Late Ch'ing Centre-Province Fiscal Relations as Seen in the Imperial Missions of Kang-i and T'ieh-liang in 1899 and 1904

Ho Hon-wai

Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica

    Historians have always focused on the issue of the rise of endemic regionalism at the expense of the central government in their study of the history of late Ch'ing China. Earlier on, there existed a consensus among historians that after the T'ai-p'ing uprising, the central authorities had lost their political, military and fiscal power, which fell into the hands of the provincial governors-general and governors. From the late 1960’s on, the validity of such a claim has been questioned continuously; historians have pointed out that the centre did not lose its power to the province, while the provincial authorities were not free to do as they pleased. In spite of the fact that this argument has gradually attained ascendancy, up to now many scholars still believe in the conventional line of interpretation.

    In 1899 a politically sensitive mission to the affluent provinces of Kiangsu and Kwangtung for financial reorganization was entrusted to Kang-i; for similar purposes a second mission led by T'ieh-liang was dispatched to Kiangsu five years later. Before proceeding to discuss centre-province fiscal relations in all their aspects, the author conducts an in-depth case study of these two imperial missions, in order to explore the following issues: the rationale and aims of their mission, how specific and realizable their instructions were, the impact of their recommendations, the effectiveness of their accomplished tasks, the response of the provincial authorities to their actions, and the political implications of these two missions. My findings indicate that their extractions and political manoeuvring merely concentrated on gaining larger short-term revenues; they produced no long-term effects on the structure of the fiscal administration system of the provinces. The experience of these two missions reveal that while the centre was accepted as political arbiter, the central financial system clearly was lacking in administrative capacity. It should be noted that like the central government, the financial power of the governors-general and governors was much circumscribed by their clerks and subordinates in the revenue-collecting process, as a great part of the taxes collected were embezzled by this substratum even before they reached the higher levels of the provincial official hierarchy. Viewed from this perspective, we simply cannot regard the centre-province fiscal relations in late Ch'ing China as "zero-sum".