State and village in late Qing and Republican North China: Local administration and land taxation in Huailu County, Hebei Province, 1875--1936

This dissertation examines local administration and land taxation in Huailu county, Hebei province, during the late Qing and early Republican periods, focusing on the actual operation of village institutions in the context of interactions between the state and local communities and between human activities and ecological surroundings.; This research is based in large part on materials from the Huailu county government archives, which contain over 5,000 files, mostly case records concerning local administration and tax collection, as well as various official documents on tax management. These materials allow us to see how the administrative disputes were mediated by peasant communities or adjudicated by the county magistrate. More importantly, they permit an up-close examination of the actual working of village practices pertaining to the selection of local official and quasi-official agents and their relationship with local communities. They also make possible here a detailed analysis of the full process of land taxation, which ran from the bargaining on the tax burden between the government and local elites, the transfer of tax liabilities, and the investigation of unregistered land and unofficial land deeds, to the advance payment of taxes by different tax agents and finally their collection of tax monies from individual households.; One of the major findings in this dissertation is the conspicuous continuity of village practices in taxation, which had existed since the eighteenth century and worked well into the 1930s. Central to these practices were “village regulations” that guided the villagers' cooperation in local administrative service and tax payment and provided a basis for the resolution of related disputes. The smooth operation of these institutions, coupled with elite activism against tax escalation and power abuses, greatly mitigated the disruptive impacts of state intrusion on village communities and prevented villagers from overt confrontation with the government. The reasons behind the exceptional level of village solidarity and local resistance, this study suggests, lay in the ecological security, the low level of social stratification, and strong kinship ties characteristic of this area, which made possible the structural stability of village communities, the growth of cooperative arrangements, and the perpetuation of related village regulations.