- 期刊
A Quantitative Evaluation of ＂Tan Ding Ru Mu＂ based on a Mathematical Model
摘要
＂Tan Ding Ru Mu＂ is an administrative policy proposed by the emperor of the Qing Dynasty in 1712, focusing on the tax reform. The basic idea of this policy is to collect tax based on the number of lands or households instead of the number of individuals. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact on farmers' annual revenue and other changes after applying the policy of ＂Tan Ding Ru Mu.＂ Most of the traditional researches of this policy were conducted via literature investigation, lacking of intuitive demonstrations. This paper aims to illustrate the effectiveness of ＂Tan Ding Ru Mu＂ by constructing a mathematical model. Then, data collected from historical documents are used to estimate the revenue of farmers after the policy was implemented. The scope of the data embraces eight provinces in ancient China from 1724-1766, including the population changes, grain price, and the amount of tax payed by farmers. The result shows that the change trend of average revenue per capita per year of farmers in both southern and northern provinces has decreased. The rapid population growth has made land resources saturated, and the growth of food could not supply the rising population. At the same time, landlords still had to rent land and used rent collected from tenant farmers to pay taxes, and in effect the burden on farmers did not decrease.