China Wants Oversea Citizens to Start Paying Tax Earned Abroad

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Keith Bradsher, 中国要对公民境外收入征税. 纽约时报中文网, Jan 8, 2015
cn.nytimes.com/business/20150108/c08chinatax/

, which is translated from

Keith Bradsher, China Wants Taxes Paid by Citizens Living Abroad; In the cross hairs are both billionaires and middle-class workers. New York Times, Jan 8, 2015.

Quote:

"China’s tax officials are now demanding that citizens start reporting exactly how much money they earn overseas.

"In asking for this information, national and municipal tax agencies in China are quietly beginning to enforce a little-known and widely ignored regulation: Citizens and companies must pay domestic taxes on their entire worldwide incomes, not just on what they earn in China.

"The nascent campaign this winter puts China on the same side as the United States in a global debate over whether taxation should be primarily national or global. On the other side of the issue are European nations, Japan, Australia and Canada [as well as Taiwan], all of which tax people within their borders but exempt most expatriates and overseas subsidiaries from paying income taxes in their home countries.

(b) "The roots of China’s decision to embrace worldwide taxation trace to the early 1990s. Still a very poor country then, China sent teams of tax officials to the United States, Britain, Germany and other nations to seek advice on drafting a modern tax code.

Said Lili Zheng, a Deloitte accountant: "The team [to US] paid a long visit to the Internal Revenue Service and was given a two-volume bound copy of the United States tax code and a five-volume copy of I.R.S. regulations.

"Chinese officials chose the American definition of income, with its worldwide scope, in issuing their tax code in 1993. It remains in force today, although with many amendments.