BOOK REVIEWS
185
value that the book possesses for other Sung specialists, it also provides students of Ming and Ch'ing government structure and society with much useful background.
However, the title is rather misleading since the work concerns itself more with sub-administrative systems and government reactions to systems' problems than with villages or personnel. The villagers are seldom brought into the discussion and the village officers, whether unpaid members of local families or hired professional clerks, do not appear until the concluding pages; and then only the former group is described in general terms. Since the work is, as Dr. McKnight states in his preface ‘a descriptive analysis of the institution of village services', a narrower and therefore more accurate title should have been selected.
Studies of this sort must always keep the human element well to the fore. In this book the problems of local communities and the attitudes and responses of peasants are not always sufficiently discernible, perhaps because they are not readily available from the source material. It is otherwise a useful work which provides a great deal of detail on the sub-bureaucratic systems of the Southern Sung, their underlying problems and partial solutions.
Hong Kong, 1973
JAMES HAYES