Taisu Zhang, Associate Professor of Law, Yale Law School - Professor Zhang provides a new account of Qing fiscal legislation and policymaking that focuses on the interplay between political ideology and state institutions. He argues that the stubborn refusal to raise agricultural taxes was not merely a pragmatic response to the state’s material circumstances, whether geopolitical, economic, or demographical, but also, and probably more importantly, an ideological and intellectual choice. Qing lawmakers locked agricultural tax quotas at very low levels largely because their ideological worldview advised—vigorously—against raising them. He traces this ideological worldview to paradigmatic changes in political thought generated by the trauma of the Ming-Qing transition.