Wang Mang may be the most controversial of China’s hundred or more emperors. Born into one of his country’s oldest noble families in about 45 B.C., he was celebrated first as a scholar, then as an ascetic and finally as regent for a succession of young and short-lived emperors. Finally, in 9 A.D., with the death (many believe the murder) of the last of these infant rulers, Wang seized the throne for himself. His usurpation marked the end of the Former Han Dynasty, which had reigned since 206 B.C.–shortly after the death of China’s renowned First Emperor, builder of the Great Wall and the celebrated Terracotta Army. In the Han’s place, Wang proclaimed the Xin—”new”—dynasty, of which he was destined to remain the solitary emperor.

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More recently, however, Wang Mang has undergone a startling reappraisal. This process can be dated to 1928 and the publication of a study by Hu Shih, a renowned scholar who was then the Chinese ambassador to the United States. In Hu’s view, it was the Han Dynasty that most richly deserved condemnation, for having produced “a long line of degenerate scions.” Wang Mang, on the other hand, lived simply, thought deeply and was “the first man to win the empire without an armed revolution.” Moreover, Wang then nationalized his empire’s land, distributed it equally to his subjects, cut land taxes from 50 percent to 10, and was, all in all, “frankly communistic”—a remark Hu intended as a compliment.

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The little that is known about Wang Mang’s reforms can be summarized as follows. It is said he invented an early form of social security payments, collecting taxes from the wealthy to make loans to the traditionally uncreditworthy poor. He certainly introduced the “six controls”—government monopolies on key products such as iron and salt that Hu Shih saw as a form of “state socialism”—and was responsible for a policy known as the Five Equalizations, an elaborate attempt to damp down fluctuations in prices. Even Wang’s harshest modern critics agree that his ban on the sale of cultivated land was an attempt to save desperate farmers from the temptation to sell up during times of famine; instead, his state provided disaster relief. Later the emperor imposed a ruinous tax upon slave owners. It is equally possible to interpret this tax as either an attempt to make slaveholding impossible or as a naked grab for money.

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Historians are divided as to Wang Mang’s intentions. Several, led by Bielenstein, suggest that catastrophic changes in the course of the Yellow River took place during his regency period, resulting in famine, drought and flood; if this is true, it can certainly be argued that Wang spent his entire reign battling forces that he could not possibly control. But the majority of modern accounts of Wang’s reign see him as a Confucian, not a communist. Bielenstein, in his contribution to the imposing Cambridge History of China, says this, though he chooses to ignore some of the more contentious issues. And while Clyde Sargent (who translated the History of the Han Dynasty) acknowledges the “startling modernity” of the emperor’s ideas, he adds that there is insufficient evidence to prove he was a revolutionary. For Oxford University’s Homer Dubs, author of the standard account of Wang’s economic policies, the emperor’s new coins were issued in conscious imitation of an ancient tradition, dating to the Warring States period, of circulating two denominations of bronze coins. Indeed, the emperor’s monetary policy, Dubs writes, can be viewed as a purely “Confucian practice, since a cardinal Confucian principle was the imitation of the ancient sages”; he also points out that the loans the emperor made available to “needy persons” came with a high interest rate, 3 percent per month. Moreover, few of the emperor’s most apparently socialist policies remained in force in the face of widespread protest and rebellion. “In the abolition of slavery and the restriction of land holdings,” Dubs writes, “Wang Mang undoubtedly hit upon a measure that would have benefited society, but these reforms were rescinded within two years.”