Toward a Pluralist Model of KMT Rule

Chinese Republican Studies Number Volume 2 V11 February 1982 Newsletter $4.50 annually PUBLISHER ADVISORY and EDITOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORIAL BOARD Center for Asian Stud1es University of Illinois David G. Strand Lloyd Eastman, Edward Friedman 1208 West California Dickinson College John Israel. James Sheridan Urbana, IL 61801 Carlisle, PA 17013 Lyman Van Slyke Subscriptions and back issues Comments and manuscripts Issues in October and February Bradley K. Geisert Muslims in 1!orth~!. fhina.:_ A Response !..Q f!:..Qfess.Q!: ~dshead Jonathan N. Lipman Republi~ §tudies A:!! _!aiwa!l.!.. _!981: Report .Q!! !:he "Conference ..Q!! th~ _!!.!_st.Q!:_y 2! the _g~pub!.ic 2.! fhina" Lloyd Eastman * * * * * * * * * * * Toward ~ Pl~lisj:, t!odel of ]SMT B~le Bradley K. Geisert. Northwest Missouri State University In the past few years several scholars have raised the question of the KMT regime's relationship to various classes and social groupings in Chinese society and most particularly its relations with local elites. (1) If we are to fathom the role the KMT has played in modern Chinese history, surely we must come to an understanding of how it interacted with the society it governed (or attempted to govern). Yet despite a recent flurry of research on the subject, we are presently far from agreement on a· descriptive mode-l of KMT rule. wide t ion: <: ...... The problem of the regime's relations with local elites subsumes a variety of specific issues. But most can be boiled down to one ques- "To what degree was this or that social grouping able to affect the regime's formation of policy?"(2) Political scientists sometimes employ an "elitist-pluralist" polarity to evaluate the relative responsiveness of regimes to political pressure from groups in society. In this scheme, an "elitist" regime is one which "sets the agenda" for society; it rules without reference to the desires and lobbying efforts of groups exterior to itself. A pluralist regime, on the other hand, mediates among the agendas and policy preferences of various PAGE 2 interest groups. (3) Lloyd Eastman's Abortiv~ ~evolutiQQ is the most pristine statement of the. argument that the KMT was an "elitist" regime. Eastman concludes that the KMT regime had no real base, or somehow comprised its own base, and therefore constituted a power group beholden to and serving no external social or economic class or grouping. Though the works of Parks Coble, Philip Kuhn, and Sherman Cochran do not as explicitly argue that the KMT failed to accommodate any.social grouping, each contends that the particular group he studied (Kuhn, rural elites; Cochran, Chinese cigarette manufacturers; Coble, Shanghai capitalists) suffered from fundamentally hostile relations with the regime, or was seriously harmed by it. (4) These revisionist interpretations of the KMT as an "elitist" regime run directly counter to the older, more prevalent view that the regime was the natural ally, and even the mere "hireling" of the urban bourgeois~e and the rural landlord class. Most Marxists and many non-Marxists still cling to this older view.(S) Although this vision of KMT governance is somewhat ~luralistic in that it pictures a regime shaped by a coalition of urban and rural social forces, most of those who have touted it have chosen to emphasize its unitary, authoritarian aspects5 (6) But the older interpretation had several shortcomings. Most importantly , it ignored significant signs of tension between the regime and local e-lites. For example, if the government was the mere plaything of landlords, why did it press for higher land taxes and for inclusion on tax rolls of unregistered lands of large landowner~ -- to the point that some landlord families were financially ruined? If the government considered local elites to be natural allies, why did it give some the opprobious appellation "local bullies and evil gentry," prosecute others for exercising power locally, and attempt to wrest control of the localities from them through centralization and bureaucratization schemes? If the regime was a front for the merchant class, why did the KMT extort large amounts of cash from merchants during the Northern Expedition, and how does one explain tax levels so high as to b-ankrupt some fledgling Chinese industries? The fact that these phenomena could not be accounted for within the framework provided by the earlier interpretation led Eastman to adopt the "elitist" model. But Eastman's "elitist" interpretation fails to account adequately for some of the most salient features of the goveinment's role throughout the Nanking Decade. For example, many local governments continued the pre-1927 practice of habitually aiding landlords in rent collection. In 1934 in one month alone the Wu hsien, Kiangsu, gover~ment received and agreed to over ten thousand landlord requests to dun tenants for rent. And a similar situation existed in many hsien along the lower Yangtze. The regime watered down and eventually killed rent reduction programs in both Kiangsu and Chekiang. ( 7) tw1any local governments found that because they had depended on landlords for land taxes, bond sales, and other types of support , they had to listen and respond to landlord pleas. As one provincial KMT leader put it, after the hsien governments in southern Kiangsu had importuned "gentry" in 1927 to buy large amounts of Northern Expedition bonds, those elites used this as a pretext to curry favor with the governments ..• (which they used as) ••. baleful shields to maintain their position. Consequently the noxious power of common local bullies and evil gentry not only has not been PAGE 3 extirpated •.• (by) ... the great tide of the revolution, but to the contrary, has daily been strengthened. (8) tvlany hsien gover'nments recruited locally powerful landlords as sub-hsien officers and (at least in Kiangsu) the provincial government made few serious efforts to root those elites out of their local bastions. Even when the sub-hsien officers were not great landowners themselves, several reports indicate that "local bullies and evil gentry" were able to manipulate them. (9) In Kiangsu the provincial government under Governor Ch'en Kuo-fu urged hsien magistrates and others to conciliate powerful local personages. Some governmental ·officers must have taken that sort of advice to heart because a team investigating land tax rectification efforts in one Kiangsu hsien in 1935 noted that the government and local gentry had "become as one, like a f ami 1y . " (1 0) Mercantile and Commercial Interests The relationship of the KMT government to urban-based merchants and financiers is a complex and important topic meriting several full length studies. Richard Bush's work on lower Yangtze cotton mill owners and the KMT is a milestone on the road to real understanding of this relationship. Bush found that the ties between mill owners and the Nanking government were not particularly close, but he also discovered that the owners were often able to influence government policy and its execution to their own benefit. This is a significant finding, for it flies in the face of earlier suggestions that merchants were powerless -- utterly unable to protect themselves from a government whose policies consistently harmed their interests. Although Bush's assertion that there was little "linkage" between the mill owners and the government is open to question, he is certainly correct that urban commercial interests were often able to participate effectively in the government's policy-making process. (11) This does ,'not mean that merchants always received from the government precisely the terms they desired. On the contrary, both sides often found it necessary to compromise. On some occasions the government did not bend to merchant demands. But this latter course was fraught with hazards for the government, because merchants could obstruct the implementation of policies they found distasteful. In some cases merchants directed city-wide general strikes to underline their power. A model of KMT rule that allows for no responsiveness to merchant concerns is simply not tenable. How then do we account for the oft-repeated tales of extortion of Shanghai merchants by government agents in mid-1927 and early 1928 to subscribe much needed loans to finan~e the Northern Expedition ?(l2) Richard Bush has convincingly explained that Chiang K'ai-shek was compelled to use such methods when Shanghai merchant leaders reneged on earlier promises to lend 6 0 million yuan. Tracing the-~"'f,,~te of cotton miller T. K. Yung, Bush demo?strates that because of his enormous wealth, the support of Wushih and Shanghai merchants, help from fellow townsman Wu Chih-hui, and aid from Wu-hsi hsien officials, Yung was not only able to prevent his arrest and confiscation of his property, but he also succeeded in reducing the forced loan from Y 500,000 toY 250,000 (on which he received 8.4 percent interest). In addition, Yung was granted significant tax advantages for one of his mills. (13) Yung was clearly not helpless in the face of party, army and government demands, and neither were a great many other merchants. Clearly, the KMT regime was not autonomous. And if that was the PAGE 4 case some sort of pluralistic model, rather than Eastman's elitist model, migh~ better explain the regime's relations with society •. As Richard Bush's work and my own st.udy of Kiangsu show, government respons~veness to.landlord demands is not the only evidence for the existence of KMT plural~sm~ On countless occasions businessmen and merchants successfully pressed the~r demands and concerns on the KMT regime. The Kiangsu provinci~l government's concern for merchant interests can be seen in its drafting and revision of regulations on pawnshops. When the government was established in 1927, it extended from sixteen to eighteen months the period pawnshops were required to hold pawned items before selling them. Pawnshops through their Kiangsu United Pawnshop Association (Su--sheng tien-yeh lien-ho hui) protested that pawnshops were going out of business because of financial problems, and that this regulation was an unnecessary burden on them. For example, wearing apparel pawned when fashionable quickly dropped in value as fashions changed. The government was sensitive to these protests because it knew that pawnshops had been declining for years and that the resultant contraction of credit exacerbated the potential for peasant and labor unrest. In 1932 the government finally acceded to the pawnshops' demands by declaring that women's fashions had to be held only twelve months. Despite this concession, pawnshops were not completely satisfied. They contended that no items should be held beyond twelve months unless the pawner indicated his desire to redeem the article by_ paying part of the accumulated interest twelve months after pawning it. In late 1935 the provincial government endorsed this scheme in revised regulations . (14) The provincial government's relationship with pawnshops was similar to its dealings with many other kinds of merchants. And this kind of pluralistic tie between regime and social grouping defined the relationship between government and merchant community at the hsien level as· well. In f~ct hsien governments, constrained by the traditional dependence of the hsien magistrate on local notables, had even more reason to accommodate merchants than did provincial governments. Historians dealing with the KMT regime 's ties with society have often failed to stress sufficiently this distinction between governmental strata; they usually speak vaguely ~f "the government" without adequately treating the cleavages within it. (This is true despite the frequency with which factionalism is mentioned in studies of the Republican period.) The most important tax issue affecting merchants in Kiangsu during the Nanking Decade was the provincial government's adoption of a business tax (ying-yeh shui) to replace the likin which was 'abolished in 1931. Because of the concerted political pressure of merchant organizations, the government was thwarted for years in its attempts to~nact and collect the new tax. Merchants' clout not only waylaid for months the adoption of the tax, decreased its initial severity, and prevented the appending of numerous surtaxes to it, but after the government finally enacted the tax, merchants all over Kiangsu successfully resisted collection efforts. It was 1935 before the business tax had filled the gap in revenues caused by the end of ~ikin. In order to achieve that rise in gross receipts for the business tax the government several times had to strengthen its collection and enforcement mechanisms. (15) Although merchant organizations finally lost out on the business tax issue, they had demonstrated considerable power in the halls of the Kiangsu government. By heading off surtaxes, holding down the tax PAGE 5 rates, and postponing the imposition of the tax, merchants had protected their own intere~ts fairly effectively. Contradictions and ~S£adox~ Ideally, an explanation of KMT rule ought to illuminate the reasons behind these contradiction$ and paradoxes. For example, why did the government often aid landlords in rent collection, cooperate with their militia, and recruit many landowners as local officials, and at the same time press forward many other policies that tended to trample upon the interests of the same grouping (e.g. land tax escalation, attempts to gain control of local administration from certain powerful local landlords, and prosecution of some great landlords as "local bullies and evil gentry")? Add to this the regime's passage of rent reduction laws and repeated refinement of them (at least on the provincial level in Kiangsu and Chekiang) even though they were seldom if ever enforced. Why did the regime go to the trouble of framing rent reduction laws, and then allow government functionaries to help landlords collect rents far above the stipulated amount? A pluralistic model helps solve problems like these by acknowledging that several social groupings affected policy making. The regime sometimes embraced contradictory policies because of its desire to "play up to" several different social groupings, each with different -- and sometimes conflicting -- interests. To argue that the regime responded to social entities outside itself is not to deny that policy makers were also responsive to demands from within branches of the regime itself. Most significantly, the military leadership had a disproportionately large voice in policy making , particularly at the national level, by virtue of Chiang K'ai-shek's pivotal role in both the military and the national government. Seen in the light of a pluralistic model, many of the Nationalist regime's policies can be interpreted as attempts to accommodate some of the interests, prejudices and dreams of members of the modern, middle-level educated elite (the grouping which also constituted the bulk of the KMT's membership). These people with middle or normal school education found it difficult to acquire positions commensurate with the elite status they felt they deserved or would have liked to attain. Few of them would ever taste the kind of power they desired. But the KMT regime could supply many of them with bureaucratic posts which enabled them to avoid hard manual 1 abor. The bureaucracy became in effect an unwieldy Rube Goldberg employment contraption which provided minor, low-paying posts by th~ thousand and gave some members of the modern-educated elite at least a fraction of the status they coveted. To paraphrase what one man from northern Kiangsu told me, "For us in northern Kiangsu, because of the bac~wardness of the economy '· there were only three avenues if we wanted to get ahead: teaching, the military , and government and party affairs." By adding numerous governmental departments, creating dual party and government bureaucracies, establishing new "local self-government" offices, founding and maintaining schools, adding "mass education institutes," stimulating the growth of cooperatives, and funding scores of other types of comparable institutions, the KMT regime provided the means through which individuals with middle-level education could pretend to elite status. Some party spokesmen even explicitly connected the "local self-government" scheme with the problem of intellectual unemployment, suggesting that creation of the new local offices could enhance central government control of localities while reducing joblessness PAGE 6 among school graduates. Also, the regime's occasional attacks on the powers of "local bullies ~nd evil gentry" dovetailed nicely with many modern educated elites' distaste for their more traditional rivals. Much of the pressure for rent reduction, to which the government responded with toothless laws it never enforced, came from parts of the same modern educated grouping, wh~ch had imbibed certain elements of Marxism and Sun Yat-sen's "land to the tiller" pronouncements, and which saw China's tenancy system as "feudal" and premodern. The government also sought to ace ommodate the scientistic and "modernist" bias of this intellectual elite by considering-measures to fight superstition and by framing grandiose plans for "construction" (chi~-she; read "modernization") of the country. Despite the foregoing arguments, I am not persuaded that a simple pluralistic model, by itself, can offer an adequate explanation of KMT rule. It is necessary to recognise that the regime was not a monolithic entity. Decision-mak~ng was not completely unified in one location, nor was KMT policy a coherent whole. There were numerous decision-making "nodes," each responding in its own unique way to a variety of pressures from various social groupings. Thus, if we accept a pluralistic model of KMT rule, it will have to be a complex one that matches the pressure groups with the individual pressure points or segments of the regime which were receptive to particular kinds of pressure. One of the cleavages within the regime that is receiving increasing attention is the split between the government and party. David Tsai has described the difficulty that the government and the KMT in Kiangsu had in working out a satisfactory relationship. I have argued that by 1930 the ·Kiangsu government had fin~lly succeeded in elbowing the provincial and local party apparati out of any meaningful role in policy formation. Noel Miner h~s found a similar situation in Chekiang, and Lloyd Eastman has recently intimated that it was a nationwide phenomenon. (17) Thus we m~st not only d~al in some cases with split authority, but must also track shifting focii of power. It is not only cleavages within the regime that complicate matters. The category subsumed under the term "local elites" was so dive~se as to defy most attempts to delimit it to a cohe.sive in·terest grouping. (18) Even with a grouping that might seem cohesive because of its common vocation or source of income, factionalism might so divide it that a portion of the grouping might oppose the regime, while another portion al\ied with it. In Kiangsu in the mid-1930's some landlords aided the government in rectification of the land tax rolls, while others fought the government and its tax program nearly to the point of rebellion. (19) Thus, propQnents of a purely elitist model of KMT rule employ fallacious logic when bhey find a handful of instances of government maltreatment of one or more landlords, "local bullies and evil gentry," merchants, or Shanghai capitalists, and then leap to the conclusion that the regime was a disaster for all landlords, "local bullies ," or whatever. The problem of local variations in regime-elite relations is not unexpected, considering the size of China. It is virtually impossible to posit a single model of regime-elite relations that holds true for all regions and locales. In Kiangsu alone the variety of local arrangements defies easy characterization and simplistic model building. In the south of PAGE 7 the province local governments aided landlords in rent collection on a daily basis, while in extreme northern Kiangsu government transactions with landlords were rare by comparison. The relative military power controlled by the government and by local elites varied so much that while southern Kiangsu merchants and landlords often sought the protection of government forces, in extreme northern Kiangsu hsien magistrates were often outgunned and outmanned by militia control.led by local elites who lived in castles and fortresses . (20) In many cases, it appears that the relationships between local governments and elites were transitory, and that they hinged on issues that were only temporarily deemed important by one or another side in the equation . Many analysts who employ the pluralist model concentrate on a handful of "key issues," believing that if interest groups have the government's ear on those blockbuster issues, than power is distributed in a pluralistic fashion. However, critics have argued that it is impossible to lay down any rational criteria to determine which issues are "key," and which are less significant. (21) (For example, for an issue to be "key," must it be so in the eyes of the affected interest group, the regime, or opposing interest groups?) I contend that in the case of the KMT regime, it would be a mistake to choose half a dozen "key" issues, and on the basis of those alone to attempt to draw "the authoritative picture" of regime-elite relations. The issues chosen would almost certainly predetermine the findings of such a study, and the richly detailed texture of the government's relations with society would be lost. Why should we, for example, exclude from purview questions (like pawnshop regulation) that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called "the most significant" issues with which the govermnent dealt? Besides general studies of local government responses to all manner of lobbying, we need analyses of particular local institutions. For example , most Kiangsu hsien governments had a Land Administration Office (ti-cReng chu) which oversaw the emendation of land tax rolls. A full lengt study of these organs and their activities would be a tremendous boon to the field. (22) Also, we must more actively investigate the "reconstruction" (chien-she) activities of the regime, and the local offices that were responsible for administering those construction·efforts. Although many of the sources describing local construction projects are prescriptive rather than descriptive, there is much we can learn about the whole enterpr.ise. Even if government-funded construction projects represented but a small fraction of expenditures, many thousands of yuan were spent on them; we need to know how the political plums were apportioned among local~l.J;:ies and how particular projects in a hsien were chosen over others. It is one thing to suspect that chien-she was a domain of pork barrel politics -- and we do have some evidence to support this suspicion -- but it is quite another to flesh out the story in convincing detail. (23) In short, though the military consumed a disproportionately large share of government revenues, it would be useful to know who influenced decisions about how the rest was spent. D~spite my criticisms of some of the works the field has produced on local affairs, I have at least as many misgivings about our grasp of the government and party at the national level. Works on KMT history lack the blow-by-blow, congress-by-congress, ·plenum-by-plenum understanding of polit- PAGE 8 ical developments that is relatively commonplace in studies of the CCP. And we have few, if any, in-depth analyses of decision-making at the national level in the period of KMT dominance. Did the Rube Goldberg, jerry-built quality so visible at the local and provincial l·evels of the government extend to national affairs? If so, what kinds of power were exercised by which institutions for whom? In other words, the same kinds of questions need to be answered about the National Government that we are now beginning to answer about lower administrative levels. Materials necessary for examination of such questions are increasingly available: the resources of the Ta-hsi Archives in Taiwan were recently partially opened, the KMT Archives in Taiwan continues haltingly in the direction of increasing the access of foreign scholars to materials, and foreigners are getting their first brief glances at a few of the sources at the Number Two Archives in Nanking. Researchers have only scratched the surface of many long-available sources like the ~~in £~ng-fu kunq-pao, not to mention the multitudes of national media in the 1920's through the 1940's. With the aid of these resources and others I we should be able to increase dramatically our understanding of the exercise-of power in modern China. !i_o tes (1) For example, see Robert Kapp, "Studying Republican China," Chin~ Republican Studies ~letter (CRSN) 1.3:13-20 (April 1976); Lloyd Eastman, "The Disintegration of Political Systems in Twentieth Century China," CRSN 1.3:10 (April 1976); Sherm~n Cochran, ••Business and Politics in China: Report on a Conference," CRSN 1.2:13-15 (February 1976). (2) My use of the term "regime" is not meant to be pejorative. I use it to indicate the "ruling apparatus" in a sense broad enough to include organs outside the government -- for example, the leadership elements of the army and the Kuomintang itself -- as well as the government. (3) Political scientists have created a mountain of theoretical literature on the "elitist" and "pluralist" models. One means of access to this mound is the (somewhat superannuated) article by Peter Bachrach and Morton s. Baratz, "Two Faces of Power" American I:ol i ti~l Science ,R~iew 56. 4:9 4 7-95 2 (December 1962), and the bibliography contained therein. This article is critical of the two models, but I believe the authors' suggested mode of analysis is too sophisticated to be of much use now in the Republican China field; we find it hard to identify the commonplace decision-making channels , much less describe the "manner in which the status quo oriented persons and groups influence those community values and those political institutions ... which limit the scope of actual decision-~aki~g to 'safe' issues." (p. 9 52) I do not seek to reopen the theoretical debate on the merits of the models, but simply to suggest that they might pr~vide useful imagery for the China studies field. ' ( 4) Lloyd E. Eastman, The Aborti~ R~.Y21 uti.Q!!.!_ China Qndll National is~ Ru 1e , 1 9 27- 19 37 (Camb r i dg e , Mas s . , 1 974 ) p p . 2 1 6- 21 7, 1 3 9- 14 3 , 2 86; Ph i 1 i p A. Kuhn, "Local Self-Government Under the Republic: Problems of Control, Autonomy and Mobilization," in Frederic Wakeman, Jr. and Carolyn Grant, eds., Conflict and Cont£2! in bate Imperial Ch~na (Berkeley, 1975), PP· 294-295; Sherman Cochran, Big Business in £hi~ Sino-Foreign Bival£y in ~~Cigarette IndustrYL 1890-1930 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 188-200; Parks M. Coble, _!he Shanghai Ca,Eitali~t~ ~!!<1 ~he _!i~tional!.st Gover.!!ill..!illh 1.~2.::!.212 (Camb r i dg e , 1 9 8 0 ) , pp . 2 61- 2 6 9. ( 5) See Harold R. Isaacs, The Traged_y ..2.! ..'£he .£hin~~ B~olu!_ion (Stanford, PAGE 9 1971), pp. 31, 182. Mao Tse-tung charged that the KMT was "a regime of comprador class ••. and the landlord class ••• " Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works of ~~ Tse-tung (P'eking,· 1967), I, 63; Lucien Bianco, Qrigins of J:he-.fhin~ Revolution, 1915-1949, trans. from the French by Muriel Bell (Stanford, 1973), p. 125. (6) One common model of "elistist rule" posits an interlocking directorate of business classes and the government. In this sense even the older interpretation of KMT relations was an elitist model. However, in order to accept the older interpretation as "elitist," one would have to believe that the merchants, landlords, and to whomever else the government responded were all part of one power elite. I submit that the groupings to which the regime responded were far too diverse to be considered a single class, grouping , or power elite. ( 7) Chang Yu-i I ed. I Chung-k U.Q fhin-taJ:. n,gnq_:yeh shih .!~~-1 iao (Historical materials on modern Chinese agriculture) (Peking, 1957), III, 307-308; Agrarian china (Chicago, 19 39) , pp. 2 6-3 0; Noel R. Miner, "Chekiang: The Nationalist's Effort in.Agrarian Reform and Construction, 1927-1937" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973), pp. 70-79. (8) Ni Pi, "Tui-yu Chiang-su ko hsien cheng-chih ti kan-hsiang ho hsi-wang" (Opinions and hopes with regard to the politics of various Kiangsu hsien), f..h iansc...§.~ hsun-k' an 2: 11-13 (September 11, 1928) • ( 9) Li Heng, "Chung-kuo nung-ts'un cheng-chih chieh-kou ti yen-chiu" (Research on the political structure of Chinese villages), Chung-k~ nung-ts~g 1.10:35 (July 1935); Chang Yu-i, III, 366; also see Bradley Kent Geisert, "Power and Society: The Kuomintang and Local Elites in Kiangsu, Province, China, 1924-1937 (Ph.D. diss., University of Virgina, 1979), pp. 174-189. (10) Kung Hsin-chai and Lo Chih-yuan, "Chiang-su ko hsien hsien-~heng ts'an-kuan chi-yao" (A record of an inspection of administration in various Kiangsu hsien), £hiagg-su ~ueh-pao 4.5,6:46, 50 (December 1, 1935). (11) See Richard Clarence Bush, "Industry and Politics in Kuomintang China: The Nationalist Regime and Lower Yangtze Chinese Cotton Mill Owners 1927-1937" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1978). (Editor's note: Bush's dissertation will be published in the spring of 1982 by Garland Pub1 ishing Co., New York, under the title, The ~.Qliti.£§. .2.! fotton Textiles 1.!1 .!S,u omintang China) (12) Eastman, The Abortive R~volution, p. 229; Coble, pp. 32-41, 43-46. ( 13) Bush, pp. 106-114. (14) For a handy summary of government relations with pawnshops, see Lu Kuo-hsiang, "Chiang-su tien-yeh chih shuai-lo chi wen-t'i (The decline of pawnbroki,ng in Kiangsu and related problems), Nung ,hang y~~h-Js.' an 3. 6:43-56 (June 1936). ~ (15) G~isert, "Power and Society," pp. 249-257. (16) Ch'i Liang-ch'en, "Chiang-su hsien-hsien-chih chih ch'ueh-tien chi ch'i kai-chin i-chien" (Shortcomings of Kiangsu's presen~ hsien system and opinions on its improvement), Chiang-~ ~ueh-k'an 4.1:5 (nonconsecutive pagination ; July 1, 1935); Li Hsia-lin, "Ke-rning ch'ing-nien shih-yeh ti chiu-ch:l" (Relief of unemployment of revolutionary youth), · Chiang-§J:! h sun-k ' an 1 1 : 2 7- 3 3 (De c ember 11, 1 9 2 8 ) • (17) David Tsai, "Party-Government Relations in Kiangsu Province, 19271932 ," Select ~~ fro!!! th.§! .£~!!.i~ for .Eli ~_