Land Tax, Surtaxes, Miscellaneous Fees and Extra-Legal Charges

Abstract

The land tax system from the early eighteenth century right through to the 1930s was dualistic in nature: a formal system regulated by statutes existed; but since it was incapable of meeting the ever-growing demands of fiscal administration, there developed in the course of time an irregularly controlled or informal system. ‘The presence of the informal system’, as Wang Yeh-chien points out, ‘made the management of the public economy fragmentary and even chaotic, but it was the system, informal yet flexible, that kept public administration in operation.’1 Naturally, there was a difference between what a peasant was required by statutes to pay and what he actually paid. To the original statutory land tax quota was added a number of surtaxes; to surtaxes were added ‘miscellaneous fees’ of local origins; to these were further added extra-legal charges demanded by tax-collectors. A contemporary observer was hardly exaggerating when he described land taxation in the late Qing and Republican period as ‘open robbery by ravenous officials and petty functionaries’.2