A Retrospective Study on the Researches and its Discussions of Imperial Power and the Power of Prime Minister in Song Dynasty

The researches of imperial power and the power of prime minister in Song Dynasty began in 1940's and set off heated discussions in 1980's.This article holds that the reason for different arguments lies in that different researchers adopted different criteria to weigh imperial power and the power of prime minister,thus resulted in different references of the same concept.In other words,if researchers had adopted the same criteria,there would not have been such heated discussions.But on the other hand,such discussions have opened a new phase for the study on imperial power and the power of prime minister in Song Dynasty.