The social and economic upsurge during the Tang and Song Dynasties was different between the north and the south. Due to the war in the north, social and economic development is intermittent. It is also related to the war. After the Anshi Rebellion, China's economic center of gravity began to shift to the southeast. The historical significance of southern development in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties has emerged. It should be pointed out that the transfer to the south does not mean that the north is completely backward. During the Northern Song Dynasty, the agricultural handicraft economy in northern Shandong and Henan was not backward, and occupied an important position in the overall economic situation of the Song Dynasty. But overall, the north is not as good as the south; This shift of center of gravity to the south was basically completed in the Southern Song Dynasty. In the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in the south, "the period of all-round development of cultivated land" shows that the implementation of the new tax law has stimulated agricultural development. Rice agriculture has made great progress since the middle Tang Dynasty. People vigorously develop water conservancy and promote the expansion of rice farming to intensive direction; Qu yuan plough has also been widely used in paddy fields; Popularization of transplanting techniques and introduction of early-maturing varieties have greatly increased rice yield. "Suzhou and Shanghai are ripe, and the world is full." Southern rice is of great significance for relieving the pressure of the whole society, and it is also the national vein of Tang and Song Dynasties. Grain output has increased, hilly dry land has also been reclaimed, and more land has been used to grow cash crops. Tea became the daily consumption of the whole society, including ordinary people, in the Tang Dynasty. Selling tea is a profitable business all over the country. Tea, mulberry, sumac and bamboo are widely planted. The development of cash crops is the development of handicraft industry. Southerners are making lacquerware, weaving bamboo and weaving exquisite silk with their unique ingenuity (actually the result of accumulated production experience). In the past, the north produced silk and the south produced flax, and the south also had exquisite manufacturing skills. The center of ceramic manufacturing industry in the early Tang Dynasty was in the north, and then gradually moved south. By the Song Dynasty, Jingdezhen had become the porcelain capital of the world. During the Tang and Song Dynasties, ceramic products also became people's daily necessities. In addition, like salt industry, mining and metallurgy industry, South China has also made great progress. The upsurge of production will certainly promote the development of commercial trade and urban civilization. During the Tang and Song Dynasties, the economic exchanges between North and South were very active. In addition to land transportation, the Grand Canal built in Sui Dynasty connected Guandong and Guanzhong, southeast and northwest. The huge water system of the Yangtze River has become the main artery of economic exchanges since the Southern and Northern Dynasties. Due to the interruption of the Silk Road connecting East Asia and West Asia, businessmen turned their attention to maritime trade. On many major traffic routes, fair trade has developed unprecedentedly, and the Grand Canal and metropolises along the Yangtze River and the southeast coast have appeared one after another, which is very prosperous. "The grass market in Jianghuai is as close to the water as possible, and rich people and large families live in it." Chang 'an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Yangzhou, Chengdu and Guangzhou were all famous cities at that time. Yangzhou, Chengdu, Quanzhou, Mingzhou and other cities developed with the development of regional economy and were the economic centers of the rich border. Even those cities with strong political colors have more and more economic functions. For example, in Chang 'an, from the beginning, the construction plan strictly separated the urban area, workshops and residential areas. After the middle Tang dynasty, the trend of shops standing along the street was obviously strengthened; Kaifeng, the capital of song dynasty, is a commercial metropolis as far as the Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival is concerned. Great changes have taken place in the urban architectural pattern, and the operators in the city began to have their own organizations, namely guilds; The proportion of money in the exchange process increased, and "money counter" and "flying money" appeared, and the paper money "Jiaozi" in the Northern Song Dynasty also began to circulate. Cities not only accumulate wealth, but also gather humanities. In all aspects of market culture, the rise of new literature and art suitable for the aesthetic taste of the citizens can best observe the social culture at that time. The "talk" about history and human stories began to prevail in the Middle Tang Dynasty and entered the "golden age" with guilds in the Southern Song Dynasty. The article recording "talking" is called "story book", which is the originator of later vernacular novels. The development of drama is equally remarkable. A drama called "Song Zaju" was performed in Washe Goulan, which has been commercialized. Southern Opera, which originated in Wenzhou, corresponds to the North and South of Zaju. In addition, there are burlesque, puppet show, shadow play and so on, which have found their own audience among the citizens. The outstanding feature of the commercialization of Song Ci is that emperors, bureaucrats, literati and businessmen can always invest and hire musicians to perform China literature, and the creators and appreciators of art have never been so closely linked as they are now. Of course, the new literature and art shows the ideology of the emerging street class, but in the speaker's narration of the past and the present, and in the adaptation of historical stories by drama, the people accept the long-standing historical culture, morality and ethics and life concept. This not only communicates ancient and modern times, but also communicates elite culture and folk culture. The role of "educating" the general public is even more popular and in-depth than running a school by the state, which promotes the development of people's wisdom. This is another era of the development of people's power in China's history after the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. In addition to the above performance, it is also a scientific and technological invention. Besides papermaking, gunpowder, compass and movable type printing were all invented or widely used in the Tang and Song Dynasties. The rediscovery of the compass is the most telling. According to reports, China people learned about the characteristics of the magnet during the Warring States Period, but in the Song Dynasty, it was re-used, and the direct reason was the need of navigation. The law that creative production and life practice stimulates the upsurge of science and technology is confirmed in the application of compass. We can also get a simple answer to the old question of why China's science and technology is gradually lagging behind the West: after the Tang and Song Dynasties, our social production did not continue to expand further and more widely. The experience of a small invention can well illustrate the relationship between technology and production demand. In Song Dynasty, there was a game of "Walking Lights", in which the candles in transparent lanterns could rotate automatically. Inspired by boiling water jacking the lid, the Englishman Watt invented the steam engine. The game of lanterns actually uses the dynamic principle of hot air. But because there was no industrial revolution in Britain, it was just a game at that time. The increasing social and cultural demand has stimulated the revolutionary changes in the printing industry. With the development of people's power and the prosperity of business, the original block printing can no longer meet the needs of society, and movable type printing appeared in the Northern Song Dynasty. Its inventor is Bi Yi, a plate-making worker and a civilian. There are more documents recording the progress of production and science and technology. Lu Guimeng, a writer in the late Tang Dynasty, recorded various farm tools, including Qu Yuan Fu. Milestones in the History of Science in China and Notes on Meng Qian appeared in the Northern Song Dynasty. Jing Lei Jing and Meng Qian Bi Tan were both written by scholars. The progress of farm tools and general science and technology can attract their attention, which shows its great momentum. There are several climaxes in the development of science and technology in China, one is the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the other is the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, and the other is the Tang and Song Dynasties, and each period is a period of high-yield development.

The Anshi Rebellion led to the decline of the Tang Dynasty, which aroused an awakening movement of national consciousness in China. At that time, people regarded the Anshi Rebellion and Shi Siming's anti-Tang Dynasty as the disaster of the Yi emperor to China, so the concept of "Yi Xia" came into being. The decline of the Tang Dynasty was accompanied by the tyrannical behavior of the Uighurs in the Central Plains, the plundering of the Tang Dynasty by the Tubo people and the long-term occupation of the northwest, which made the Tang Dynasty decline more and more, and the racial consciousness became higher and higher, even turned into hatred for all outsiders. The uprising led by the late Tang Dynasty killed thousands of Persian merchants in Yangzhou, and Huang Chao also attacked Hu merchants in Guangzhou. During the Five Dynasties, with the invasion of northern aliens and the confrontation between Song Dynasty and Xia, Liao, Jin and Yuan Dynasties, the awakening of racial consciousness became more intense, in-depth and firm. This inspired the spirit of the literati class formed by the imperial examination in Tang and Song Dynasties and the reform movement with reform as the core. Scholars before Kaiyuan and Tianbao in the Tang Dynasty were in high spirits because they were in a peaceful and prosperous time and accorded with the emperor's attention to poetry and literature. But most of the monks at that time were concerned about their fame and career, or their spiritual home; The former is like the singing of frontier poems, while the latter is like the singing of pastoral school. Since the middle Tang Dynasty, the ideological system of intellectuals has changed obviously. The change is reflected in two aspects: one is the consciousness of fighting for cultural orthodoxy, and the other is paying more attention to the specific problems of reality. Han Yu, Li Ao, Liu Zongyuan, Liu Yuxi and Bai Juyi are representatives of the ideological and literary circles in the middle Tang Dynasty, and their ideological changes are reflected in these people respectively. In a series of articles, such as The Original Road, Han Yu revealed a kind of "orthodoxy" from Yao Shun, Yu, Tang to Confucius and Mencius, thinking that this kind of "orthodoxy" was lost to Mencius, but today it has to be inherited by him, reflecting a strong sense of historical and cultural subjectivity. Complementing this, he regarded Buddhism and Taoism as a "barbarian" religion and ideological heresy under the banner of "rejecting the old Buddha" (mainly Buddha) and wanted to reject it. Li Ao, his academic companion, should give full play to the connotation of "mind" and "nature" in Confucianism, and should agree with Han Yu's theory of "orthodoxy". On the one hand, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi participated in the realistic innovation; on the other hand, their academic works such as Feudalism, Non-Mandarin, Tian Lun, Tian Dui and so on. It is either intended to solve practical problems from historical interpretation or to break spiritual misunderstanding. Bai Juyi represents the tendency of returning to tradition in poetry creation. The "New Yuefu Movement" led by him, with the aim of "only singing makes people sick", is actually intended to restore the literary tradition initiated by the Book of Songs and Han Yuefu. Han Yu went to Mencius to learn the source of spiritual courage, while Bai Juyi converted to the Confucian School. In the mid-Tang Dynasty, Confucian classics also formed a temporary atmosphere, such as Lu Zhu, Zhao Kuang and Lu Chun's research on Chunqiu Zuozhuan. The cultural orthodox consciousness and strong sense of reality derived from poetry, as well as the thoughts, knowledge and articles of Liu Han and other scholars in the middle and Tang Dynasties, basically constitute the basic scope and scale of the literati spirit in the Song Dynasty. In the Song Dynasty, Taoism evolved into the spirit of "worrying about the world first, and enjoying the world later" and "creating peace for the world". The content of the theory of mind and nature has developed from scholars who were deeply "shameless" in the late Tang and Five Dynasties to Neo-Confucianism and Taoism. In the civil service politics carried out in the Northern Song Dynasty, scholar-officials were politicians, poets and scholars, but in the Song Dynasty, based on their own moral knowledge and different understanding of practical problems, a political group similar to the later "parties" appeared. In the Tang Dynasty, there was a so-called "struggle between Niu and Li", but it was basically a struggle for power and profit by the weak imperial court. In the Northern Song Dynasty, there were a "new party" headed by Wang Anshi and an "old party" headed by Sima Guang. Those who tried to change the situation of "accumulating poverty and weakness" in the dynasty by various new political measures belonged to the new party, while those who opposed this reform on the grounds of "disturbing the people", "insurrection" and "competing for profits with the people" belonged to the old party. The new Party represents Tu Youyou's positive and promising spirit, and the old Party cannot simply be regarded as "reactionary". The differences between the two factions stem from different understandings of reality. The old party thinks that there is nothing wrong with the existing political system and various policies. The problem is that officials can't implement them correctly. Instead of increasing revenue and reducing expenditure like the new law, it is better to start with the economy of the emperor and the court.