18. The Hsien is the unit of self-government. The province links up and provides means of co-operation between the Central Government and the local governments of the districts.[286]
Whatever the occasion for the slight difference of opinion, it has been the policy of the Kuomintang to emphasize hsien rather than provinces as units of self-government. The Party itself is quite centralized. The Resumé of the Kuomintang Third National Congress Resolutions Concerning Political Matters, adopted March 27, 1929, states unequivocally: “The traditional policy of attaching greater importance to provincial government than to Hsien or district government must be corrected or even reversed.” It adds, “The provincial government, on the other hand, shall act only as a supervisor of local self-government, standing in between the Hsien or district government on the one hand, and the Central Government on the other.”[287]
The province is thus reduced to the lowest possible level. It is not probable that this tendency was influenced by Marxism, but it certainly resembled the Marxian idea of a vast confederation of self-governing communes, acting, by some proletarian metempsychosis, as a highly centralized instrument of revolution.[288] The doctrine of the hsien-province-nation relationship which places emphasis upon the first and the last is the authoritative one, and is quite harmonious with the earlier picture of Imperial China which, apart from the strictly governmental, was a vast confederacy of largely autonomous communities. In the picture of the new democratic national government which emerges from this doctrine, the central government may be regarded as a centralism versus the provinces, and a super-government in relation to the hsien; that is, while the [pg 231] people govern themselves as groups in the hsien, they will govern themselves as one people in the National Government. The province will remain as a convenient intermediary between the two.
This is one of the few doctrines of Sun Yat-sen upon which no one definitive and final pronouncement is to be found and concerning which, consequently, recourse must be had to the history of the development of the Sun Yat-sen political philosophy.
The Hsien in a Democracy.
The hsien, or district, was one of the most important social institutions in old China. The lowest official, the hsien Magistrate, represented the Empire to the people of the hsien, while within the villages or the hsien the people enjoyed a very high degree of autonomy. The hsien was the meeting point of the political system and the extra-legal government, generally of a very vaguely organized nature, by which the Chinese managed their own affairs in accord with tradition. An estimate of the position of the hsien may be gleaned from the fact that China has approximately four hundred eighty million inhabitants; apart from the cities and towns, there are about half a million villages; and the whole country, with the exception of certain Special Municipalities, such as Shanghai, is divided into nineteen hundred and forty-three hsien.[289]
The hsien, however significant they may be in the social system of China, both past and present, cannot be described in a work such as this. It is not inappropriate, however, to reiterate that they form what is perhaps the most important grouping within China, and that much of [pg 232] Chinese life is centred in hsien affairs. It is by reason of hsien autonomy that the Chinese social system has been so elastic as to permit the shocks of invasion, insurrection, conquest, famine and flood to pass through and over China without disrupting Chinese social organization.
Sun once quoted the old Chinese proverb about the Lu Shan (mountains): “We cannot find the real shape of the Lu Shan—for we ourselves are on it.” From the viewpoint of the Western reader this proverb could be turned against Sun in his treatment of the hsien. He was passionately emphatic in discussing the importance of the hsien with his foreign friends;[290] in his writings, addressed to his countrymen, he, as they, simply assumed the importance of the hsien without troubling to make any cardinal point of it.
The hsien is in the unit of the most direct self-government of the people, without the interference of any elaborate set-up from officialdom. Apart from its age-old importance, it will gain further significance in the democracy of Sun Yat-sen.