From Democracy to Bureaucracy: The Baojia in Nationalist Thought and Practice, 1927–1949

Abstract

In the 1939 New County Reforms, the Nationalist government made the baojia system the lowest level of self-government in the country. This decision was the result of more than ten years of discussion among Nationalist administrators and writers who were searching for a tutelary system to train the people in their political rights in preparation for constitutional rule. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nationalist writers claimed to be following Sun Zhongshan’s (Sun Yat-sen) philosophy by reinventing the baojia as a form of democracy. Harkening back to a reimagined national past, they “discovered” that the imperial baojia was not a system of local control, but a traditional model of bureaucratically-designed local self-government. Nationalist writers dovetailed this new baojia with Sun Zhongshan’s philosophy in order to rationalize its position as the foundation of the Three Principles of the People State. Once philosophically legitimized, Nationalist writers endorsed the baojia as a top-down bureaucratic system that would transform the political, social, and economic life of the country; it would become the core political unit of their state-making and nation-building projects. In so doing, the baojia came to represent the Nationalists’ deeply-held belief in the power of human agency to create state institutions capable of entirely remaking society and transforming the nation

Keywords

baojia / self-government / bureaucracy / state-making / nation-building / Nationalist Party / Sun Zhongshan

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2014 Higher Education Press and Brill