No taxation without representation: China's taxation history and its political-legal development

Abstract

China's ancient tax system, primarily built on land tax, suited its huge agrarian economic basis, which remained little changed for several thousand years. A variety of other taxes and revenue-like sources including the monopoly of salt and iron and compulsory labour duties were imposed as supplements to formal taxation. Informal taxation existed along with the development of formal taxation because formal tax revenues often could not meet government needs particularly at local levels. An advanced “provincial and prefectural” political regime evolved, from the time of the Qin Dynasty, to enable emperors or rulers to control the large territory. Tax administration was managed by the powerful bureaucratic government which effectively controlled nearly all aspects of state power. Yet taxation appears to have had little or no effect on shaping China's constitutional polity. Given the linkage between taxation and political-legal development in Western countries, this article examines the reason why, during the long period of China's political-legal transition, taxation failed to play a similar role in helping create a more developed constitutional polity.