The Sino-foreign Negotiation Of The Import Tariff’s Revision In 1918

The Agreement Tariff was established in Treaty of Tientsin, it had not been abolished until the period of Nanjing National Government. After the Boxer Rebellion, the foreign powers in order to ensure their compensation income, they proposed clearly the trade import duty will be increased effective 5% in International Protocol. Due to changes of price in the Republic of China, The import tax was much lower than 5% standards, the Chinese government used the provisions of modifying treaty of ten-year period, and proposed to increase the import duty to effective 5%. Although the proposed modified was abolished because of the restriction by foreign powers in the early days, but the Chinese government used the opportunity of World War I to strive for the right to revise the tariff. This paper specifically discusses the modification of the customs tariff in 1918.There are five chapters in the main content in addition to the introduction and the appendix.The introduction discusses the existing research results, and puts the published and unpublished data files in a brief order. In this background,the paper puts forward the orientation and innovation of the issue. The appendix specializes the new duty in 1918 of Chinese text index, to researches the status of the duty agreements in 1918 in Wang Tieya edited “Zhong Wai Jiu Yue Zhang Hui Bian” and discusses the problem of governments to recognize the new tariff.The first chapter mainly discusses the background of 1918 to revise the tariff and conference system; The second chapter discusses the valuation standard of the tariff modification, namely the problem of “standard year”, this part probes into the different opinions on this question in both China and Japan and the two sides on the issue of bargaining; The third chapter mainly studies the problem of “provisional tax”, that is, in the tariff revision during a surcharge to achieve real “value take out five” problem, this part respectively studied the dominant negotiations of changes of Shanghai tariff commission and the ministry of foreign affairs two institutions; The fourth chapter discussed is the new tariff land border trade issue, this part respectively discussing the border trade relationship with China governments of different attitude.The fifth chapter mainly analyzes the causes of the failure in 1918 to modify the tariff by inside and outside factors, and have the conclusion : what the great powers unwilling to fulfill treaty obligations is the most direct cause of the failure to modify the duty.