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The Taxation System of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopei Border Region, 1938–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Michael Lindsay
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Extract

Shansi-Chahar-Hopei was one of the largest of the Chinese Communist areas during the war against Japan and was the only one of the areas behind the Japanese lines to receive some sort of recognition from the National Government. (Its boundaries were the Tat'ung–T'aiyuan railway on the west and T'aiyuan–Shihchiachuang–Techow railway lines in the south and it extended into Jehol and Liaoning in the north. The population under its control may have reached 20 millions.) In its general level of administration, Shansi-Chahar-Hopei was probably the most advanced of the Communist wartime areas. Its government had started the earliest, at the beginning of 1938, and it was able to develop with less Kuomintang-Communist friction than other areas. It had more than the average proportion of educated officials since, as it adjoined the Peiping-Tientsin area, students or other intellectuals who decided to leave the occupied areas to take part in anti-Japanese work were most likely to come to Shansi-Chahar-Hopei. And, while much of the mountain base area west of the P'ing-Han railway was very primitive, Central Hopei had reached a fairly high level of economic and social development before 1937.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 42 , June 1970 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1970

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References

1 See Taylor, George E., The Struggle for North China (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940), p. 35.Google Scholar

2 General Lü Cheng-ts'ao told the author in 1945 that he had found a steadily declining level of competence and efficiency as he moved farther west. His head-quarters had been in Central Hopei until a large-scale Japanese offensive in August 1942 forced him to move to the Peiyao area west of the P'ing-Han railway, and he had found the Peiyao area less efficient than Central Hopei. He was then transferred to command of the Shansi-Suiyuan Border Region which he found less efficient than the Peiyao area of Shansi-Chahar-Hopei. And finally he had found that Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (the Yenan area) was even less efficient than Shansi-Suiyuan.Google Scholar

3 Information from Professor T. I. Dow of Florida Atlantic University who was living in Kansu at the time.Google Scholar

4 Theses on the Situation in China by the 7th Extraordinary Plenum of the ECCI, 22 November–16 12 1926Google Scholar. Quotation taken from North, Robert C. and Eudin, Xenia J., M. N. Roy's Mission to China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1963), p. 139.I should like to thank Professor Hsiao Tso-liang for calling my attention to this document.Google Scholar

5 From materials in the Hoover Library.Google Scholar

6 The rates for 1941 and 1942 are from information given to the author by members of the Executive Committee. The rate for 1943 was given in a report by the Border Region Government Chairman, Sung Shao-wen, to representatives of the Border Region Congress in February 1944. The rate for 1944 and the maximum fixed for 1945 are mentioned in some of the supplementary tax regulations.Google Scholar

7 The village had a right to levy a surcharge for village purposes on the Border Region assessment but the hsien did not.Google Scholar

8 University of Chicago Press, 1939.Google Scholar

9 E.g., editorial in Jen-min, jih-pao (People's Daily) (Peking), 11 10 1957, translated in Survey of the China Mainland Press (SCMP) (Hong KongGoogle Scholar: U.S. Consulate General), No. 1635; Teng, Tzu-hui, Director of CP Rural Work Department, in Jen-min, jih-pao, 14 11 1957, in SCMP, No. 1659; and survey of farming in Hopei province, in SCMP, No. 1626.Google Scholar

10 E.g., “Struggle between the Two Roads in China's Countryside,” Peking Review, No. 49 (1 12 1967).Google Scholar

11 China's Wartime Finance and Inflation, 1937–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 22–26.Google Scholar

12 In 1961 a Japanese informant told the author that he knew from personal experience that a Japanese officer could safely move unescorted through the countryside in Central Hopei in September 1942.Google Scholar