VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA, 1933
145
such as a broken bridge or a bandit raid. Even such judicial duties as settling disputes between private individuals, spoken of above as the particular duty of the elders, is mentioned by that author as a function of the Ti-pao. Officially he has no such right, and unless he happens to be a village elder he would lack the customary authority which accrues to the accepted leaders of the sib and village group.
Village government would be able to get on quite well without the Ti-pao, for it has an adequate machinery for almost any internal governmental circumstance. What he does in village affairs, therefore, mostly replaces a function which some one else would do if he did not. It is his position as a link between the village and the state that makes the Ti-pao significant. This will be discussed in the next chapter.
(Chapter 4) THE VILLAGE EXTERNALLY
No village is completely an isolated unit. On the one hand there are contacts and relations with outsiders and with neighboring villages; on the other, the village is forced to have relations with the Central Government. These external contacts and how they are fitted into or provided for by the scheme of village government are the subject of the present chapter.
I
Relations with outsiders or with other villages are carried on in a thoroughly customary manner, chiefly through the agency of the village temple. It is one of the duties of the temple to form inter-village alliances and treaties, a whole network of which will radiate out from one to many similar temples in other villages.3 Often these treaties are in a true sense alliances, especially in the South, where there have occurred inter-village wars, based upon hereditary feuds. In the main, however, the treaties are economic, relating
1 Jamieson; op. cit., p. 72.
2 Ibid.
3 Leong and Tao; Village and Town Life in China, p. 33.
4 These clan fights are frequently mentioned in the Peking Gazette, and are accorded special treatment in the law. See: Alabaster, Ernest; Notes and Commentaries on Chinese Criminal Law, p. 451, 459-462. For specific examples see ibid., p. 461-462, and Chinese Repository, vol. IV, 1836, p. 411-415. Smith also gives accounts of sporadic "wars" in Shantung as late as the end of the last century, though these were not blood feuds, Smith, Arthur H.; Village Life in China, p. 176-178.