Public Administration of Salt in China

While some occasional notices by Western students appeared in the late nineteenth century in regard to a field hitherto largely unknown to Europeans it was not until the advent of the socalled era of financial control in China that more intensive examinations by Western financial experts were made, aided by Chinese economists and industrial leaders. These investigations began to bear fruit with the assignment of foreign officers of the Imperial Maritime Customs to the service of the Anglo-German loan of 1898, for which China was obliged to pledge revenues from salt in six collectorates in the Yangtze River Valley. The character of the salt administration became still more evident during the negotiation of the Hukuang Railway loans for the construction with foreign capital of railways in Central China, and with the formation of the Six Power Banking Syndicate in 1912. Unlike the earlier scholarly researches of such Sinologists as Hirth and Parker, inquiries into the gabelle in China were now made by European and Japanese experts for the very practical purposes of determining the burden which the salt revenue might be expected to carry for the service and the amortization of financial advances to the Chinese Government by foreign bankers against the flotation of bonds on the world's bourses. But even here the conclusions reached were of the most approximate nature, based as they were upon the very incomplete and often misleading records of the Chinese treasury. Estimates as to the annual gross collections varied from forty-eight to sixty-four millions of taels 1 of silver. Only the net amount remitted to the Central Government was agreed upon by various authorities as in the neighborhood of thirteen million taels. This enormous discrepancy between gross and net collection could be accounted for only by the method of allocation of the revenue. For some time prior to 1909, the salt revenue administration had come to be conducted by the provinces. The Imperial Government merely laid down the lines upon which rates of duty were to be levied and the general procedure of control of manufacture and transportation of salt. The governor or viceroy of a province, through the provincial salt commissioner, supervised the salt impost in his jurisdiction, referring only special administrative questions to the central authorities for approval. From revenues thus collected, the

Administration (probate law · Business · Capital (architecture · China · Economics · Economy · Geography · Government (linguistics · Loan · Pledge · Political science · Revenue · Service (business · Economic Zones and Regional Development · Finance · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Law

• State finance, merchant stake, and foreign interests

  Xiaoqun Xu, Yin Xu•Business History•2024

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