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Author: Taisu Zhang Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 131651868X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
This survey of the fiscal history of China's last imperial dynasty explains why its ability to tax was unusually weak. It argues that the answer lies in the internal ideological worldviews of the political elite, rather than in external political or economic constraints.
Author: Taisu Zhang Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 131651868X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
This survey of the fiscal history of China's last imperial dynasty explains why its ability to tax was unusually weak. It argues that the answer lies in the internal ideological worldviews of the political elite, rather than in external political or economic constraints.
Author: Taisu Zhang Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Increasingly, scholars believe that China's relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th Centuries -- relative to Western Europe and Japan -- and the subsequent collapse of the imperial system altogether had much to do with the Qing state's extraordinarily limited fiscal and administrative capacities. Contrary to the still surprisingly prevalent notion of "oriental despotism," the Qing was, in fact, an extremely low tax regime. The central element of state revenue, the agricultural tax, remained stagnant in total volume from the mid-18th Century to the end of the 19th, despite a near tripling of China's population and economy. Ultra-low levels of extraction from the rural economy helped mire the late-Qing state in a perpetual state of fiscal crisis and administrative weakness, stunting its industrial development and eventually destroying its political cohesion.Despite the crucial role that fiscal institutions played in the Qing's economic and political decline, their origins and foundations remain poorly understood. Most importantly, preexisting explanations struggle to explain the stagnation of agricultural taxes in the 19th Century, when the Qing state was under constant and severe pressure to expand its revenue base -- pressure that become almost unbearable after mid-century. Using this as an impetus, this book provides a new account of Qing fiscal legislation and policymaking that focuses on the interplay between political ideology and state institutions. It argues that the stubborn refusal to raise agricultural taxes was less a pragmatic response to the state's material circumstances than an ideological choice. Qing lawmakers locked agricultural tax quotas at very low levels not because they had to or could afford to, but because their ideological biases produced interpretations of real world events that emphasized -- overemphasized, for the most part -- the sociopolitical dangers associated with tax hikes.However, this was not a simple story in which "Confucianism" straightforwardly undermined Chinese politics and institutions. From the earliest decades of the dynasty, Qing elites operated under a fiscal mindset that, while vaguely “Confucian” in some sense, exhibited fundamental differences from what we observe in earlier dynasties. Whereas elites in previous dynasties often debated fiscal policy in highly moralistic terms -- whether, given the circumstances, government fiscal policy was inherently just or ethical -- the Qing state was overwhelmingly preoccupied with the perceived sociopolitical consequences of tax hikes. The dominant political belief among early Qing elites was simply that increasing agricultural taxes would trigger severe social unrest among the rural population, and must therefore be avoided out of basic political self-preservation.Qing fiscal policymaking was therefore unusually pragmatic and “realist,” but it was heavily ideological nonetheless. The idea that raising taxes would trigger social collapse and rebellion gained popularity in the early Qing largely because its “factual” explanation for Ming collapse, which placed much of the blame on a series of tax hikes in the early 17th Century, echoed and reinforced a longstanding moral skepticism towards government taxation passed down through the Confucian canon over two millennia. In their attempt to learn from the trauma of Ming collapse, early Qing elites committed to a new political “common sense” in which keeping tax burdens below the late Ming “red line” was considered a necessary condition for sociopolitical stability. This remained the dominant political wisdom throughout the dynasty, even though, by at least the mid-18th Century, its basic empirical assumptions about agricultural productivity and local living standards had become wildly inaccurate. In other words, the nominally “empirical” foundations of Qing political “realism” were themselves the product of ideological bias.A number of factors contributed to the longevity of these dubious empirics: First, the cognitive biases that facilitated their initial dissemination in the early Qing continued to influence elite thinking in later periods. Throughout the dynasty, they interpreted -- misinterpreted, most of the time -- almost any sign of local unrest as evidence that tax were already too high. More interestingly, the belief in ultra-low taxation was institutionally and intellectually self-perpetuating: political elites commonly believed that the very act of surveying would generate social speculation of potential tax hikes, and was therefore politically dangerous in the same way that actual tax hikes were dangerous. As a result, the state's last systematic attempt to measure agricultural production and land usage occurred in 1689, and the imperial court banned land surveys from 1730 onwards. This was an unprecedented move: every major Chinese dynasty before the Qing had conducted land surveys with some regularity, and were able to convert that knowledge into much higher levels of fiscal extraction. The Qing state, in contrast, knew disturbingly little about its economy for the final 223 years of its existence. Without clear information to the contrary, however, the conventional assumption that tax increases would push rural income below subsistence levels, and therefore trigger severe unrest, was politically impossible to refute. By stunting the state's capacity to collect information, anti-taxation arguments created an institutional and intellectual environment in which competing ideas were unlikely to emerge, and even less likely to persuade. As a result, policymakers remained committed for nearly two centuries to fiscal practices that they believed were necessary for political survival -- but were, in fact, a major cause of the dynasty's decline and fall.
Author: Jean-Laurent Rosenthal Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674057910 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
Why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? The authors combine economic theory and historical evidence to argue that political processes drove the economic divergence between the two world regions, with continued consequences today that become clear in this innovative account.
Author: Taisu Zhang Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107141117 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
Zhang argues that property institutions in preindustrial China and England were a cause of China's lagging development in preindustrial times.
Author: Michael D. Swaine Publisher: Rand Corporation ISBN: 0833048309 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
China's continuing rapid economic growth and expanding involvement in global affairs pose major implications for the power structure of the international system. To more accurately and fully assess the significance of China's emergence for the United States and the global community, it is necessary to gain a more complete understanding of Chinese security thought and behavior. This study addresses such questions as: What are China's most fundamental national security objectives? How has the Chinese state employed force and diplomacy in the pursuit of these objectives over the centuries? What security strategy does China pursue today and how will it evolve in the future? The study asserts that Chinese history, the behavior of earlier rising powers, and the basic structure and logic of international power relations all suggest that, although a strong China will likely become more assertive globally, this possibility is unlikely to emerge before 2015-2020 at the earliest. To handle this situation, the study argues that the United States should adopt a policy of realistic engagement with China that combines efforts to pursue cooperation whenever possible; to prevent, if necessary, the acquisition by China of capabilities that would threaten America's core national security interests; and to remain prepared to cope with the consequences of a more assertive China.
Author: Yi Wen Publisher: World Scientific ISBN: 9814733741 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics, especially the institutional theory of economic development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable despite its current 'backward' financial system and political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream 'blackboard' economic models, and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself.
Author: Robert J. Antony Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
A dozen papers from the Workshop on Qing Management and the Bonds of Civil Community, 1600-1014, held in Cumberland Falls, Kentucky in October 1998 examine the strategies and institutions the Qing government used to solve practical problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex empire. Most of the contributing historians are American. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Author: David C. Engerman Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108317855 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 903
Book Description
The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.
Author: Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107013518 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 495
Book Description
Leading economic historians present a groundbreaking series of country case studies exploring the formation of fiscal states in Eurasia.
Author: Taisu Zhang
Author: Taisu Zhang
Author: Taisu Zhang
Author: Hao Jiang
Author: Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
Author: Taisu Zhang
Author: Michael D. Swaine
Author: Yi Wen
Author: Robert J. Antony
Author: David C. Engerman
Author: Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla