Inspired by Fan, the later Chancellor Wang Anshi (1021–1086) implemented a series of reforms in 1069 upon his ascendance to office. Wang promulgated a community-based law enforcement and civil order known as the Baojia system. Wang Anshi attempted to diminish the importance of landholding and private wealth in favor of mutual-responsibility social groups that shared similar values and could be easily controlled by the government. Just as scholar-officials owed their social prestige to their government degrees, Wang wanted to structure all of society as a mass of dependents loyal to the central government. He used various means, including the prohibition of landlords offering loans to tenants; this role was assumed by the government. Wang established local militias that could aid the official standing army and lessen the constrained state budget expenses for the military. He set up low-cost loans for the benefit of rural farmers, whom he viewed as the backbone of the Song economy. Since the land tax exacted from rural farmers filled the state treasury's coffers, Wang implemented a reform to update the land-survey system so that more accurate assessments could be gathered. Wang removed the mandatory poetry requirement in the civil service exams, on the grounds that many otherwise skilled and knowledgeable Confucian students were being denied entry into the administration. Wang also established government monopolies for tea, salt, and wine production. All of these programs received heavy criticism from conservative ministerial peers, who believed his reforms damaged local family wealth which provided the basis for the production of examination candidates, managers, merchants, landlords, and other essential members of society. Historian Paul J. Smith writes that Wang's reforms—the New Policies—represented the professional bureaucratic elite's final attempt to bring the thriving economy under state control to remedy the lack of state resources in combating powerful enemies to the north—the Liao and Western Xia.