In this volume Guo Yongqin provides an overview of land and labor taxes in Imperial Qing China (1644-1912). The previously unpublished fiscal sources and detailed introduction will be a valuable for resource on how the standardized tax system performed and affected the Qing regime.

This book, resulting from extensive research on the land tax in China during the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1911), is based on the multivolume Ts'ai-cheng shuo-ming-shu (Financial reports) produced from a nationwide survey of public finance, 1908-1910, and numerous local gazetteers. It reveals in detail the complexity of surcharges levied with tax quotas, and so provides the first realistic estimate of the land tax actually collected in different provinces and districts.

Leading economic historians present a groundbreaking series of country case studies exploring the formation of fiscal states in Eurasia.

This clear and engaging book provides a concise overview of the Ming-Qing epoch (1368–1912), China’s last imperial age. Beginning with the end of the Mongol domination of China in 1368, this five-century period was remarkable for its continuity and stability until its downfall in the Revolution of 1911. Viewing the Ming and Qing dynasties as a coherent era characterized by the fruition of diverse developments from earliest times, Jonathan Porter traces the growth of imperial autocracy, the role of the educated Confucian elite as custodians of cultural authority, the significance of ritual as the grounding of political and social order, the tension between monarchy and bureaucracy in political discourse, the evolution of Chinese cultural identity, and the perception of the “barbarian” and other views of the world beyond China. As the climax of traditional Chinese history and the harbinger of modern China in the twentieth century, Porter argues that imperial China must be explored for its own sake as well as for the essential foundation it provides in understanding contemporary China, and indeed world history writ large.

Professor Ch'ien Mu (Qian Mu) describes the basic constitutive elements of China's traditional government as it evolved. He concentrates upon those dynasties he considers China's most representative: the Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing; and critically analyzes and compares their governmental organization, civil service examination system, taxation, and defence.

China's Last Imperial Frontier explores imperial China's frontier expansion in the Tibetan borderlands during the last decades of the Qing. The empire mounted a series of military attacks against indigenous chieftaincies and Buddhist monasteries in the east Tibetan region seeking to replace native authorities with state bureaucrats by redrawing the politically diverse frontier into a system of Chinese-style counties. Historically, at all the strategic frontier locations, the state had been for the most part outstripped by local institutions in political, military, and ideological strengths. With perceived threats from the Anglo-Russian "Great Game" accentuating Qing vulnerability in Tibet, the Sichuan government took advantage of the frontier crisis by encroaching upon local and Lhasa domains in Kham. Even though the Kham campaign was portrayed in Qing official discourse as a part of the nationwide reforms of "New Policies" (xinzheng) and administrative regularization (gaitu guiliu), its progress on the ground was influenced by the dynamics of interregional relations, including Sichuan's competition with central Tibet, power struggles among Qing frontier officials, and varied Khampa responses to the new regime. The growing regionalism intensified the resistance of local forces to imperial authority. Despite the uneven results of the late Qing campaign, it had come to serve as an important source of sovereignty claims and policy inspirations for the subsequent governments.

This survey of the fiscal history of China's last imperial dynasty explains why its ability to tax was unusually weak. It argues that the answer lies in the internal ideological worldviews of the political elite, rather than in external political or economic constraints.

From the perspective of village activists across China, this book tells the stories of farmers and rural laborers who raised the banner of opposition to constitutional reform during the first decade of the twentieth century. The author brings to life the stories of the Camel King of Zunhua county, Qu Shiwen and the Four Mountains of Laiyang county, and many others who criticized government modernization efforts, known collectively as the New Policy. Using county archives—-including oral histories—-as well as memoirs, periodical literature, missionary records, and official documents both Chinese and foreign, Of Camel Kings and Other Things constructs, from fragmented sources, a coherent historical view vital to our understanding of China's twentieth-century crises and the dilemmas of modernity itself.