The Study On Public Sale Of Tobacco And Wine In Early Republic Of China(1915-1927)

In the late Qing dynasty,to solved the financial problems,the government gradually pay attention to tobacco and wine tax,tobacco and wine tax system were gradually formed.But at that time,two main problems existed in the taxes,one is a big gap between the actual results and expected income,second is the tobacco and wine taxes were very disarry.After that,in order to expansion the fiscal revenue,the successive governments often tries to heavier tobacco and wine taxes or rectified it,the public sale of tobacco and wine is an important measure introduced by the Beijing government to rectify the tobacco and wine texes.The method of the public sale policy is official superintend and merchant selling,although Beijing government promulgated a series of regulations for every aspect of the public sale policy,there are still many problems in it.After the policy implementation,various disputes emerged up in different regions.And in this process,public sale itself was also in the event of a change,gradually move away from the provisions of the regulations.After that,tobacco and wine merchants constituent groups to petitioned the government to impove the tobacco and wine taxes,including abolition of the public sale.Although the government also has the plan to rectify the tobacco and wine taxes,the plan was on the premise of the public sale policy reserved.The merchants and government had deadlocked over this issue due to both of them were stuck to their own stand.With the political changes and other reasons,in the end of 1917,the pattern of tobacco and wine taxes—public sale tax and other tobacco and wine taxes in parallel—were basically stabilized.Overall,the public sale of tobacco and wine was a failed attempt,which was introduced by the Beijing government modeled on the monopoly policy in western countries,and the main purpose of it is to increase the fiscal revenue.Because of the problems existing in the policy itself and the merchant's opposition as well as the government's financial standard orientation and the bad policy environment,the so-called'public sale' designed by the policy were eventually turned into the 'public sale tax' in the actual operation.On the other hand,the main purpose of the Beijing government adopted this policy is to increase the fiscal revenue,and the government was full of hope for the potential benefits of public sale.However,with the bad implementation of the policy as well as the political chaos and other reasons,public sale income of the provinces within its control were far from expected,and what's worse,provinces hold back of the state revenue makes the limited income greatly reduced.The role of tobacco and wine public sale for increase fiscal income,in fact,is very limited.