Clerks and the cession of Taiwan: dismantling of the undertaking system for tax collection in the process of the establishment of colonial power

Abstract

In traditional Chinese society, the clerks and runners – not the department magistrates, country magistrates, or secretaries from other provinces – were responsible for local administration. In particular, tax collection had a multi-layered structure of undertaking, with the chief tax clerks and the tax clerks having a monopoly. After the cession of Taiwan to Japan, regular Taiwanese officials ranked below the provincial administration commissioners and above the country magistrates and their assistants, crossed over from Taiwan to mainland China, but many clerks and runners of the yamen of various ranks stayed back in Taiwan, and some were even sent back to work for the colonial government. Many of the clerks became deputy interpreters as they could speak Mandarin and write Classical Chinese. However, as young Taiwanese graduated from Japanese language institutes and public schools (elementary schools for the Taiwanese), they began to replace the clerks. Moreover, the chief tax clerks and the tax clerks, who had previously been involved with tax collection, provided tax collection books and helped the colonial government prepare the original books that would serve as the basis for tax collection; however, they were excluded from the actual tax collection work. The Governor-General’s office used the military police and the police force to force people to pay taxes, achieving a much higher collection of tax than before. Thus, the mechanism for undertaking tax collection as intermediary groups was dismantled, and other clerks left the government offices at the end of the 1900s.

Keywords

• Taiwan; cession
• traditional han Chinese society
• state and social relations
• local governance
• colonialism