The start of Chinese Capitalism and Its Early Demise

Many people would agree that the Song dynasty was probably the weakest dynasty in Chinese history. The Song dynasty was the first to let the entire Chinese territory to be taken over by barbarian tribes, in this case, Mongols. "The weak Song" was the term that most people use to refer to this period of time in Chinese history. (Roberts, 241) For the majority of time, Song dynasty only had control over half of China. This was very rare for Chinese dynasties; this is only comparable to the East Jin dynasty which did not last too long. But if we change our point of view to the common people. During the Song dynasty, there was never a nationally wide spread peasant rebellion of any kind. The few peasant rebellions that did happen never exceeded the border of their province and are mostly led by well known criminals. This has never happened in any other dynasty. One reason for this was because during the Song, business tax collected exceeded farm tax by over 200%. The government was making tax money off of commerce much more than farming. …