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 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)