Talk:Chinese Maritime Customs Service

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shouldn't this article note that the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, although officially under the control of the Qing dynasty, was in actuality a tax collection agency (as the article description gives) for the British Empire (I am not certain of how the distribution of revenues would work or who it would go to)? It is staffed by the British to collect taxes due to European powers in control of China. Isn't that by any standard a colonial tax collecting agent? Stevenmitchell 10:02, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

The Chinese Maritime Customs Service was mainly staffed by foreigners, but it did collect taxes for the Qing Empire. It is true that this gave the foreign powers a degree of supervision over Chinese finances, which they later used to collect indemnities, but the fact the remains that the Qing empire was ultimately the recipient of the taxes collected.--Niohe 13:07, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

There is an excellent project on the Chinese Maritime Customs Service at Bristol University (UK) - see their website http://www.bris.ac.uk/history/customs/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hkb (talk • contribs)

The Customs was an agency of the Chinese government, emphatically not of the British Empire. As Niohe observes, though, for many years it did supervise the servicing of Chinese debts to other countries. This, along with its foreign staff, makes it easy to think that the Customs was an imperial institution - but not quite.

Debt servicing became most pronounced after the collapse of the Qing Empire, when the foreign leadership took responsibilty for every level of financial control in the Customs. The IG would work out how much foreign governments were owed by China every year, pay that amount first, and then deliver the rest to the Chinese government (choosing which warlord constituted that government, from the end of the Qing in 1911 until the rise of the KMT in 1928, was another matter!)

So, it wasn't a direct tax collection agency for Britain. But it was a means through which Britain and other nations extracted money from China - via these debts. One might argue that China owed the debts in any case, and the Customs was simply the means through which they were paid. But many of these debts were deeply unfair - for example, the indemnity China was forced to pay as compensation for the Boxer rebellion. So, it's a mixed bag.

It's worth noting that the Customs was the single greatest, and most stable, source of revenue to every Chinese government from the late Qing until the start of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Without its semi-foreign status, it would undoubtedly have collapsed when the Qing did in 1911.