The Relationship between War Reparations and Fiscal Transformation: Historical Lessons from Germany and Late Qing China

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_114How to use a DOI?

Keywords

War Reparations; Fiscal Transformation; Fiscal Sovereignty; Crisis Mechanism

Abstract

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, defeat-induced reparations escalated fiscal imbalance into a crisis of sovereignty and governance, subjecting Germany and the Qing dynasty to, respectively, acute and chronic external pressures. Employing comparative history and documentary analysis, this study systematically juxtaposes fiscal archives, official documents, and existing scholarship to construct an analytical framework—“crisis–institutional response–structural adjustment”—with Germany and the Qing as paired cases. In Germany, 1923–1925 witnessed fiscal recentralization achieved through Rentenmark stabilization and the upward recentralization of tax authority; under the Dawes Plan, inflows of foreign capital restored fiscal and social order in the short term while simultaneously generating a structural dependence on international credit. Under the Boxer Indemnity and foreign supervision, the Qing introduced reforms including the Ministry of Finance (Duzhibu), a budgetary regime, the Ta-Ching Government Bank, and tariff adjustments. These measures formed the institutional rudiments of a fiscal state, yet they did not markedly increase centrally disposable revenues. Taken together, the analysis indicates that reparations are at once coercive constraints and generators of institutions; moreover, the intensity and temporal structure of external constraints determine the tempo and trajectory of transformation—Germany exemplifies centralizing consolidation under high pressure, whereas the Qing illustrates institutional learning and limited modernization under prolonged strain. Taken together, the two cases show how fiscal crisis can function as a key mechanism driving the reconfiguration of state capacity.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xingyu Li
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/15
TI  - The Relationship between War Reparations and Fiscal Transformation: Historical Lessons from Germany and Late Qing China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1113
EP  - 1123
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_114
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_114
ID  - Li2026
ER  -