ABSTRACT
The Sung period saw an enormous increase in economic activity in China proper and the northern borderlands. People of various classes and groups were largely taken up with the pursuit of wealth and luxury for themselves. There was a great extension of the arts and graces of life, of comforts and pleasures in which all classes strove to increase their share. The limited value of the class-war theory may again be illustrated from this period. That theory is useful in helping to identify and define certain group-interests in a generalised way; but the more sharply it does so, and the more exclusively it insists on its own limited criteria, the more it distorts the picture of the real society.
