Legal Comment On The Shanghai And Chongqing Real Estate Tax Reform Experiment

As China’s society and economic is developing, its real estate market has varied dramatically. Recently, a series of social problems has been erupting along with the soaring rising house price, among which, some are extremely urgent for the government to figure out, such as controlling the house price, narrowing the disparity between the rich and the poor, ensuring residents’basic right of habitation. As for macro-control and these difficult problems, the foremost and frequently used tool by government is tax. House property tax is an independent kind of tax existing in China for many years. The house property tax being executed right now origins from the Interim Regulations of the People’s Republic of China for Housing Property Tax, which is released on1986. However, after being implemented for more than20years, the regulation is not suitable for today’s social economic circumstances any more due to the significant change of the social background it depending on. In order to deal with these problems, scholars proposed to reform the house property tax to meet with the social needs. On28th, January2011, Shanghai and Chongqing published their reform experimental regulations respectively, taking the lead in house property tax reform. Nevertheless, there are full of controversies aroused by scholars towards the experimental reform about its legality and content. In my opinion, the house property tax being implemented is so unreasonable that it will be reformed inevitably. This article takes the regulations of Shanghai and Chongqing as research object and analyses the legality of the experimental reforms. Besides, this article provides its suggestions for the nationwide house property reform based on a comparison of two regulations’contents. This article s divided into four parts.The first part introduces the development of house property tax and real estate tax in China, putting forward several concepts along with the development including house property tax, the house properly tax being implemented by China, real estate property and the house property tax of Shanghai and Chongqing’s reform regulations. By compared with each other, these concepts are clearly explained and clarified.The second part analyses the legality of Shanghai and Chongqing’s experimental reforms. Firstly, this article orts out the viewpoints towards the reforms illegality and legality respectively. There arc two reasons for considering the reforms legal—the state council is entitled to decide the collecting and reform of house property tax and Shanghai and Chongqing didn’t violate the Interim Regulations of the People’s Republic of China for Housing Property Tax. While there also two reasons for viewing the reforms as illegal —the mainland China is lack of the precondition of collecting house property tax—private ownership of land system, and the house property tax collecting is against the doctrine of taxation by law. After analyzing these viewpoints, I proposed my own view on this issue. I think it seems legal for Shanghai and Chongqing to reform under China’s special legislative authorization, but when looking into deeper, we will find that is not so reasonable. According to the doctrine of taxation by law and the requirement of building a country ruled of law, the power to decide the reform of house property tax should given back to the legislative institution.The third part compare with the two regulations in seven aspects—the range of the experimental region, taxation object, taxpayer, basis of tax calculation, tax rate, tax relieving standard and tax usage. By this way, the contents of the two regulations are clearly presented.The fourth part propose some suggestions for the nationwide reform of house property tax, which are based on the third part, designing some regulations in the aspects of taxation object, taxpayer, basis of tax calculation, tax rate, tax relieving standard and tax usage.