英文摘要
|
This paper is a response to ”Warfare, Markets and the Fiscal State: A Reconsideration of Southern Song Taxation and Finance” by Guanglin William Liu, which criticized my book, ”A Study of Local Financial System of the Song State”. Liu was certainly correct when he pointed out that long term inflation should be taken into consideration while accounting the tax revenue, but the stable commodity prices during the years 1127-1234 could not support his assumption that the tax revenues of the Song state were decreased instead of increased. Liu misapprehended the case studies of Fuzhou and Lianzhou, as well as the actual taxpayers of the state income from monopoly commodities too, because he failed to understand the Song fiscal system in more detail.Actually, the Song state was quite capable of keeping its tax revenue in step with the long term inflation, if not of manipulating it. In the field of financial history of traditional China, induction based on a careful decoding of historical records might be much more important than deduction from certain set hypotheses. It is expected that Liu's paper will be a good example to scholars of how to make academic criticism more professionally.
|