Chinese local government has been the ever-fertile soil out of which successive Empires grew. To no other level of government has the Republic reached so poorly. Since China is constituted of about half a million villages, several thousand market towns, and a few hundred major cities, the bulk of the population is rural, but rural in a way foreign to the West. Congestion imposes upon agrarian China many problems and evils known as urban in the West. Corruption in government, extortion in economics, demoralization in social and family life—these start with the village and the hsien. Inconspicuous in any single village, each evil summed to its China-wide aggregate becomes tremendous.
Government has not been beloved by the Chinese farmer. Governmental benefits—for the continuance of scholastic culture, the protection of the realm, the creation of grandiose public works—were remote, but taxes were not; government meant the taxgatherer. Fêng Yü-hsiang, one of the great war-lords and now a Kuomintang general, says of his own childhood:
The people, except for paying their taxes, had nothing to do with the government. The government never paid any attention to the conditions under which the people lived, and the people never bothered themselves about what the government was doing. One party collected the taxes; the other paid them. That was all there was to it. Although Paoting city was only about two li [less than a mile] away, the inhabitants of Kang-k'ê village showed no interest in city civilization; instead, they rather looked down on that sort of thing. No discussions of politics were heard, and nothing about the encroachments of the foreign powers on China. All the big changes seemed to have taken place in another world, and very seldom affected this place.
When the government was about to collect taxes, the Li Chêng
"Pay your taxes! Four hundred and sixty coins to the mou [about one third of an acre] for the first harvest!"
When the people heard the gong, they did not go and pay their taxes immediately. They would walk listlessly to their doorways, only to withdraw after having taken a nonchalant look at the Li Chêng—as though they had heard nothing. They would wait until the very last minute, until they could not put it off any more, and then go, group by group, to the city to hand in money they had earned by sweat and blood.
They were industrious and miserable all through the year ...[6]
This basic level of Chinese society is not easily susceptible to standardization, or the imposition of ready-made bureaucracies. Even in the United States, it would be almost impossible to impose a uniform plan for community organization from Bangor to San Diego and Walla Walla to the Bronx. Sun Yat-sen once said to Judge Linebarger, "China is a land of autonomy from the smallest village upward. Who shall dictate to the sub-governments of China the form and manner in which they shall express their local governmental needs? Of course, we must have a minimum of uniformity for both economy and efficiency in government, but the will of the people must be followed."[7] By seeking to remedy political abuses the National Government apparently hopes that economic inequalities will be ironed out by the people themselves.
The Chinese land problem cannot be understood except at the politico-economic nexus, where low political morale exposes the farmers to the unrestrained power of the gentry, acting in the triple capacity of officials, landlords, and money-lenders. The cycle, familiar in the West, of freehold farmers or yeomen first mortgaging their land, then becoming tenants, and finally ending in utter economic helplessness, has been familiar in China. In China's past, the cycle had another phase: agrarian insurrection sweeping the land with banditry and innumerable rebellions, thereby increasing the fiscal burden on the remaining land, leading to worse exploitation, until the slate was swept clean by dynastic collapse, general civil war, and a new Imperial house, whose administrative decline began another cycle. The peasantry never won completely, and never lost utterly. Today, if one judges by past experience, rebellion or reform seems long overdue.[8]
The detailed legislation adopted by the National Government in war time is given in [Appendix I (G)], and Chiang K'ai-shek's own explanation of the new system in [Appendix III (C)].[9] One might explain the general plan quite simply in terms of inter-connection between the central government and the millions of households. The pao-chia system is one of mutual aid and mutual responsibility between households and groups of households, under government supervision. It has appeared in China from time to time since the Ch'in dynasty (221-203 B.C.). If used for welfare purposes, it amounts to a recognition of the pluralistic character of Chinese society by the government, and the happy utilization of the family pattern. Applied for police purposes, it is well suited to repression and terror. Thus, today the National Government is applying the pao-chia system (in relation to its whole scheme of local government) as a measure of progress and reform, while the Japanese encourage the same organizations in occupied China as a device for despotism and exploitation.
Expressed in law, now being applied in fact, the chia is a group of six to fifteen families (households), and the pao, a group of six to fifteen chia. The hsiang is formally composed of six to fifteen pao; actually it approximates what is loosely termed a community in the United States (e.g., a city ward, a single suburb, part of a rural election district). The ch'ü is the rough equivalent of a township. The hsien (district; county) is the fundamental unit of the traditional China-wide bureaucracy. Hence the missing steps are not those between the hsien, near to two thousand in number, and the central government. The gaps occur between the half-billion Chinese and their two thousand hsien. The following chart shows the broad outlines of the system:[10]
This is the official government plan. If ever put into complete effect, China will consist of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of self-governing units, arranged on seven levels (the five local levels; provinces; nation), and the world will wonder at a massive new democracy. In practical politics, what seems to be happening is that the system extends to the National Government areas, involving less than three hundred million people. Much of the application is purely formal, and signifies no more than did the grant of an imaginary suffrage under the first Republic. Elsewhere the new system is installed with telling administrative effect, improving the bureaucracy, strengthening the state, but not arousing much popular participation or enthusiasm. And in the remainder the program is beginning to work as is intended with genuine elections and popular participation in government.