近代中國的自由貿易和保護關稅—「裁釐加稅」的形成過程

”Free trade” was the rallying cry of Great Britain as it started the Opium War against China, and the meaning of this cry was the elimination of all restrictions on the goods, clients, and locations of trade. Tariffs as such were not the most important issue for the British. Since the Chinese government had established the likin system in 1850, the British regarded inland taxation in China as a primary obstacle to surmount to achieve their goal of free trade. The Chinese regarded trade and ”custom duties” only as financial resources, and had no concept of protective tariffs or tariff autonomy. Only in the 1870s did protective tariffs begin to be discussed as policy options among the staff of Li Hung-chang, the imperial commissioner for Northern Ports. In 1876, China and Britain concluded the Chefoo Convention, which provided that the settlements at the treaty ports were to be exempt from likin taxation. Until September 1881, it was agreed that the Chinese would accepted the exemption of the likin on foreign imported goods, while the foreign countries would agree to raise the tariff from 5 to 10 percent. In other words, a policy of so-called ”ts'aili-chiashui” (exempting likin and raising tariffs) was almost agreed to be carried out. At the beginning, Li approved of raising tariffs but objected to exempting likin, and we can see here that chiashui and ts'aili were two different things, not related to each other. In the actual negotiations, ts'aili-chiashui was discussed as a twinned concept due to a memorandum from Ma Chien-chung to Li. From the viewpoint of recovering the concessions and searching for wealth and power, Ma proposed raising the tariff and in return exempting likin to protect Chinese merchants. Thus, his idea of protective tariffs related chiashui to ts'aili, and the idea of a unitary ts'aili-chiashui was established at last. However, no final agreement was reached in these negotiations, and, as well, from that time to the twentieth century, China never had an opportunity to revise tariffs. Under the conditions of the nineteenth century China, the Western idea of free trade and the notion of protective tariffs of the Chinese were coupled to create the mode of ts'aili-chiashui, but at the same time this was only a conceptual plan, not practical one. In order to understand the reasons for this, it is necessary to reexamine the structure of Chinese society and economy during the Ch'ing period that first brought about and maintained the likin system.