 This age suffers from two defects: defects in its institutional rules (fa) and defects in the current political situation. The defects in the rules can all be altered at once quite easily, but the defects in the current political situation all reside in people. How can they be changed when people go about their business with a selfish heartmind! The rules of the last eight years of Emperor Renzong’s reign can be considered defective. Wang Anshi changed them all soon after [becoming the emperor’s prime minister], but this only gave rise to numerous new defects. This is because people are hard to change. (ZZYL 108:2688; translation slightly modified from Zhu 2019: 62)