likin, special tax paid by merchants and traders in mid-19th-century China. Likin (“a tax of one-thousandth”) was levied on goods in transit or as a sales tax in shops where goods were sold.
The tax originated in 1853 in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu as a method of financing troops to aid in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64). With the great volume of trade carried on in China after the opening of the country to the industrial West in the second half of the 19th century, it generated considerable revenue, and by 1860 the likin had spread to virtually every province in China. Within a few years the central government began to demand that a portion of the likin revenues be made available to the imperial treasury, and it soon became one of the major financial supports of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12), relieving some of the burden on the overtaxed peasantry.
The tax was a constant source of contention with Western trading countries, which resented the petty levies their goods were subjected to in the interior of China because of the likin. In 1931 China abolished the likin in return for the restoration of tariff autonomy, which had been taken from China by the Unequal Treaties signed in the 19th century after the Opium Wars.