Green Sprouts Policy Lends to Song Farmers

1069

Wang Anshi's most ambitious reform went straight to the root: the Green Sprouts program offered government loans to farmers at twenty percent annual interest - usurious by modern standards, but a fraction of what private moneylenders charged. The goal was to break the rural debt cycle that turned free peasants into tenant serfs each drought year. Conservative officials were horrified. The farmers, cautiously, borrowed.