Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-ph5wq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:26:55.567Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The Building of Public Administration and Taxation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2023

Get access

Summary

Abstract

Chapter 7 discusses the process of the Guangdong provincial government's efforts to reform its administration of tax collection. The tax collection in Guangdong province relied heavily on a tax-farming system where contractors varied from traditional merchant guilds to professional tax-farmers. The co-existence of various currencies and their daily fluctuating exchange rates added to the difficulty of tax collection. The provincial governments tried to set up tax bureaus locally and create a unified and top-down tax collection system in Guangdong. However, the complete abolition of the contract system was never declared due to the financial vulnerability of the provincial government. The Chen Jitang regime in Guangdong heavily depended on fund-raising through loans from merchants.

Keywords: tax-farming, Guangdong, China, tax collection

Various evaluations of the tax-farming system

The tax-farming system is a taxation method that allows the government to delegate administrative affairs to private organizations. It is based on a mutual agreement between the government and a private organization. However, tax-farming in Chinese history always had negative implications. Delegating administration to middlemen, particularly in taxation, was linked to exploitation of the people and the malfunctioning of state administration.

Prasenjit Duara's study of rural areas in North China in the 1920s analyzes the penetration of state power to the grassroots level by shifting from a tax system through traditional gentlemen and local communities to the rise of tax “brokerism” during Republican China. According to Duara, the taxfarming system was part of a violent process in which state power infiltrated the private sector to obtain financial resources, and the tax farmers were profit-seeking because they did not belong to local communities. Meanwhile, Susan Mann describes the transition between the two systems as “liturgical.” In the 1930s, the bidding system introduced professional tax contractors, which Mann depicts as the demise of the liturgical tax strategies. In Mann's research, the tax-farming system was introduced by the state's aspirations to expand financial resources, and tax-farming and traditional taxation through guilds were established incompatible binarities.

Mann's study focuses mainly on the emergence and characteristics of the likin tax in the late Qing and it lacks a detailed analysis of the professional tax-farming merchants during Republican China.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Guangdong Model and Taxation in China
Formation, Development, and Characteristics of China's Modern Financial System
, pp. 175 - 192
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×