Tuesday, January 11 7:15 PM SGT Some 20 Chinese taxmen killed on duty since 1993: government BEIJING, Jan 11 (AFP) - Hundreds of Chinese tax collectors have been wounded in the line of duty and some 20 killed in recent years, the State Administration of Taxation (SAT) revealed Tuesday, acknowledging violent opposition taxmen face in the countryside. "Since 1993, there are several hundreds of tax staff who have been injured and about 20 sacrificed their lives," SAT director general Jie Renqing told a media briefing here. "There are tax staff who encounter violence. This phenomenon doesn't happen very often, it happens in rural areas sometimes," he said. Peasant protests against taxes and fees -- sometimes imposed in excess of legal limits by corrupt local officials -- are regularly reported, usually by dissident groups based overseas. In mid-October, two village officials in southern Hunan province were arrrested for having gathered some 500 protestors against an 88-yuan (10.6-dollar) agricultural tax that would have robbed farmers of all their income. The government has regularly repeated its vow to end illicit fees and taxes heaped on the country's impoverished farmers, but the levies later reappear in different forms in many cases. Jie admitted the existence of "complaints that some tax officials collect taxes that are not in accordance with the law" but said the majority of these claims were groundless. "Investigations show that it's not the tax staff which collect more than they should, it's the taxpayers who pay less," he said. He estimated that tax evasion in recent years totalled some 30 billion yuan (3.6 billion dollars), adding that inspectors managed to sniff out some 10 billion yuan in unpaid taxes in 1999. Annual revenue increases have for years far outstripped the rate of economic growth, as tax authorities struggle to make inroads against ingrained habits of tax evasion and crooked accounting. China as yet lacks a revenue-collection apparatus capable of tracking the country's fragmented and chaotic population of taxpayers. The SAT boosted revenue collection by 13.4 percent last year to 1.03 trillion yuan (124.2 billion dollars). Jie said a 78-percent rise in customs duties, a consequence of a national crackdown on smuggling, was responsible for much of the gain. But he indicated that the tariff revenues were due to slip back as a result of China's expected entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), saying accession would "incur difficulties for SAT." The SAT predicts a slow-down in the growth of revenues this year to eight percent, as the government is planning to use aggressive fiscal measures to boost economic growth. Even eight percent will be "quite difficult to accomplish," Jie said. Despite tax rates far higher than international norms, the country's revenues remain tiny as a proportion of its economic size. In 1999, they stood at 12.4 percent of gross domestic product -- lower even than in the world's most laissez-faire economic regimes. ------------------------------------------------------ Daniel F. Vukovich Dept. of English; The Unit for Criticism University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 ------------------------------------------------------