I.B.5.d. Political History and International Relations

Political History

Song Political Institutions and the Central Government

This edited volume consists of essays reviewing international scholarship on Song institutional history during the last century. It includes essays reviewing scholarship on political history, legal, and military institutions, central and local government, clerks, official historiography, fiscal policy and population statistics, land tenure, the postal system.

For a review of Chinese scholarship on political history in general, see

For a review of American scholarship on political history between 1990 and 2006, see:

For a discussion of policies in the early Sung period, see:

On central government institutions and politics, see:

This article reviews research on imperial power, ministerial power, power over the military administration, power over financial administration, power to issue decrees and impeach.The reviewers divide PRC historiography on these topics up into three periods: 1942-85, 1985-90, and the 1990s.

For Japanese scholarship on Song fiscal policy, see:

This article treats the fiscal situation of the whole empire and the fiscal institutions of the central government, river transportation and military provisioning, local finance, and the increasing integration of fiscal policy.

This article broadly reviews scholarship on Song legal history. It is identical to the author’s chapter on legal history in Songdai zhidu shi yanjiu bainian, 1900-2000 mentioned above.

Political Figures

On Wang Anshi, see:

For Wang Anshi's reforms, see:

This is a very comprehensive study of Chinese reactions to the reforms, covering interpretations from the Southern Song period up to the late twentieth century. For the latter period, the author focuses on research trends in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, but he includes a bibliography of publications through 2000 in Chinese, Japanese, and European languages. The coverage of the latter is incomplete.

For earlier Chinese scholarship on Wang Anshi's reform, see:

This article is divided up into sections on overall appraisals of the reforms, economic and financial reforms, military reforms, educational and examination reforms, and contemporaries' views of the reforms.

For an interpretation of the role of scholarship on Wang Anshi in modern Chinese historiography, see:

See also I.B.5.a.

For studies on Yue Fei, see:

For Wang Anshi, Yue Fei, and Fan Zhongyan, see also Zhu Ruixi's Song shi yanjiu (I.b.1).

International Relations

On Sino-Japanese relations:

On Sino-Korean relations:

For research on Pu Shougeng, Supervisor of Maritime Trade in Quanzhou during the late Southern Song period, see