"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] [Footnote 6: Fêng Yü-hsiang, _Wo-ti Shêng-huo_ (My Life), Kweilin, 1940, p. 22.] 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. [Footnote 7: As reported by Paul M. W. Linebarger in his _Conversations with Sun Yat-sen_ [as yet unpublished; in the author's possession]. Book II, Chapter V.] 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]