Special Municipalities, most of which are now under Japanese occupation, are directly subject to the National Government and only incidentally a part of the provinces in which they are located. Ordinary Municipalities are under their respective provincial governments, but not under a _hsien_ (district or county) administration; in some cases they include several former hsien. The Municipality is headed by a Mayor (_Shih-chang_), advised by a City Council (_Shih-chêng Hui-i_) composed of the chiefs of the administrative sections, several supplementary counsellors, and representatives from the Municipal Advisory Assembly (_Shih Ts'an-i-hui_), if one exists. Below the _Shih_ the urban pattern of local government differs somewhat from the rural, but otherwise city government displays no features peculiarly Chinese. LOCAL GOVERNMENT 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_ [a petty local officer] would ring a gong from one end of the village to the other, shouting: