During the war, the Ming issued a total of three foreign debts, totaling 300 million pounds. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

The first was a pre-war loan in the name of a railway company, the second was just after the war, and the third was a bond issued in 1887, the year after the war broke out.

The interest rate of the first is as high as six percent, and the interest rate of the second one has been further increased to seven percent, but by the third time, the interest rate has fallen by four percent and five, for two reasons, one is that the Ming army has achieved an advantage on the battlefield, so that the Ming bonds have appreciated, and the credit of the Ming country has improved, and the second reason is that the financial situation of the Ming Dynasty has been improving, during the war, the Ming Dynasty's fiscal revenue was as high as 200 million Ming taels, equivalent to 85.35 million pounds, In the same period, the British fiscal revenue was only 130 million pounds, and the Ming fiscal revenue was as high as more than 60% of the United Kingdom.

It seems amazing, but Hurd thinks that the Ming government's tax collection capacity and tax level are still too low, with a population of more than 100 million, it is the world's largest exporter of raw silk and tea, and has developed a considerable industrial level, and the fiscal revenue is not as good as the United Kingdom, Hurd thinks it is very unreasonable.

This is not Hurd's deliberate exaggeration, this is a historical fact, because as India that was frantically squeezed by the British, its fiscal revenue is half of the British local income, and the Ming Dynasty, as a large country with independent development, is not even comparable to India, obviously the Ming government's tax collection ability is too poor, and even the tax collection ability of some second-rate countries in the West is not comparable.

An advanced tax system can bring about a tax collection capacity that the literati in traditional societies cannot imagine.

Historically, during the First Sino-Japanese War, the Manchu Qing's fiscal revenue was 88.67 million taels of silver, and Japan's fiscal revenue was 75.85 million taels of silver.

Siam, which was smaller than Japan, established a sound fiscal revenue, and by 1909, the fiscal revenue could reach 4.8 million pounds, equivalent to 39% of the Qing government's revenue at that time, and the per capita tax payment was 17.3 times that of the Manchu people.

If Siam is poor and scrapes the people's fat, facts have proved that the living conditions of the Siamese people at that time were relatively good, attracting a large number of Chinese immigrants to Siam to make a living, which shows that under the modern financial system, the government has improved its ability to collect taxes, concentrated a large amount of wealth in the hands of the government, and did not force the livelihood of the people to bankruptcy, but the Manchu Qing civilization with a low tax rate, not because they did not want to levy, but could not levy it, the result was that the Manchu people continued to go bankrupt, and the low tax rate of the Manchu Qing Dynasty obviously did not benefit the people.

The truth is that China's traditional taxation system is backward, although the official nominal tax rate of the government is very low, but in fact the taxes paid by the common people are much higher than the official tax rate, and the excess part is all embezzled by corrupt officials and corrupt officials, and those who enjoy the benefits of the government's low tax rate are just a group of moths.

If the per capita tax rate of the Ming Dynasty can reach the level of Siam, with the current population size of the Ming Dynasty, it should be four times the fiscal revenue of the Manchu Qing Dynasty in history, and the fiscal revenue of the Manchu Qing Dynasty is calculated at 80 million taels, the Ming Dynasty should receive 200 million taels.

However, the industrial level of the Ming Dynasty is obviously higher than that of Siam, so the taxing capacity should be stronger than that of Siam, so Hurd believes that the Ming's taxing ability needs to be strengthened.

But Zhu Jinglun really didn't dare to let Hurd carry out Europeanized reforms.

Because Hurd wanted to touch the very foundation of Chinese society: the land of the landlords.

Hurd strongly suggested that land should be taxed, because land tax is one of the most important taxes in any country, and this is true in England, as well as in the British system in the colonies.

Before the First World War, India's fiscal revenue reached Rs 1 billion, equivalent to Rs 100 million, of which the land tax was Rs 321 crore, mainly the corporate tax and income tax paid by British investors were only Rs 29 crore, customs duty was Rs 113 crore, excise duty was Rs 133 million, and salt duty was Rs 52 million.

Although the tax rate implemented by the British in India does take care of the interests of British whites, the result of the land tax far exceeding other taxes, and it is not entirely the result of squeezing India, because the British land tax was also very high this year, and the British domestic fiscal revenue for that year was 198 million pounds, of which 33 million pounds were customs duties and 40 million pounds of consumption tax, while the land tax, property tax and income tax combined amounted to 50 million pounds, and the income tax based on land tax reached a quarter of the tax revenue.

However, before that, the Ming Dynasty has not taxed land, and Zhu Jinglun continued to exempt taxes in order to appease the localities, and after a long time the commercial tax came up, he completely gave up the practice of re-taxing land, which was a huge tax loss.

During the Meiji Restoration, Japan carried out a thorough land tax reform, which turned land into private property, allowed transactions, and taxed according to the land price, and as a result, the Meiji government scavenged the largest amount of industrialization funds from the peasants, and during the Meiji government, the Japanese peasants captured more than half of the government revenue for a long time.

Even at the same rate as India, the Ming lost one-third of its tax revenue by exempting rural land.

However, when Hurd demanded a tax on land, Zhu Jinglun was directly alarmed, not because he had the intention to protect the interests of the landlords, but because he knew that moving the peasants' land was equivalent to moving the foundation of a patriarchal society, and the backlash would be greater than any rebound, and the failure to build railways and run education would be greater.

In fact, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, land annexation was far less serious than in the Song Dynasty, and during the Japanese occupation of North China, a survey was conducted and found that less than 30 percent of the land occupied by landlords with more than 100 mu of land was occupied by all land, and more than 70 percent of the land was concentrated in the hands of yeoman farmers and small landlords.

The patriarchal system in southern China was stronger than in the north, so this fragmentation of land was more severe, with nearly eighty percent of the land being small assets. The reason for this is very simple, it comes from the separation system implemented during the Ming Dynasty.

In the early Han Dynasty, Emperor Wen of the Han Dynasty adopted the suggestion of the famous minister Chao Cuo, and implemented the Tui En Decree among the princes, requiring the princes to distribute the fief equally to each son, in order to disperse the territory of the vassal states and weaken the national strength of the vassal states through this method.

As a result, the vassal states were well aware of the conspiracy of the imperial court, and they raised troops one after another, playing the banner of "Qing Jun Side Punishment Chao Cuo", and finally Emperor Wen of Han was forced to kill Chao Cuo to calm the anger of the vassal states.

Chao was dead, but the central dynasty slowly spread by requiring the princes to divide the wealth. The imperial courts of successive dynasties used this method to constantly weaken the powerful power of the people, and always let the central dynasty have absolute power.

In the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang did it more thoroughly, and promoted this kind of power originally used on the princes and big clans to the whole society, and stipulated in the law that every male heir has the right to divide the family property equally, including illegitimate children, and the result is that the land of the big landlord cannot be passed on at all, and the longer it is inherited, the more it will be divided, and finally it will become a small piece of land.

The Qing Dynasty inherited the system of the Ming Dynasty, and this system of division of the land of large families continued to be enforced, so it was difficult to have a concentration of land annexation. The way in which the clan society resisted this law was that each family bought a large amount of public property and put the land in the name of the ancestral hall as a sacrificial property, which was equivalent to hanging the land in the name of a certain ancestor, so there was no need to divide it. Therefore, in the southern region where the clan is strong, a large part of the rural land is clan commons. Therefore, during the land reform, some agronomists thought that Jiangnan did not need land reform, and that there was no landlord class in Jiangnan in the northern way, and the result was that the government still took away the land in the public court, and the clan patriarch and the local owner were attacked, and as for those agronomists, they died very miserably one by one. The government's greatest purpose in recovering land was to break up the patriarchal social system and at the same time concentrate capital for industrialization. Agronomists do not see this, and they are not unjustly dead.

The patriarchal system in Guangdong is also very strong, most of the land is concentrated in the hands of the clan, not only the public land, even if the land held by private individuals is sold, the clan also has the right to interfere, the conventional tradition is that the land should be preferentially resold to relatives of the same clan, the same clan, and the same village, and even in the title deed, it must be stated that the words have no objection to the blood relatives, etc., the buyer can complete the legal delivery, and the land sold by the same clan can be given back.

The reason why land is valued so much is because land is the life of the peasant, the foundation of the patriarchal system, and the foundation of the clan.

Once these lands were to be moved, the clans would inevitably rise up in revolt, and bloodshed would be required to complete the reform.

After intense discussions, Zhu Jinglun partially agreed to Hurd's reform plan, approving that Hurd could tax land with a high degree of commoditization, which was also more profitable and easier to tax, so there would be relatively little resistance.

The main reason why Britain was able to implement the land tax system in India was that Britain had turned the Indian economy into a typical colonial economy, with highly commercialized agricultural production, with more than 10 million acres of land used to produce cotton, five or six million acres of tobacco and more than six million acres of sugar cane, so it was relatively easy to implement the land tax.

The price of Japan's massive land tax collection was several thousand peasant uprisings, 499 from 1868 to 1877 alone. The Meiji government brutally suppressed these peasants, and I don't know how many people died, and Zhu Jinglun did not intend to bear this price.

As a result, Hurd could only collect taxes on commercial land in the cities and mulberry orchards, tea plantations, and sugar cane plantations in the countryside.

But this is still a huge tax, because the area of the Ming silkworm is huge, the area of the silkworm in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong is more than five million mu, Guangxi has also developed to two million mu, two taels per mu, it is as high as more than 10 million taels, the area of tea gardens is huge, more than 10 million mu of tea gardens, one tael per mu has more than 10 million taels. Sugarcane has more than 3 million taels. Urban commercial land can afford a higher tax rate, with a tax of up to 30 million taels.

The land tax alone has increased the Ming Dynasty by 60 million taels, which has greatly improved the Ming Dynasty's tax collection capacity.

But this alone is not enough to raise the Ming tax to the level of 60% in the UK.

Hurd also levied taxes on specific groups of people.

What is more distinctive is that the levy of a concubine tax on the rich who keep concubines, and a foot-binding tax on the father who insists on binding the feet of his daughters, these two taxes Zhu Jinglun strongly supports, because he has always opposed the bad habit of binding feet and taking concubines.

Not to mention that these two taxes are also quite generous, there have been a large number of rich people in the Ming Dynasty in recent years, and there are at least one million people who can afford to take concubines, and the number of concubines on the throne of the government is as high as more than four million, and Hurd levies heavy taxes on this, and each concubine must pay ten taels of silver every year. The number of women who bind their feet cannot be counted, because it is difficult to check the past one by one, and the foot-binding belongs to the conservative feudal dross, and in conservative families, women rarely go out, and Chinese women's feet are equivalent to Western women's breasts.

Therefore, there are not many taxes on foot binding for the time being, a person only needs to pay five taels of silver a year, and only five million taels of silver were collected last year, and the Ming women are not only one million in foot binding.

In addition, Hurd also increased income tax, but encountered the same problem of foot tax, that is, the difficulty of ascending the throne, the people of the Ming Dynasty have not been accustomed to depositing their income in the bank, and many people are more accustomed to holding cash, the result is that there is no way to count the income of the people, and the income census of hundreds of millions of people is carried out, and the administrative resources required are too great, so that the people take the initiative to declare, and the fool will report. As long as there is a person who evades this tax, others will refuse to pay under the fair mentality of "he doesn't pay, I don't pay", once there are more people, it will form a mentality that the law is not responsible, and no one is willing to pay, so this is the most important tax project in the United Kingdom, which is basically impossible to implement in the Ming Dynasty.

In the final analysis, it is because the UK is a highly commercial country, land is highly mobile as an asset, and buying and selling land is the same as buying and selling cotton, just a business, while land in China has a strong spiritual significance, and land often cannot be completely equated with money, because it is difficult to buy the land you want to buy if you have money.

The requirements of the agricultural society for personal quality, are not as high as the commercial society, the cost of not being honest in the commercial society, is much higher than the price paid for honesty, and the requirements of the agricultural society for integrity are not necessities, but a noble morality, so for those taxes that are difficult to count, it is basically difficult to implement, because the people must be able to escape and escape, and no one is willing to pay more taxes.

But Hurd's goal is to raise Daming's fiscal revenue to the same level as the United Kingdom, so he must continue to carry out various tax experiments to find the most suitable tax system for the Chinese.

At this time, his eyes were set on the highly growing industry.