This irridentist attitude also contributed towards his desire to centralize fiscal matters: he told his war minister Wen Yanbo that "if we are to raise troops for our frontier campaigns, then our treasuries must be full.

Shenzong's goals were opposed by the conservatives, particularly Fu Bi and Sima Guang, who were concerned with his expansion of monarchical power and who wanted to maintain the peaceful equilibrium with the Western Xia and the Liao Dynasty.

Shenzong respected the conservative faction: he kept Fu Bi in the capital until 1072 and had close relations with Sima Guang, whom he admired for his morality and intelligence.

5,300 Muslim men from Bukhara were encouraged and invited to move to China in 1070 by Shenzong to help battle the Liao empire in the northeast and repopulate areas ravaged by fighting.

The Song dynasty's rigorous civil service examinations rejuvenated humanist-oriented Confucian elite culture; in particular, the literati wanted to improve the material conditions of the people.

Additionally, the humiliating loss against the Western Xia in the 1040s[6] (as well as the unfavorable terms of the Treaty of Chanyuan) created, according to Sogabe Shizuo, a "perpetual wartime fiscal regime".

[8] Immediately after taking the throne in 1067, Emperor Shenzong established the Office of Expenditure Reduction with Sima Guang at its head to improve Song finances.

[6] Shenzong's fascination with the revenue-generating potential of interest prompted him to invest heavily in a new price control policy, despite complaints from merchants and consumers about governmental harassment.

[15] The New Policies' circumvention of checks on central power was controversial from the onset; both Fu Bi and Sima Guang wrote memorials to Shenzong advising him to balance governmental function, respect the bureaucratic process, and not to support Wang Anshi.

This, along with the general controversy surrounding the New Polices and Wang’s own misbehavior regarding court factions prompted Shenzong to remove him from his post as chief minister in 1074.

Wang did not stay for long and an astronomical omen (along with further misbehavior such as pretending to be sick and overworking his son to death) prompted the distraught man’s permanent retirement in 1076.

He first significantly expanded his personal power and used the domineering official Cai Jue to keep the conservatives, many of whom had been invited back to court, in line with the emperor.

With Shenzong himself as the most active policy maker, this inefficiency was largely unproblematic, but the reigns of the child-emperor Zhezong and the incompetent emperor Huizong exposed the redundancy of such a system.

However, from Chinese records it is known that Michael VII Doukas (Mie li yi ling kai sa 滅力伊靈改撒) of Fo lin (i.e. the Byzantine Empire) dispatched a diplomatic mission to China's Song dynasty that arrived in 1081, during the reign of Emperor Shenzong.

Sima Guang, a minister interested in the history of the previous 1000 years, published the Zizhi Tongjian or A Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government in 1084.

Another notable literary achievement that occurred during his reign was the compilation of the Seven Military Classics, including the alleged forgery of the Questions and Replies between Tang Taizong and Li Weigong.

In tears, he berated his councilors and said “Not a single one of you said that the [Yongle City] campaign was wrong.”[28] He was crushed by the realization that his reforms, into which he had poured immense amounts of time and energy, had failed.