Professor Xu Shanda Delivered A Lecture on Taxation System in Our School

On September 16, 2013, Professor Xu Shanda gave us a wonderful lecture themed “A Number of Issues on China's current tax system” at 7:00 pm. The seminar was sponsored by SSDPP and presided by President Zhang Xiulan. After the event, on behalf of SSDPP, President Zhang awarded the letter of appointment of "academic advisor" to Professor Xu.

Starting from the international comparison of the proportion of government revenue in GDP and the structure of government spending, Professor Xu gave us a broad-brush outline of the basic outline of China's fiscal revenue; briefly reviewed China's 1994 tax reform history and logic context that laid the basic framework of China's tax system, analyzed the historical roots of problems in the current tax system of China, and made an in-depth analysis of the strategic significance, main challenges and development directions of the “Change from Business Tax to Value-Added Tax”, the main content of China's new round of tax system, as well as main tax category creation of local government under the background of the “Change from Business Tax to Value-Added Tax”, which is the focus of Professor Xu’s lecture. Professor Xu believes that the “Change from Business Tax to Value-Added Tax” is of great significance to China's economic transformation and upgrading and service industry. The advance of the “Change from Business Tax to Value-Added Tax”, however, involves the division of the central and local fiscal revenue and the determination of the tax collection body, and will be a gradual process. According to the experience of pilot areas, after the “Change from Business Tax to Value-Added Tax”, local government’s fiscal revenue will be reduced, so we must attach importance to the development of new taxes. In this regard, Professor Xu believes that after the “Change from Business Tax to Value-Added Tax”, the consumption tax, rather than property tax, should become a main tax to be collected by local government.

Graduated from the Department of Automatic Control of Tsinghua University in 1970, Professor Xu has long been engaged in the macroeconomic, fiscal and financial theory research and tax management and once served as the Deputy Director of the State Administration of Taxation. His Golden Tax Project won the second prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2006.