Chiming in on your conversation, Found this academic article which seems like a nice coverage of the broad tax history of China -
https://www.researchgate.net/public..._and_Its_Political-Legal_Development/download.
Does seem to make it clear that the imperial government viewed taxation as an instrument to shape society according to Confucian ideology, and a role to play in shaping society, beyond simply taking a laissez-faire view of social development. Ideological preference for low tax is specifically a preference for low agrarian tax (land tax), to favour an economy rooted in agricultural production, tax on trade seems less clear, though trade certainly controlled and heavily regulated, if not taxed. This is not as a such laissez-trade, low tax and regulation on trade and business to grow trade and business economic type ideology. As the economy has an agrarian base in employment (as all Malthusian economies with relatively low agriculture surplus must be) this is functionally relatively low tax.
From what I've read on this though, it seems really difficult to tell how much of a leading role ideology actually had in tax rates and mdoels though. There are limits of tax levels imposed by the inequality possibility frontier (states can't sustain high tax or inequality if the result would push large amounts of population below subsistence -
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/med...Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/2013/WPS6449.pdf, and China was a relatively low income society according to what we know of historical economics), limited incentives to tax from on military costs due to China's relative size to local competitors, and limits to tax bargaining imposed by China's model of government (bureaucracy in a limited position to credibly negotiate limits on powers for higher tax rates, in a system built to make bureaucracy accountable only to the centre). Would they have come up with a different justification under Confucian ideology if they'd faced different conditions (a richer, less agricultural population, much competition with peer states, an absence of a strong early bureaucracy)? And thus Confucian ideology not really necessarily causal.