The reunification of China remained very important in the Southern Song, though no serious efforts were made after a Chinese general was betrayed during the war and lost the empire's last chance to challenge the Jurchen.<ref name=":015" />
The capital at Hangzhou was considered a temporary capital, with the permanent and "real" one being at Kaifeng, showing how much the Chinese intended to reconquer the North. However, the Song dynasty ended up never achieving that goal as a little over a hundred years later, the Mongols conquered China and established their own empire there.<ref name=":015" />
Geographic nature and demographics
By the geographical nature of the terrain the Southern Song had come to possess (located in Southern China), their economic base had radically altered from the time they had possessed a whole, unified China. As seen previously, the north of China consisted of mostly agricultural (and indeed high-yielding) plains, forming the breadbasket of China in history. By contrast, the southern parts were hilly, with centres of population being separated by difficult to parse hills, river valleys and low mountains.<ref name=":016">{{Citation|author=Dr. Ken Hammond|year=2004|title=From Yao to Mao: 5000 years of Chinese history|chapter=Lecture 18: Economy and Society in Southern Song|publisher=The Teaching Company}}</ref>The population of the Southern Song amounted to 60% of the total population of Chinese people. Beginning in the Tang, there had been a shift in the region populations gravitated towards. Back in the Han and earlier times, the great majority of Chinese people lived in the North or to the West. As China expanded geographically, people migrated to the South which resulted in a greater dispersal of people. By the end of the Tang dynasty, the majority of Chinese had come to live in the South. This trend reversed by the end of the Southern Song and today, there is about a 50/50 distribution between North and South China.<ref name=":016" />
Because of the "remoteness" imposed by the geographical nature of the hilly terrain in south China, localities seemed to develop a greater sense of identity from each other, a conscious thought that their settlement existed and was different from another settlement.<ref name=":016" />
Because of this particularity, this transformation of the Song from controlling all of China to just the southern half had some effects on the ''shi'' class of educated political officials. In the Southern Song, they changed the ways they arranged marriages in a very clear (historically) marker. In the Northern Song, the political capital at Kaifeng had been a great cultural center; officials from all around the country travelled there every three years for assignment to new duties. Through these travels to the capital, families would meet each other and negotiate marriages. Kaifeng had become a major center for such arrangements, and it wasn't rare for people from opposite ends of the country to meet and arrange marriages between their families.<ref name=":016" />
In the Southern Song, the wide horizon of arranged marriages scaled back dramatically. Marriages were not negotiated empire-wide as they had been before, but most families at this level tended to keep marriages within a narrow local circle; perhaps a handful of townships at most. However, the tradition of travelling to the capital for re-assignment was kept from the Northern Song and these officials still took care of empire-wide tasks. This change in behaviour indicated a change in their thinking and cultural identity which was informed by the new material conditions they had found themselves in: the educated elite families in the Southern Song thought of themselves principally as members of local societies who served on a national level, rather than members of a national elite that served on a local basis.<ref name=":016" />
These families also became much more involved in local affairs. They undertook public works such as repairing roads, digging canals, organising local militias to control bandits, even starting schools and academies. While nowadays we expect these tasks to be carried out by the government, this development marked the first time the Chinese government effectively started taking care of these issues. However, the management of these public works projects can only be called semi-governmental as they were carried out by local families ''besides'' of their imperial duties, not as part of them.<ref name=":016" />
Economy in the Southern Song
All of these factors led to differences in the economic base of the Southern Song. Notably, there came to be a trend towards local economic specialization—the production of certain commodities became the specialty of certain locations. For example, tea had been grown more or less everywhere alongside grain and other crops. Under the Southern Song, tea came to be mostly grown in Zhiejang and Hunan provinces who abandoned other crops (including grain, which was a staple of subsistence farming) to focus on tea. Grain thus required to be imported, and long-distance systems developed to supply the regions with food.<ref name=":016" />
[[File:Bowl, China, Jingdezhen kilns, Jiangxi province, Southern Song dynasty, 13th century AD, qingbai-glazed stoneware - Ethnological Museum, Berlin - DSC01992.jpg|thumb|Ceramic bowl from Jingdezhen made in the 13th century.]]
The city of Jingdezhen became a great center of ceramics. Ceramics had been produced in China for millennia and many centers had developed. Jingdezhen however industrialized production; the imperial kilns were located there, and production was organized on a basis similar to assembly lines. Thousands of workers were employed, with teams running the kilns 24 hours a day. Distribution was also handled industrially: warehouses were built for storage, and then shipped not only all over China, but also made their way regularly as far as the Persian Gulf. From there, they could be shipped all over the world; Jingdezhen wares have been found as far as the Western coast of Africa and Mediterranean countries, making them a truly global commodity—all regulated by the imperial state.<ref name=":016" />
The imperial state, while continuing to be a Confucian government, put in place a number of policies which actively encouraged the growth of the commercial economy (trading)—particularly though monetary policies.<ref name=":016" />
The state encouraged and carried out a great expansion in the money supply which, at the time, was backed by precious metals. These policies had an international dimension as well; Song coins were allowed to leave the country and spread throughout East Asia, becoming the common currency in Japan and Korea at this time.<ref name=":016" />
The Southern Song also experimented with paper money, which was a fairly radical development. The Chinese recognized the use of money as a universal means of circulation or universal commodity, recognizing that it did not have to be a precious metal so long as it was accepted as having value by the people who used it. While not much paper money left the borders, it did circulate quite widely within China. The experiment didn't work out as well as intended however, and paper money fell out of use after the Song dynasty.<ref name=":016" />
Growth of the merchants and artisans
These factors fostered the growth of a new class, merchans and artisans which derived their wealth not from agriculture or landlording, but from the production of goods and subsequent distribution and sale.<ref name=":016" />
This started to apply some stress to Chinese society. In classic Confucian thought, merchants were at the bottom of the social strata, considered to be morally tainted (although they were recognized to have some social utility). Up until the Southern Song, the limited presence of merchants did not create a big problem for the state due to how they were perceived. However, as commercial activity expanded wideld, so did not only the numbers of merchants but the wealth they concentrated in their hands as well. Towns grew, where large numbers of merchant families made their home. They built elaborate mansions, wore fine clothes (often the same kind the educated elite would be wearing), had themselves carried around in chairs by servants, and eventually started emulating the culture of the elite: they bought books and paintings, they established libraries, funded public works projects, sponsored monasteries, etc.<ref name=":016" />
This created tensions between the emerging commercial class and the established feudal elite who made their money on agricultural production; a situation highly reminiscent of the rise of the [[bourgeoisie]] in Europe and their later struggles against the established [[Feudalism|feudal]] order (even happening around the same time in history).<ref name=":016" />
In China, this development took a different trajectory; the contradiction between the two classes was able to be diffused to some extent. This can be explained by the convergence of interests that happened early in the Song dynasty: wealthy landowing families started to take some of the wealth they were earning from their agricultural revenue and invested it in commercial enterprises, making there commercial partners. At the same time, merchants who were becoming wealthy wanted to reinvent themselves as these educated, elite families and bought land to set up their estates. After a generation or two, they would train their sons to take the imperial examinations to cement their ''shi'' status.<ref name=":016" />
