TWO ESSAYS ON THE CH'ING ECONOMY OF HSIN-AN
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Li-chia refers to that system whereby rural leadership were utilized by county magistrates in the collection of land tax and corvee duties. The system was intended to perform two functions:
1) As a rural land registration agency, the li-chang (1) were to keep the county magistrate informed of expansions in taxable cultivated land, and 2) as an agency to assist the magistrate in the collection of land taxes. The first function was primary in the sense that imperial edicts restricted the use of li-chang as tax collectors till the early eighteenth century. Hsiao, however, cites numerous references to demonstrate that the second function devolved increasingly on the li-chang to the extent that it became their principal responsibility by middle Ch'ing.
Under the general rubric of li-chia falls innumerable variations of local collection structures; all rest, however, on the imposition of subadministrative tax divisions over more or less indigenous rural divisions (villages, markets, groups of villages (i.e. hsiang (§), yueh (§), she (§)) etc.). The prototypical subadministrative units, from which the system derived its name, were li (§) and chia (§). The county was divided for the purpose of tax collection into several li, each consisting of 110 households. Of these 110 households, the ten wealthiest (in terms of land and available corvee labor) were designated li-chang; the remaining 100 households were divided into ten chia, each consisting of ten households who annually designated (by rotation) a chia-chang from among their ranks. The process of tax collection was generally referred to as ts'ui k'o (§§); the li-chang collected the tax, in kind or in cash, from the chia-chang, and in turn handed it over to the magistrate or one of his runners. Each li-chang was responsible for tax collection once every ten years; hence, both positions (li-chang and chia-chang) were ideally intended to circulate among the membership of the respective groups such that a full cycle was completed every ten years.10
It is not my intention to describe the complexities of an idealized system which rarely, if ever, operated along the lines outlined above. It is sufficient for us here to examine the specific properties of li-chia described in official contemporary accounts of Tung-Kwun and Hsin-An.
In both counties, land was registered under the household head (§) by means of the tu-p'i-chia (§) variation of li-chia.11