Progress of the Single Tax Doctrine in China

William E. Macklin

[An address delivered at the Henry George Congress, 12 September 1927, New York, New York.
Reprinted from Land and Freedom, September-October 1927]

What China needs more than anything else is education and development. With 95% of illiterates, you are not likely to develop an ideal Single Tax republic in a few years.

The Chinese are very intelligent. They take the highest honors in our colleges and institutions. They are great philosophers arid poets. But their civilization can only be compared with the civilization of ancient Persia, Assyria and Egypt. The China of this day has shown no symptom of a republic. It has gone from Imperialism to Feudalism.

But we have many hopeful things. Mr. Garst, a missionary in Japan, Mr. Williams, missionary and professor of Chinese literature and language in Berkeley, California, have both spread the doctrines of Progress and Poverty, with which I became familiar while in China.

When I came back to this country I met Henry George and had many conversations with him and kept up a correspondence with his followers, Dr. McGlynn, Tom John son and others, and I went back to China enthused.

That the missionaries are responsible for the revolution is not true they are responsible for what we wanted but did not get. We wanted to bring about a better day the Kingdom of God on earth, so a body of the older missionaries formed, to put into Chinese the best literature giving the political, moral and social advancement of the Christian world, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Literature. This society invited me to translate Progress and Poverty, which I did, and they published it and circulated it without expense to me. I spent a long time at it as I wanted to have it correct and wanted to put the whole idea of the book into the translation. It went into a third edition, for which Mr. Fels paid.

Later I translated Protection or Free Trade, The Theory of Human Progression, Herbert Spencer's Social Statics, the same society publishing all the books. I translated Green's History of the English People to make them understand the development of political freedom.

In China we have a few things to encourage us. A gentleman, a musk expert in China, came to Nankin and lived in a temple. He was a great botanist. He had a mule which threw him and kicked him insensible. I took him into my home for a month to recuperate and gave him Progress and Poverty to read. This German friend of mine, Karl Smidt, taught Dr. Schrameyer, the first governor of Kiaochau, and Admiral Diedrichs how to prevent the new colony being ruined by land speculations. A tax of 6% on land values was adopted, displacing other taxes, the land being reassessed every three years. With German thoroughness, they tried to kill, bury, embalm and cremate land speculation and if a holder did not use the land they added 3% for every three years that the land was held idle. It worked so well that Dr. Schrameyer went home to Germany to devote his life to the propaganda for justice in land.

W f e have got an object lesson and it is still going. When Sun Yat Sen came to China I had many visits with him. Prof. Bailie of Nankin University and I worked up a colonization association that was endorsed by all the leading men of both the revolutionary and reactionary parties. It is fashioned on the Single Tax method. It has been tried with success, but in the feudalism following the revolution it has been impossible to do much. I went to call upon Dr. Sun when he was president in regard to this colonization, and he gave us letters to convert the parliament to Single Tax. We gave a copy of Progress and Poverty to all the members. They were quite willing to read it.

The Famine Relief found that no permanent good came from distributing food, or providing employment only, and then they adopted a Single Tax method. They planned to borrow money enough to put in dykes and drainage and permanently improve the famine area, and then charge up the expense to the increased land values, thus turning charity into business methods.

Dr. Sun started an English paper with Mau Su as editor and they have a platform for Single Tax, but are not very clear on it.

The platform of the Single Tax is now part of the nationalist programme and it is up to us to see that they get it. My idea of working for the Single Tax is that it leads the way to the Kingdom of God on earth. The Sixth Chapter of Matthew looks foolish when you read "Take no thought for the morrow," but we can make a condition, and we can strive to bring about a state of affairs, where this would be possible.

And if there be Jews in this audience, the fifth chapter of Matthew states that when a cry was made about the taxes, the command was "Every man shall have his fields and vineyards; restore their lands; require nothing of them." Rawlinson says that the landlords of Egypt were the worst kind of oppressive landlords, demanding six-tenths of the crops. Joseph, however, confiscated the land and rented it to the people at 20%. Looks like a great land reform, doesn't it?

We may fail on it, but still it is what we think and feel and it makes us enthusiastic, and if we don't succeed why the fellows that don't believe in it are the fools.

Mencius, the great philosopher, said in China there should be a site value tax, no tax on the building but just a site value tax. An early scheme was to divide the land into nine squares, the center square being the government square and the eight families had the outer squares. They had to cultivate the government land as a tax. In this way all men got the advantage of the land.

We are descendants of the ancient Danish and Saxon pirates and have not lost their piratical tendencies. We are loyal to our ancestors, but the Single Tax will stop us. There is a sort of evolution of depravity. When you have a state where a man kills and eats his neighbor, later he will reason, if I kill my neighbor I lose all; I will keep him and make him work. Then he reasons, keeping him as a slave I have to feed him. So he gets his land and makes him work.

I can see very hopeful signs in the Chinese. But we cannot think of them as a nation that will get a republic immediately. I have made tracts with Henry George ideas in them. I have circulated a great many.

There has been much Bolshevism in China and the government has had much trouble in keeping the mobs down, but lately they have been fighting among them selves. It is hard for them to unite. Supposing they did unite, 95% of absolute illiteracy is a problem requiring a process of education through generations, so we can not be too optimistic, but only hope that slow, Christianizing education will have its effect.