Chapter V of the Draft Permanent Constitution deals with local

government. The institutions of provincial government are wittingly minimized, because of recent trouble with provincial satrapies and the dangerously centrifugal effect of provincial autonomism. In contrast to this, government at the district (_hsien_) level is designed in strict accordance with the realities of twenty-odd centuries' experience. It is probable that no other constitution in the world provides for such careful guarantee of district, county, canton, or _Kreis_ autonomy. The old Imperial Chinese system was a loose pseudo-centralized federation of two thousand near-autarkic and near-autonomous commonwealths; the Draft Constitution attempts to reinstitute (at the political level) this vigorous cooperative independence of the _hsien_. The _hsien_ meeting, extrapolitical, unsystematic, and occasional in the past, is made the foundation for the new legal structure. (These proposed reforms are now being anticipated under the Provisional Constitution and current statutory changes.[11])

[Footnote 11: See below, p. 106 _ff._, and Appendix I (G), p. 324.]