Tsingtao (Kiautschou) Land Tax

Overview

Kiautschou (also spelled Kiaochow; its port city, Tsingtao, is today Qingdao) was a German leasehold territory on China's north-eastern coast, occupied by Admiral Otto von Diederichs on 14 November 1897 and administered by the German Navy Department from 1898 until Japan seized it in 1914. Its Land and Tax Statute, drafted by colonial officer Wilhelm Schrameier (1859–1926) and in force for the whole occupation, imposed a 6% annual tax on the assessed value of unimproved ("naked") land, re-ascertained at regular intervals, plus a one-third tax on the increment in land value at resale or every 25 years.[1] Silagi describes it as the sole State-like territory to introduce a full single tax on land in direct response to Henry George's campaign.[1]

Schrameier, George, and the Statute's Legacy

Schrameier had encountered Progress and Poverty — a friend, Karl Schmidt, urged him to read it "to prevent speculators from destroying the colony" — before drafting the statute, though he spent much of his later career minimizing his direct debt to George, at one point in 1912 calling Kiautschou "an exact realization of Henry George's principles" while elsewhere denying George's direct influence on his own drafting.[1] The statute remained the territory's only significant tax on Europeans besides minor levies, and in May 1914 the German Reichstag voted to extend the same land-tax model to Cameroon — only for the outbreak of World War I, a few months later, to end German rule in Kiautschou and the domestic German land-reform movement's momentum together.[1] Schrameier returned to China in 1924 at the invitation of Sun Yat-sen, advising Sun's son Sun Fo, then mayor of Canton, on land tax questions — one of the direct channels by which the Kiautschou example fed into the land policy Sun had already begun advocating as early as 1905, and which later shaped Taiwan's land value increment tax.[1][2]

See Also

• Sun Yat-sen
• Taiwan
• Single Tax
• The Power in the Land (book)

Sources

1. Michael Silagi (trans. Susan N. Faulkner), "Land Reform in Kiaochow, China: From 1898 to 1914 the Menace of Disastrous Land Speculation Was Averted by Taxation," American Journal of Economics and Sociology 43(2), April 1984, pp. 167–177 — used for the statute's 6% land tax and one-third increment tax mechanics, Schrameier's biography and shifting statements on Henry George's influence, and the statute's 1914 extension debate and end. Free PDF
2. Fred Harrison, The Power in the Land: An Inquiry into Unemployment, the Profits Crisis and Land Speculation (Universe Books/Shepheard-Walwyn, 1983), Ch. 17 — the wiki's discovery source connecting Schrameier, Kiautschou, and Sun Yat-sen. Book page