China’s long wait for a tax everyone loves to hate

IF SUN YAT-SEN had got his way, China would have been a bold pioneer in the taxation of real estate. During his exile in Europe from 1896 to 1898, the republican revolutionary fell under the spell of Henry George, an influential American journalist who believed a single tax on land should replace all others. Sun hoped pre-industrial China could adopt such innovations more easily than the West, because it was “unimpeded by the opposition of entrenched capital”, as one scholar put it.