations to curtail that power and reimpose a higher level of control. By the middle of the twelfth century, although Szechwanese regional administration was even more decentralized than under the New Policies, the THA itself had been reduced to but one component of a functionally overlapping fiscal network subordinated to the new post of viceroy (hsuan-fu shih ).^[75]

Organizational success, in short, was rewarded with organizational power, and the organization that ceased to be successful found its powers increasingly diminished. From this perspective we can understand why the ENG intendants were never granted the degree of autonomy enjoyed by their THA peers: for the Ever-Normal Granary operation was charged with a set of mutually contradictory goals that drew it in conflicting directions and made it impossible for the policy and its administrators to achieve the unambiguous success registered by the Tea and Horse Agency.

On the one hand, the ENG intendants were under great pressure to generate revenues through rapid circulation of the loan fund. Circulation was measured by quotas for distribution and collections, inspiring such abuses as forcing loans on the basis of household registration; issuing new loans to households with unpaid prior debts; and overzealous collection of back debts. On the other hand, the ENG intendants presided at the same time over the state's primary mechanism for relieving a peasantry that both reformers and reform opponents agreed was stretched to the limit by nat-

[75] Thompson, Organizations in Action , pp. 30-31. For the decline in THA powers, see Smith, Taxing Heaven's Storehouse , pp. 191-217.

ural disaster and (for the reformers at least) inequalities of wealth. Thus even as it pushed the ENG intendants to deliver profits from the farming loans, the central government had to monitor them carefully to ensure that grain reserves were adequate to meet emergency needs, that relief grain was in fact distributed, and that loan collections did not dispossess poor peasants.^[76] The inconsistencies that stemmed from this tangle of conflicting goals are illustrated by the debate over loan eligibility and the problem of deferred repayments (i-ko ).

The question of loan eligibility placed the reformers in a vulnerable ideological position. As a social welfare measure, the Green Sprouts policy was intended to "suppress engrossers and relieve the poor and weak." But as a means of generating revenues, the Green Sprouts loan fund had to be circulated widely and to households that could be counted on (or forced) to repay. Consequently, in early 1070 the Finance Planning Commission pegged loan limits to the household grading system and extended eligibility to virtually all resident (as opposed to vagrant, fou-lang ) families. The new order entitled grade 5 and guest households to 1,500 cash; grade 4 to 3,000 cash; grade 3 to 6,000 cash; grade 2 to 10,000 cash; and grade 1 to 15,000 cash. The order then added that "if there are remaining funds, county officials are authorized to assess the situation and offer additional loans to households of grade 3 and above; if there are still surpluses, then interested households from the urban wards and suburbs with property and businesses to offer as collateral will be allowed to form into five-family guarantee groups and obtain loans under the Green Sprouts statutes."^[77]

Han Ch'i immediately attacked the new measure for providing public loans to the very same interests—the engrossers—it was purportedly seeking to suppress:

It is the rural households of grade 3 and above and the propertied urban and suburban households that have heretofore been "engrossing families." Now they are all given loans and charged 1,300 cash for every 1,000. The government is simply chasing interest payments. The measure absolutely contradicts the stated intent of the policy to suppress engrossers and aid those in need.^[78]

[76] HCP:SP 7/la; CPPM 68/2162; HCP 252/27a-b; 254/1b-2a. On new loans to already indebted households, see Ou-yang Hsiu's charge in HCP 211/12a-16a. In the spring of 1071 Han Ch'i complained from his post as vice-administrator of T'ai-ning-fu that the Hopei ENG intendant refused to issue grain from the loan fund for the hungry poor, insisting that they be fed from the sheng-ts'ang instead. In response Shen-tsung warned the fiscal, judicial, and ENG intendants against withholding poor relief and causing vagrancy. HCP 221/la-b. In 1074, Shen-tsung worried that although loan revenues were substantial, over 70 percent of the system's resources were in circulation at a time when widespread disaster made adequate relief-grain stores essential. The granaries were ordered to keep half their resources in reserve. HCP 256/15a-b; 272/7a-b.

[77] Wang An-shih to Shen-tsung, 1070/2, in SHY:SH 4/20b; and SHY:SH 4/19a, as quoted by Han Ch'i in 1070.2.1.

[78] SHY:SH 4/19b.

Han's charge apparently caught the reformers off guard and forced them to defend their position publicly and before the emperor. Shortly thereafter Wang An-shih added his personal response to an official rejoinder by the Finance Planning Commission:

Rural households of grade 3 and higher as well as wealthy urban and suburban households also encounter periods of financial trouble and then have to incur private debts. How can they all be "engrosser families"? At the present time, after making loans to poor families the surplus is loaned to these (wealthier) grades, so they too are not forced to contract loans at 100 percent from private houses. This is precisely within the intent of the original imperial decree to repress engrossers.^[79]

But Han Ch'i utterly rejected the official response:

Not only does this official know that [these grade 3 and wealthy urban and suburban households] are "engrossing families"; everyone under heaven knows it! The only reason the Finance Planning Commission denies that they are engrossing households is that it wants to push even more Green Sprouts funds on them to get back still more interest.^[80]

We need to know more than we know now about Sung rural society to judge whether Han Ch'i's condemnation of all upper-grade households as "engrossers" is accurate. But as a political tactic Han's attack was brilliant, for it highlighted the essential contradictions between the social-welfare and revenue-generating components of the Green Sprouts policy. Though Han did not succeed in reversing the Green Sprouts measure, he did force Wang An-shih and the Finance Planning Commission into lengthy public justification of their policy of universal eligibility.^[81]

The problem of deferred payments cut directly to the heart of the conflict between social and fiscal objectives. The Green Sprouts directive of 1069 specified that repayments be made after the summer and fall harvests of the year of loan issue, but allowed extensions of one harvest period in the case of disaster or poor crops. Subsequent orders extended the repayment period up to two years, but even with the more liberal provisions there were always borrowers who could not meet their obligations. Debtors and their guarantors were subject to confiscation, first of their collateral and then of their immovable property. As early as 1071 the Court of Agricultural Supervision obtained permission to funnel the returns from debt sales of property back into the ENG capital fund.^[82]

But even perfectly legal debt collections and property seizures could intensify rural disintegration, and in periods of endemic disaster the Court of

[79] SHY:SH 4/23a.

[80] SHY:SH 4/27b; also in Han's Chia-chuan , cited in HCP:Shih-pu 7/26a-27b.

[81] See, for example, SHY:SH 4/22b-24a, 24b-25b.

[82] SHY:SH 4/16b; HCP 228/7b; 279/23a-b; 294/8b-9a.

Agricultural Supervision was pressured to grant payment deferrals. Yet deferrals created their own set of problems. First, a debtor under deferred status was presumed to be a bad risk and was legally prohibited from receiving further loans. But denying a loan amounted to withholding essential agrarian relief: in 1074 the administrator of Chi-chou, in Hopei, predicted that the denial of Green Sprouts loans to deferred planters of spring wheat would diminish the following season's harvest as well as force farmers to go hungry. The court immediately ordered the ENG intendants of five northern circuits to grant interest-free loans of 1,000 cash to all spring-wheat farmers below household-grade 3, even if they had deferred debts. Two years later, however, the emperor censured granary officials for issuing loans to deferred debtors, accusing them of pursuing profits and good merit ratings at the expense of prudence.^[83]

In addition, collecting from deferred debtors raised delicate political as well as practical problems. In 1075, for example, the Court of Agricultural Supervision got permission to set the summer of 1076 as the deadline for repaying loans issued in Liang-che, Huai-nan, and Chiang-nan two years earlier, agreeing to accept labor service in exchange for money or goods. By the summer of 1077, however, collections had still not progressed, and the Secretariat-Chancellery this time sent its own agents to press for repayment following good harvests in Liang-che and Huai-nan. The Secretariat's collections were halted again the following spring for the two lowest household grades; and in 1079 the Court of Agricultural Supervision was in turn forced to accept another extension for the poorest households in Liang-che. Predictably, the deferrals, politically essential though they may have been, were financially disastrous: loan collections were 13 percent off quota in 1080 and fell 1.8 million strings into the red a year later. Moreover, the politically unavoidable deficits spurred even tighter control, and in 1083 the Finance Ministry was ordered to lead an investigation of the ENG intendancies. In contrast with the THA, whose prodigious fulfillment of a consistent set of policy expectations protected it from outside interference, the inability of the Ever-Normal Granary system to satisfy an intrinsically contradictory set of social and fiscal objectives provoked suspicion and careful scrutiny from its superiors as well as its opponents.^[84]

Finally, the Green Sprouts policy was centralized at a higher level and watched more closely than the Szechwan tea monopoly because direct state intervention in the agrarian economy, and efforts to get more out of the peasantry than custom and direct taxation warranted, kindled greater controversy than state control of commerce. In contrast with the Szechwan tea monopoly, critics of the Green Sprouts policy rejected the fundamental

[83] HCP 258/17a; 272/2b.

[84] HCP 268/18a-b; 283/10a; 288/11b; 289/13a; 292/3b; 297/1b; 332/10a-b.

principles and goals of the policy and occupied positions throughout the government, including the Ever-Normal Granary administration itself.

Among the many criticisms leveled at the policy, three in particular shed light on conservative fiscal views. Opponents rejected the theory of poverty on which the policy was justified; they criticized the dangerous reliance on money that the farming loans promoted; and they argued that the state was a far harsher creditor than private lenders could be.

As we have seen, the architects of the Green Sprouts policy blamed rural poverty on the powerful "engrossers," who could turn the endemic crises of agrarian production to their own advantage. But critics of the policy blamed rural poverty, not on exploitation, but on the spendthrift habits of the poor. In his polemic against the Green Sprouts policy and the Finance Planning Commission of 1070, for example, Ssu-ma Kuang outlined a model of rural society that portrayed wealthy families as a safety net for the poor:

The reason there are poor people and rich people is difference in talent, nature, and intelligence. The rich are more intelligent, their concerns deeper and their thinking more long-range, and they gladly work their muscles and toil their bones, dress plainly and eat sparingly. And to the end they do not want to borrow from others. Thus their households normally enjoy a surplus, and they do not go to the wolves [become hopelessly dependent]. Now poor people are timid and weak and grasp whatever they can rather than working industriously; they don't think of the long term, and if in one drunken day they get rich, soon there will be nothing left; when they are hard pressed they borrow from other people, and as the debts accumulate they are unable to repay them, until they reach the point that they must sell their wives and children. . . . Thus it is that the rich often make loans to the poor in order to enrich themselves, and the poor often borrow from the wealthy in order to survive. Though bitterness and happiness are not equally distributed, at least [rich and poor] mutually aid one another, in order to guarantee their livelihoods.^[85]

Anticipating Tung Wei's market-oriented theory of famine relief documented in chapter 7 in this volume by Robert Hymes, Ssu-ma Kuang identified wealthy rural families as the foundation of a stable order, and profit as the lure that moved the wealthy to aid the poor. For Ssu-ma Kuang, any policy that sought to displace the rural rich threatened to undermine society and the state.^[86]

[85] SMWKWC 7/3a, "Ch'i pa T'iao-li-ssu ch'ang-p'ing-shih shu."

[86] For Tung Wei's views, see chapter 7. Ssu-ma Kuang's projection of the impact of the Green Sprouts policy on the rich is worth quoting at length: "Now county officials [are themselves] issued interest-funds to lend to the people in spring and fall. None of the wealthy people want the loans, but the poor people do want them. Because the Intending Officials want to distribute [loans] on a wide scale in order to accumulate merit, they do not inquire into people's wealth or poverty, but just force loans on them according to their household grade. The wealthy are assigned relatively large debts, the poor somewhat smaller. Large loans go up to 15 strings, small ones not less than 1,000 cash. Prefectural and county officials and clerks fear [getting stuck with] the responsibility of absconders and defaulters, so order the poor and rich to array themselves together in pao-chia guarantee groups. The wealthy are made the chiefs (k'uei-shou ), the poor obtain money, and in no time at all the money is gone. In the future if the millet or wheat [harvests] are small or don't come up, they cannot even pay their twice yearly tax, let alone the interest payments. Since they cannot repay, the fears of the clerks are spread to all four quarters. The wealthy cannot avoid it, and must themselves repay the debts of the many households" (SMWCC 7/3b).

Ssu-ma then outlines a scenario for universal immiseration and disaster: "Once the poor are completely exhausted, the wealthy will also become poor; your minister fears that after ten years time there will not be many wealthy. And once the wealthy are completely exhausted, if the nation (kuo-chia ) should have the misfortune of a border emergency, and have to raise many troops, then from whom will the monies for grain, cloth, and military provisions be raised?" (ibid., 3b).

Prominent critics also charged that the farming-loans policy changed the calculus of rural poverty by first pumping unnecessary money into the countryside, then siphoning it out again through monetized collections of fees and taxes. In 1074, for example, Feng Ching, second privy councillor, asserted that when the people of Hsiang-fu county, K'ai-feng, hear that the government is distributing loan funds they put up whatever they own as collateral to get money that they do not need: "They just see that the government is giving out money, and there are none who do not want some; so they pile up debts, and when the time comes they cannot repay."^[87] Cash loans were seen as an inducement to debt and extravagance. As Su Shih wrote in a retrospective assessment of the policy:

Peasant households balance expeditures against income and economize in clothing and food, so that even if poor they still meet their basic needs. But when peasants can get more money than they need their expenses naturally increase, and there is nothing they will not do [to get still more].^[88]

Having habituated the peasants to money, however, the government made money increasingly hard to get by drawing it out of circulation through loan collections, the service-exemption fees, and inequitable exchange rates for the payment of taxes. Ssu-ma Kuang called attention to the problem in 1074, alleging that monetized payments forced the peasantry to sell everything they had to obtain the one thing they lacked—cash—in order to pay the state. The currency shortage undermined the farming loans' original objective as a rural credit mechanism. For, as Wang Yen-sou argued in 1086, when it came time to repay their loans poor peasants once

[87] HCP 252/8a.

[88] HCP 384/10b. Cf. Shang-kuan Chün's assessment, HCP 378/18b.

again had to borrow from the "rich families and great clans" at inflated interest rates to obtain the cash they needed to pay off the state. Thus the Green Sprouts policy had come full circle: "established in the name of suppressing the engrosser households, it wound up giving them great assistance."^[89]

Moreover, the state had far greater power to press its debtors than private lenders had. In 1069 Ssu-ma Kuang had predicted that although the rich could merely "nibble away" at the poor, county clerks and officials would come down on the peasantry with the irresistible legal and police powers of the state. According to Shang-kuan Chün's appraisal in 1086, although private lenders had charged nominally high interest rates, they had at least been flexible and relatively benign in their capacity to exact repayment. By the time a peasant finished paying off the ruthlessly efficient agents of the state, on the other hand, the price of a loan had risen to 50 or 100 percent. Wang Yen-sou graphically illustrated the monetary and physical cost of a government loan: first, in order to register for a loan, the guard chief, guarantee-group head, and notary for household registration all had to be paid off. Then, if at collection time there was not enough money to pay, when the government clerk appeared at the door he had to be bought off with food and drink. But the clerks could not be bribed endlessly, and for tens of thousands of debtors the inevitable day arrived when they were dragged off to be beaten and their property was seized. Nor did Wang Yen-sou assume that the Green Sprouts policy was intentionally malicious. The problems were simply the unavoidable consequence of government interference in the rural economy. "To strive intentionally for the benefit [of the peasantry]," he concluded, "is not as good as bringing them benefit by leaving them alone."^[90]

It should be evident from the discussion to this point that it was not merely a small circle of conservatives who rejected the rural credit policy; Green Sprouts critics were located throughout the government, constituting a vocal and persistent base of opposition to the measure at all levels. At the court level, complaints by such elder statesmen as Ssu-ma Kuang, Han Ch'i, Ch'en Sheng-chih, and Tseng Kung-liang kept Shen-tsung uncertain of the policy's merits and sensitive to its potential excesses and embroiled Wang An-shih and the Green Sprouts measure in continual and divisive court controversy. In 1070 Ssu-ma Kuang, against the emperor's wishes,

[89] SMWCC 7/10a-b, "Ying-chao yen ch'ao-cheng ch'ueh-shih chuang." Ssu-ma pointed to the low price of grains despite widespread famine as proof of the efficiency with which the government siphoned cash out of the countryside. For Chang Fang-p'ing's confirmations, see HCP 269/2b. On government manipulation of the exchange rate between money and goods in its own favor, see Ssu-ma's 1071 memorial "Chun t'i-chu Shen-hsi ch'ang-p'ing—kuang-hui-ts'ang ssu tieh," SMWCC 7/6a-7a. Wang Yen-sou's argument is in HCP 376/17a.

[90] SHY:SH 4/18a-b; HCP 378/18a-b; 376/17a-b.

resigned in protest against the policy, and Ch'en and Tseng used illness as an excuse to withdraw from the fray. But continued attacks against Green Sprouts forced Wang An-shih temporarily out of office in 1074, and debate over the program compelled the court to confront fundamental questions of factionalism and the proper limits of remonstrance. Outside the court, Fu Pi and Ou-yang Hsiu used their posts as prefectural administrators to spearhead an obstructionist movement against distributing the Green Sprouts loans in Ching-tung East and Huai-nan East circuits in 1070 and 1071; and they were joined by a fiscal intendant in Hopei and a vice fiscal intendant in Shensi, as well as county administrators in K'ai-feng and Liang-che. Moreover, even the administrators of the policy turned against it: in 1070 Chang Tz'u-shan used his refusal of an ENG intendancy to lambaste the New Policies generally, while the Ho-tung ENG intendant Liang Tuan recommended that the Green Sprouts be abolished; in 1077 the Chiang-nan West ENG intendant Fang Tse counseled that the associated hired-service system be ended; and in 1081 Wang Ku memorialized against the rural credit policy after administering it in Liang-che, K'ai-feng, and Ching-hsi.^[91]

Opposition to the Szechwan tea monopoly, in contrast, was far more limited in political and ideological scope. The first wave of opposition to the monopoly, in 1077, was confined entirely to native Szechwanese in Szechwanese prefectural posts (Lü T'ao, Chou Piao-ch'üan, and Wu Shih-meng) and the censorate (Chou Yin). These four gained the dismissal of one intendant (Liu Tso), but were themselves all neutralized through transfers, dismissals, and a "muzzling order" that prohibited outside officials from interfering in THA affairs.^[92] Opposition to the THA was effectively silenced until the Restoration movement of 1086, when Lü T'ao and his fellow Szechwanese Su Ch'e were joined in their efforts to dismantle the THA enterprise by the elder statesman Liu Chih.

Ideologically, it is clear that state regulation of subsidiary crops and industries, including textiles and salt in addition to tea, provoked less fundamental resistance than official intervention in the staple grain economy. In the particular case of the Szechwan tea monopoly, even Lü T'ao and Su Ch'e were more opposed to the THA as an entrepreneurial enterprise than

[91] On the resignations of Ssu-ma et al., see CPPM 68/2191; SHY:SH 4/24b. Court debates over the policy, all involving direct participation by a confused and deeply troubled emperor, are richly documented in CPPM 68 and 69. See especially pp. 2164, 2169, 2171, 2173, 2176, 2180, 2185-89, 2221. For Ou-yang Hsiu, see HCP 211/12a-16a; SHY:SH 5/7a-b. For Fu Pi, see HCP 220/6b-7a; 222/6a-7b; 224/14b; and SHY:SH 5/8b-9a. For others, see SHY:SH 4/22a-b; SHY:SH 5/6b; HCP 212/7a-b; and for ENG administrators themselves, see HCP 210/10b; HCP 212/14a; HCP 285/5b-6a; HCP 313/7b-8a.

[92] HCP 283/9b; 284/15a-16a; SHY:CK 43/50b. For Lü T'ao's three critical memorials of 1077, see Ching-te chi 1/4a-23b.

to the idea of a state-run tea and horse trade. In particular, they condemned THA autonomy and its control over county government; the unrestrained profit seeking associated with THA involvement in nontea commodities, the profit-sharing-incentive system, and the forced sale of tea to Shensi residents; and the exploitative burden the tea monopoly placed on tea producers and Szechwanese conscripted into tea-transport service. But both accepted the need to trade tea for horses and merely urged that instead of imposing a region-wide monopsony, the state purchase the tea it required in the open market. Similarly, both grudgingly agreed that the costs of frontier defense entitled the state to claim a share of the profits from the tea trade, but they pressed the government to obtain its revenues from the collection of sales and transit taxes and licensing fees from an otherwise free trade (t'ung-shang , literally "via merchants") instead of from monopolization.^[93]