This program possesses obvious merit. Lacking a foundation of dogma, it requires no implementation through terrorism. The politically innocuous character of the movement is attested by the frequent demands by provincial officials for personnel from the Mass Education training centers. Since the purpose is to improve the entire community without revolutionizing its class structure, the enlightened landlords are as favorable as the peasants themselves. Unfortunately, enlightened landlords are not always prevalent. Despite the modesty of the program, it finds stumbling blocks in actual corruption, extortion, and illegality. Many _hsien_ are under local machines which permit wealthy conservatives to evade tax payments, steal government funds, and repress genuine farmer organization. The consequence has been that the movement succeeds only when it has the immediate backing of a provincial or central authority; its progress has been slow. Many critics, both Chinese and Western, have become disgusted with the slowness of social reform on the land, and despair of anything save reconstruction through implicit class war.[4] [Footnote 4: Research Staff of the Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, _Agrarian China, Selected Source Materials from Chinese Authors_, Shanghai, 1938. A more Leftist and even gloomier view is taken by Chen Han-seng, _Landlord and Peasant in China_, New York, 1936, and the same author's _Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, A Study of the Livelihood of Chinese Tobacco Cultivators_, Shanghai, 1939. Two general surveys of the Chinese economy are Condliffe, J. B., _China Today: Economic_, Boston, 1932, and Tawney, R. H., _Land and Labour in China_, New York, 1932. A significant hypothesis of the relations of economics, government, and culture in China is found in Lattimore, Owen, _Inner Asian Frontiers of China_, New York, 1940, Ch. III, esp. p. 39 _ff._; this rests in part upon Wittfogel, Karl August, _Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas_, Leipzig, 1931, the leading Marxian exposition of the subject.] The present period of resistance and reconstruction opens a very promising period in rural modernization. In the first place, war-time stress puts great power in the Generalissimo's hands. Ubiquitous armies can, on short notice, enforce orders from Chungking. The shift of troops among provinces makes the central government an outside power now physically present in tens of thousands of communities. Devolution of watchfulness by the Commander-in-Chief and his staff results in slow but irreversible accumulation of governmental authority.