The Study Of Wanganshi's Political Essay

The existing collected works of Wang Anshi are composed of 62 volumes, including tables, books, remember, the system, epitaph, playing like, argued, Miscellaneous Kai, prefaces and other genres, of which about 70 percent are related to politics. And about 70 articles of these genres can be classified as political argumentative writing. All these show Wang's unique style both from the aspect of ideological contents and that of artistic features. This thesis is composed of five sections. The first section is mainly about the political and ideational backgrounds of Wang's political theory because these special backgrounds influenced Wang on his political theory and reforms deeply. The second section focuses on the ideational contents of Wang's political theory, which include the idea of ruler and subject, the idea of controlling and the idea of talents. These three ideas were also the prevailing thoughts in his reforms and affected their results directly and deeply. In the third section, the artistic features of Wang's political writings are discussed. Previous discussion on this aspect is very brief, or just superficial, or similar with each other, and there are fewer detailed analyses. So this point becomes a breakthrough in this thesis. The fourth section talks about the effects of Wang's writing. Because of the raw deal towards Wang, the spread of Wang's writing inevitably gained negative influences. But even so, its artistic fascination attracts generations of scholars and its ideas are praised highly by the active innovators of state affairs. However, when elaborating his political theory, the art and thought of his writing show his incomparable contributions, but at the same time his disadvantages can't be neglected. Despite having the ambition to reform, he also had too much sympathy to make him cut out the superfluous officials. Though having the good basis of looking for variety of talent, he carried out wrong tactics towards talents. Therefore, the fifth section of this thesis, based on the thorough analyses of Wang's political argumentative writings, is formed with the author's own thoughts towards the reasons why Wang's reforms failed. Generally speaking, this thesis takes texts as its basis, and thoughts and arts of Wang's writing as its focus so to study the contributions and influences of Wang's political theory and then manifest the author's opinion on the failure of his reforms.