Between the provincial authorities and those of the hsien there stood Special Commissioners of Administrative Inspection, whose function was to relate the two administrative units and to work for the modernization of hsien organization. The hsien served, and still serves, not only a rural area but also the central municipality in which the hsien magistrate has his headquarters. The yamên (official building) occupies the center of the town, mostly a one-story edifice built around a courtyard; some yamêns still display the two flagpoles and the two stone lions that were required by the custom of the Empire. Usually the yamên contains:

"(a) the rooms occupied by the tax collectors and the administrative and judicial police; (b) the court and the assembly room; (c) the offices of the various bureaus; (d) the residence for magistrates and the dormitory for officers."[6] The conduct of hsien government is influenced by three main groups—the illiterate masses, the conservative gentry, and the younger progressives. In those hsien units where no reformist or revolutionary pressure is felt, the magistrate and the tax collector do little more than collect funds, and the administration is marked by the laxity which characterized old Chinese government in its inadequate form. The gentry, the scholar-administrators, and the tax collectors represent a single social group and manage to rule in their own economic interest. In other hsien units the influence of modern government is noticeable; the magistrate is in most cases a man determined to put into effect the standards of twentieth-century administration. The prestige and power of young men with modern educations have so increased that they are able to obtain a considerable number of magistracies, and if they are willing they may introduce a respectable measure of good government and reform.

The magistrate selects his secretary and four bureau heads, subject to the approval of the provincial authorities. The secretary performs the work usually expected of permanent officials, carrying on much of the routine so as to leave the magistrate free for political and quasi-judicial functions. The secretary is virtually a vice-magistrate and, if successful, keeps the governmental machinery of the hsien in smooth operation. When the magistrate is absent, he acts as the substitute. The four bureaus of the hsien correspond to the four chief administrative divisions of the province—civil affairs, finance, reconstruction, and education. An opium suppression bureau is often added, carrying on the anti-narcotic campaign. The civil affairs bureau has charge of the census, and supervises local areas within the district. Such matters as police, militia, sanitary administration, public buildings, classical shrines, and parks are frequently under its jurisdiction. The subordinate units of administration are provisional, but the pao-chia system has been restored at the lowest level. This is a device for the mutual guarantee, protection, and responsibility of citizens, in which ten families make a pao and ten pao make a chia. The tax bureau is one of the weakest links in Chinese local government, as in this office corruption is rife, and severe oppression of the farmers most frequent. In unreformed hsien units, the tax bureau is likely to be the political plum of members of the local gentry, who use it to extend their tenant farms, promote usury, and defraud the government. The provincial governments have begun to send out accountants and to install regular bookkeeping systems—an undertaking which if completed would be one of the major reforms of local administration.

In the smaller hsien units the magistrate is assisted for judicial purposes by a judge; in the larger, separate courts are provided. Up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1937 the national and provincial governments were making great strides in reorganizing judicial administration and in the professionalization of police work. The judges are appointees of the provincial courts, a factor which may make for greater professional capacity and independence. The general importance of the hsien is illustrated by the fact that in Manchoukuo the Japanese have been forced to revive this system. They have, however, implemented it with a Japanese officer known as the Kanjikan, who is supposed to advise his Chinese colleague. The experiment is of great interest, as it provides the acid test for the Japanese attempt actually to administer a Chinese area. Without firm hsien governments beneath them, the Japanese puppet regimes are foredoomed to failure.[7]

Until the beginning of the undeclared war, the departmentalization and modernization of the hsien had proceeded most extensively in certain model districts selected for the purpose of political and administrative experimentation. Some of these had reached a level of efficiency which augured well for the future of Chinese government. With the coming of war, however, administrative interests had to yield in many cases to political or military ones, but in one significant respect hsien government was constructively affected. The evocation of popular interest in and cooperation with the government caused a great acceleration of progress toward local democracy, and focused attention on reaction and corruption in the inland regions. War propaganda among the masses of the people amounted to a call for public-spirited action; such action is bound to take the form of direct military enlistment or of collaboration in local patriotic and defense schemes.

Municipal government in old China was carried on largely by the officials of the imperial or provincial bureaucracy. Cities and towns were graded and even named according to the rank of the office for which they served as headquarters. The imperial administration thus extended to municipal affairs; each municipal government included a designated rural area surrounding the city. With the growth of modern government in China, plans were considered for a definite and systematic development of municipal administration. The foreign-controlled cities of the coast provided models of Western administration, and the Chinese were not slow to copy. A few years ago the cities of China were divided for administrative purposes into three categories: those administered directly by the national government; those placed directly under the provincial governments; and those for which no special category was provided, leaving them under the established bureaucratic hierarchy. In 1936 there were five cities of the first class (Nanking, Peiping, Shanghai, Tientsin, and Tsingtao) and eighteen of the second class, including the very important cities of Hankow and Canton. The municipal administration is headed by the mayor and the council. The mayor is appointed by the authority under whose jurisdiction the city is placed. The council is composed of two appointed councillors and the chiefs of the municipal bureaus—four or more. The four required bureaus are civil affairs, finance, public works, and education. Intracity organization was accomplished through the use of ch'u, or wards, subdivided into family groups of defined size. With the development of democracy it was intended for each of these to take part in the promotion of self-government; at each level representatives should be chosen by free suffrage. The family foundation has remained a significant feature even of municipal administration.

The chief political question before the National Government at the outbreak of hostilities in the summer of 1937 was the adoption of a permanent democratic constitution. This was to be accomplished in much the same way that the Provisional Constitution had been adopted in 1931—by means of a specially elected People's Congress. In the meantime, a draft constitution had reached a nearly final form. The outstanding features of the draft included the strengthening of the presidency, the abolition of the Kuomintang party dictatorship, the extension of a widely defined suffrage to operate on an unprecedented scale, and provision for periodically assembling People's Congresses to take, by and large, the position of the Kuomintang by exercising the four powers of the people: initiative, referendum, election, and recall. The elective offices would be reduced to a few. The installation and removal of the major government officers was a function to be divided between the People's Congress and the president, who was himself to be elected and recalled by the Congress.

The Japanese invasion led to the scattering and the partial suspension of government. Military needs began to rule the hour. The Kuomintang Party Congress held in the spring of 1938 elevated Chiang K'ai-shek to the newly-created position of Tsung-tsai—a term meaning Party Leader, which had been the office held by Sun Yat-sen under the more august synonym Tsung-li. Not only was this a partial recognition of the leadership principle[8] in a democracy at war and a testimonial to Chiang as the supreme military leader of the Republic, but it was also a substantial grant of power. Four new powers were given Chiang as Party Leader: (1) the position of Chairman of the National Kuomintang Congress; (2) the chairmanship of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang; (3) the power to ask (impliedly, to demand) that the National Kuomintang Congress reconsider its resolutions, which amounted to the grant of a courteous but effective conditional veto; and (4) final authority on Central Executive Committee resolutions, by means of a parallel veto.[9] This apparent trend toward emergency one-man control was, however, offset by the convening on July 6, 1938, of the People's Political Council, an advisory all-Party representative body, designed to substitute temporarily for the again-postponed National Congress. Its appearance was the widest break in the formal front of one-party Kuomintang rule to occur in a decade, and was heralded as a signal for the practical democratization of the government.