Chan TK (2023)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Thesis
Publication year: 2023
What is a tax? Who collects it for what purpose? How is it justified? Across cultures and times, people hold different answers to these questions in their respective languages and devices of reasoning. This research probes the knowledge production process of these answers in Chinese history and provides a descriptive and analytical account of the controversy of a transit duty called lijin from 1853 to 1931, a period of turbulence in which China was entangled with challenges of globalization, internal strife, and social and cultural modernization.
Apart from all the variables from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, what was apparent was that the Chinese fiscal structure experienced a radical transition. Specifically, taxation depending on commercial activities became dominant in state revenue, rising from 10% in 1841 to over 60% in 1890. In this transition, the establishment of lijin amidst the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-1850s was an especially crucial episode. In hindsight, lijin not only rescued the empire from its prolonged civil warfare but also de-railed the political equilibrium between the throne, provincial governors, and rural gentry. In other words, the green light to fiscal autonomy granted on local levels compromised the power balance that had formed the backbone of China’s dynastic structure.
Many have studied the monetary aspect of the above history, but very few focus on the
new discursive fabrics that followed China’s unprecedented changes in public finance. This
research examines the semantic changes happening in China’s capitalistic transformation and
traces these changes to the social and political factors that produced them. In order to narrow
down the scope, this research uses the media materials about lijin to identify the new discourses
that reshaped the idea of public finance in China’s encounter with the global expansion of
capitalism. Over the years, historians’ interest in lijin was mainly to uncover archival evidence
and overcome the statistical challenges of its incomplete records. Instead, this research looks at
the language choices, the argumentative tools and frameworks, and the social discourses that
embedded the lijin debates. With a Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, this
dissertation uses Chinese experiences to shed light on how the ideology of public finance
interacted with the project of modern state-building and how the identity of individuals and
social groups gradually reconfigured alongside their relations with each other.
APA:
Chan, T.K. (2023). Taxes and China's Capitalist Transformation: The Changing Narrative on Lijin from Late Qing to the Republican Era (1875−1931) (Dissertation).
MLA:
Chan, Tsz Kit. Taxes and China's Capitalist Transformation: The Changing Narrative on Lijin from Late Qing to the Republican Era (1875−1931). Dissertation, 2023.
BibTeX: Download