 Most of the explicit debate about this issue was taken up after a series of attempts at dramatic reform at the tail end of the Northern Song associated with Wang Anshi and his successors. However well-conceived those reforms may have been in their own right, they coincided with a disastrous famine resulting in widespread debt and dislocation, and the last round of major reforms took place shortly before the Northern Song fell to Jurchen invaders. With that national anguish and humiliation serving as historical background for a great deal of political thought in the subsequent Southern Song, many political thinkers blamed the very attempt to improve governance through mere reform (rather than concomitant improvements in character) for the Northern Song’s downfall. Accordingly, most political thinkers were attracted to Xunzi’s position on the question of the relative importance of people (of good character) versus institutional rules. Zhu Xi articulates a version of this consensus position in some recorded remarks to his students: