Research On The Implementation Of Land Tax In Kind In Xihe County(1941-1949)

Land Tax has always been an eminent source of fiscal income in China.In 1928,the central government of Republic of China granted local government the ownership of Land Tax,as the principal source of provincial fiscal income.In April of 1941,When the war against Japanese invasion came to a stalemate,as one of the efforts made to remedy the rising problems caused by financial deficiency and a drastic increase in food prices,the central government decided to withdraw the Land Tax back to the state.In June,the third National Financial Conference decided to enact Wartime Act Governing the Collection of Agricultural Land Tax in Kind.The collection of in-kind Land Tax started in September at the provincial level.In general,the application of this taxation method is significantly effective,in that it not only released the fiscal pressure on government but also slowed down the momentum of the continuous rising in food prices,therefore settled the material base for the victory of the Anti-Japanese war.The implementation of In-kind Land Taxes varies over places.This article investigates the case of Xihe County in Gansu Province.To start with,the author forms an introduction on the course of change and development of Land Taxes and it's collecting in this county.Before the Land Tax was collected in kind,the local government in Xihe county had been practicing the Qing conventions.After the announcement of wartime's taxation,Xihe county established Land Tax agency to start collecting this tax in kind.Moreover,this article will present the research on the background,Institutional settings and collectors.In addition,this article analyzes the storage and transportation methods in the county during the in-kind period.As results of the switch of collecting method,compact time and difficulties in transportation,the collected grains couldn't be sent out immediately,the collected food was placed in several granaries of the county until transportation was arranged.Xihe's construction of new granaries had paralleled the efforts to repair and maintain the existing ones.Last but not the least,the author tries to develop an overall analysis on the implementation and the effectiveness of the efforts.Xihe County worked proactivelyto enforce the taxation policy,however,due to remoteness,threats from bandits,instability in society,natural disasters like floods,in combination with local authority's low efficiency,favoritism,and corruption,the perforamance of the implementation of Land Tax in kind was poor.In the process of implementation of in-kind Land Tax,with all the influences from those subjective and objective factors,the actual effectiveness of the policy was far from the expected.However,one cannot easily deny their part of the contribution to the anti-invasion war that was made through the food that were collected in this county and successfully transported to the frontier.Taking the interaction between provincial and county,local government and the people as the perspective,the case study of Land tax in kind in Xihe county is of great significance to the overall study of Land tax in kind in the period of the Republic of China.