Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"For a decade, power teetered between the two sides, neither able to make much progress past the Yangtze. Slowly, the Song court began to accept the reality of its position: the north was, at least for the moment, lost. In 1141, the emperor Gaozong agreed to sign a peace treaty with the Jurchen. Thirteen years of war had given him no choice. He could no longer afford to mount endless expeditions into the north; the cropland in the south was untilled, the farmers drafted into the army; the only other road for the Song ended in poverty and famine. The Shaoxing treaty was a humiliation. It referred to the Jurchen as the “superior state” and the Song as an “insignificant fiefdom,” and Gaozong was forced to accept the status of Jurchen vassal, complete with a hefty annual tribute. But it halted the fighting for two decades, and the shrunken Song, battered and shamed by the nomads, slowly began to build a new existence for itself." [Bauer: Renaissance World, p. 26-7]