CHINA
not clearly known. Foreigners who have enjoyed excellent opportunities of judging, allege that 0.75 tael per acre fairly represents the average tax on good rice land. Now even if one-third of that figure be taken as the general average for all arable land, good and bad included,—in other words, if the assessment be only sevenpence per acre,—the tax should yield a hundred million taels (the area of land under cultivation being 400 millions of acres approximately), whereas the total collection is only one-fourth of that amount.[1]
Out of this land-tax revenue of twenty-five million taels, about eight and a half millions go direct to Peking for the uses of the Central Government, namely, three and a half millions in coin and five millions in kind. Here, however, it must be repeated with increased emphasis that the sum sent to Peking, even when it is collected in coin and forwarded in coin, does not by any means represent the total taken from the people. What the local authorities do is to take not the actual amount requisitioned by Peking, but that amount plus all expenses of collecting, all charges for transmission, and all fees and perquisites sanctioned by custom. To illustrate what is involved in this, Mr. George Jamieson, sometime British Consul-General in Shanghai, and one of the best authorities on such subjects, mentions a case of a junk chartered by a foreigner which, on passing
- ↑ See Appendix, note 11.
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