本文评述了1986~2013年研究近代中国国际贸易问题若干篇主要文献,这些文献在分析中国近代国际贸易的状况、解释对外贸易的影响因素、分析对外贸易对宏观经济的影响和评价对外贸易政策的作用等方面所做的研究是非常深入的。本文认为,采用“前提假设-逻辑推理-实证检验”研究范式的文献具有很高的学术价值。同时我们也发现,一些仅仅使用历史学和社会学的方法来研究经济史的文献存在较大的问题:第一,难以在经济学逻辑层面展开分析,大都是仅凭作者个人的感觉得出结论,学理价值不大;第二,有时套用经济学的一些概念,但对理论框架的逻辑和推理方法一知半解,往往出现“两层皮”现象;第三,实证大都采用不甚可靠的举例法,况且,作为例证的史料也不丰富,难以涵盖大部分同类现象。采用这种实证方法时,依据几条例证得出的结论完全可以被几条相反的例证推翻,无谓的“学术争论”就不可避。
This paper comments some of the main literature concerning modern China’s international trade issues from 1986 to 2013, which have conducted profound researches on the analysis of China’s modern international trade situation, ex-plaining the affecting factors of foreign trade, the analysis of the effect of international trade in macroeconomic and evaluating the function of international trade policy etc. We believe that the literature which applies“assumption - logical inference - empirical test - Conclusions and Countermeasures” research paradigm has high academic value. While we also find serious problems lying in some of the literature which merely use historic and sociological methods to study economic history. Firstly, it’s hard to analyze in logic level of economics, and the conclusion are from the author’s individual feelings so the doctrine has little value. Secondly, some authors use concepts of economics indiscriminately as they don’t know well of the theoretical framework of logic and reasoning methods. Theories usually become mere decoration without practical usage. Thirdly, unrelia-ble illustrative methods are applied to prove author’s viewpoint .The historical material as illustration is not plentiful to cover all the same phenomena. Using this empirical method, relying on several examples to draw the conclusion can be overturned by a few of opposite examples completely, so it cannot avoid unnecessary“academic debate”.