Taxation is an ancient economic category, and from the perspective of the history of human development, taxation is an distribution category that has an essential connection with the state. It arose with the formation of the state.
Taxation was an important pillar of the establishment and maintenance of the rule of the ancient Chinese dynasty, and taxation was an important source of state finances, an important means of managing the economy, and a policy measure that was compulsorily levied in order to maintain the operation of the state apparatus.
When private property appeared on the land of China, it already provided a hotbed for taxation to grow, and once the state was established, taxes already had the name of compulsory collection.
The taxation system of China's feudal society mainly includes the poll tax based on the people, that is, the Ding tax; the household-based property tax, that is, the household adjustment; the land tax based on the field mu, that is, the field rent; and the military service and military service based on adult men; and the customs tax and other miscellaneous taxes.
China's taxation has been around since the Xia Dynasty, but only as a product of a concept similar to taxation, i.e., "tribute", which literally translates to tribute, from Bei Congwu to levy. Tribes or commoners paid tribute according to a certain percentage of the field estate.
In the Shang Dynasty, the gongfa gradually evolved into an auxiliary method. The helper law is actually the well field system, which divides the land into nine parts according to the tic-tac-toe, and the outer eight fields are the private land of eight households, then the inner field is public land, and the eight families cultivate nine fields, helping the state to cultivate the public land of the inner field, and the inner field is taxed.
In addition to the above-mentioned agricultural taxes, in fact, in the Shang Dynasty, there were already taxes on commercial handicrafts in China. Commerce and handicrafts had developed in the Shang Dynasty, but taxes had not yet been levied at that time, that is, the so-called "city halls do not tax, and ridicule does not levy." In the Zhou Dynasty, in order to adapt to the development of commerce and handicrafts, the "Gift of Sekishi" was levied on goods that passed through checkpoints or listed trades, and the "Endowment of Yamazawa" was levied on logging, mining, hunting, fishing, boiling salt, etc. This is the earliest industrial and commercial tax in China.
In the Zhou Dynasty, the agricultural tax assistance method has undergone some rectification, evolving from the auxiliary method to the thorough method, that is, to divide a piece of land for each farmer, and the output of the land is taxed and needs to be paid to the royal family. The phrase "those who consume a hundred acres of the people, take ten acres as a gift" is a true portrayal of this period.
During the Spring and Autumn Period, the word tax began to be really mentioned. In the "Fifteen Years of Gu Liang Chuan Xuan Gong", the term "initial tax acre" appears. The initial tax on mu is a reform implemented by the State of Lu to replace "rent in kind" with "rent in kind", which is the beginning of the recognition of the legalization of private land. "Mu" refers to the peasants' share of the land under the well field system, that is, the so-called private land, which is symmetrical with the public land, that is, the lord's own camp. The tax acres used to be "nationality without taxation", that is, the implementation of the system of servitude rent for public land, and the grain exploited by the lords from the peasants was limited to the harvest of the land. Because the peasants were diligent in private land and neglected to do public work, resulting in the development of private land production and the decline of public land production since the late Western Zhou Dynasty, the noble lords had to abandon the public land force servitude system and instead expropriate private land production from the peasants.
In the Tang Dynasty, Tang Chengsui system introduced the rent-to-yong system in the second year of Tang Wude. The introduction of a system of enlistment based on the expropriation of grain, cloth or service to the government is based on the implementation of the equalization system. In the Tang Dynasty, the equalization system of land was divided according to the number of people, and each adult in the early Tang Dynasty could receive a hundred acres of land. The fields allocated are divided into two categories: Kou fen tian and Yong ye tian.
The Koufen field is land without the nature of inheritance, which belongs to the grain field, accounting for 80% of the land allocated. After the death of the Detian people, this part of the land needed to be handed over for redistribution by Xinding.
In the first year of Tang Dezong's founding, in order to solve the financial difficulties of the imperial court, under the leadership of Yang Yan, the chancellor, the Tang Dynasty government officially began to implement the "two tax laws". A new tax law formulated to unify various taxes based on the original local tax and household tax. Because it is levied in summer and autumn, it is called the "two tax laws".
In terms of taxation, in the second year of Tang Gaozu Wude, the emperor ordered the people of the world to "rent two stones, two silks, and three or two"; in terms of labor, each adult male was required to serve the state for twenty days a year.
Although the "two tax laws" combined the "rent adjustment" taxes and labor servitude to be paid in two installments, over time the government slowly forgot the history of the reform of the tax system, resulting in a mixture of tax items.
In the last years of the Tang Dynasty, due to the increasingly corrupt life of the ruling clique and the chaotic situation formed by the division of the feudal towns, the central government's financial payments became more and more numerous, and it became a very common phenomenon that the income was not enough.
Every year, after the two taxes have been collected, when the government wants to use money and servitude, it is inevitable that the "levy of forced labor" and the "levy of cloth" will be re-enacted, but these two items have long been levied in the two taxes, and now the collection of these two items again is bound to aggravate the burden on the people.
During the Reign of Emperor Shenzong of the Northern Song Dynasty, Wang Anshi resolutely implemented the tax method in the five years of Xining in order to solve the problem of uneven land endowments in various places in the past, and the taxation method resolutely implemented by the taxpayers in the five years, which was mainly composed of cadastres and various books, and affirmed the amount of tax per mu in various places. The content of the work is: to make an inventory and measurement of the cultivated land in each prefecture and county, to verify the amount of land occupied by each household, and then to compile it according to the premise of terrain and soil quality
In 1581, in order to increase fiscal revenue, Zhang Juzheng of the Ming Dynasty combined the field tax, the Ding tax, and the miscellaneous tax, collected according to the number of fields and acres, and paid with silver.
At this point, China's tax revenue has slowly shifted from physical goods to currency.
In the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty, the reform policy of dividing the land into the mu was implemented and the poll tax was abolished. The implementation of this system has reduced the economic burden of landless and landless peasants and promoted population growth. Workers have greater freedom in life, which is conducive to social and economic development. The simplification of tax rules has reduced the possibility of arbitrary tax increases by the government.
The implementation of the spread into acres directly led to the explosive growth of the Chinese, breaking through the 300 million mark, and then to Daoguang's fourteenth year the national population exceeded 400 million, accounting for more than 40% of the world's population (the world's population in 1830 was 1 billion), laying the foundation for Chinese large country.