China's income tax totaled 2.7319 trillion yuan from 1994 to 2004, Director of the State Administration of Taxation Xie Xuren said on Thursday.

The income tax climbed from 76.1 billion yuan in 1994 to 581.1 billion yuan last year, an increase of 6.64 times, Xie told a national working conference on the management of income tax that opened on Thursday.

Xie said that the proportion of the income tax in China's total tax revenues rose from 15 percent in 1994 to 22.6 percent in 2004, up 7.6 percentage points.

And the income tax proportion in the country's gross domestic product surged from 1.74 percent to 4.26 percent during the period, a rise of 2.52 percentage points. In the first eight months of this year, China scored 564.5 billion yuan in income tax revenue, a year-on-year increase of 34.56 percent, he revealed. Xie noted that income tax has become an important source of the country's fiscal revenues and played an important role in promoting economic development, ensuring social stability and adjusting income distribution.

He attributed the rapid rise in income tax revenue to strengthening management and supervision by tax departments at all levels.

(Xinhua News Agency September 23, 2005)