Taxation, Trust, and Government Debt: State

This article explores the shifting relationship between the state and the rural elites in Sichuan during the last decades of the Qing dynasty through the lens of taxation and public debt by using a creditor-debtor model as a theoretical framework. Sichuan’s unique rewarded land tax surcharge, called the “Contribution” and levied since 1864, established a relationship of symbolic and economic indebtedness of the imperial and local state to the taxpayer. Western-inspired reforms after 1898 directly attacked the symbolic and economic bonds established by the Contribution. The Railway Rent Share tax shifted the creditor-debtor relationship from the state to the public Sichuan-Hankou Railway Company by making individual taxpayers into shareholders. When Beijing eventually banned what it saw as a privatization of taxation and decided to nationalize the railway company, this ignited the Railway Protection Movement, which precipitated the 1911 Revolution in Sichuan