Sasagawa Yuji

The Chinese Nationalist government was forced to discontinue its program of land tax reform after the Japanese invasion of July 1937. The aborive project has failed to attract the attention of reseachers since then. However, the reform program should not be neglected since the government aimed to introduce correct registration of land and landowners, and legal guarantees of private land-ownership. In addition, the government attempted to adolish the unofficial privileges that influential landlords had enjoyed under the traditonal taxation system, and to reduce the unjust tax burden on small and medium-sized landowners. This paper deals with the case of Zhejiang province. Just before the Japanese invasion, the provincial government was rapidly putting the various complicated measures of the land tax refoms into one package. It was also engaged in an exact land surver of all land in the province which extended plains along the Qiantangjiang river. This indicates that the modernization of land-ownership and the land tax system in the area had really begun. In the process of the reforms in Zhejiang, the local governments of Lanxi and Pinghu achieved achieved very successful results through different methods. In Lanxi, the government gatherd all of the old land ledgers that ceshu had possessed. This led to a large increase in land tax revenue, but it did not involve land survey and was inapplicable to many other districts. Lanxi therefore does not provide a suitable model for land tax reform in Zhejiang as a whole. Pinghu county government carried out an aerial land survey, using the latest methods of the time, and achieved the best results at a minimum cost. As a result of this, the Zhejiang provincical government planned to extand the aerial survey to every other district that had not finished surveying. Though many Zhejiang districts had already begun their own surveys, the results in Pinghu would have provided a new technical basis for land surverying and encouraged other areas.