704 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION
women slaves employed as state workers, he would have exempted them from
local service altogether to save them from male domination as well as official
exploitation.
The most complex issue, however, was the distribution of power between the
central bureaucracy and its agents - the magistrates and their clerks - and the
local community. This issue had been discussed in the Chincse literature for two
millennia, but no matter which solution was tried, problems continued nonethe-
less. Since Yu was living in a period when district magistrates controlled the
administration of relief, credit, loans, and price stabilization as well as tax col-
lection and labor service, he concluded that the fault derived from excessive
reliance on the magistrate. He preferred Chinese institutions that shifted the locus
of power from the magistrate to the local community, dominated, of course, by
local leaders. He, thereforc, insisted on that kind of solution for the conduct of
agencies for price stabilization, credit, and relief to the peasantry.
Nonetheless, his solution was not motivated by a commitment to the defense
of local-let alone individual-freedoms or rights against the intrusive and oppres-
sive power of bureaucracy, but rather a distrust of distant and corruptible
bureaucrats who could not be trusted to protect local people against the distorted
appl ication of central power. In working out the rules for local agencies, whether
relief or lending institutions, for example, he provided for stiff penalties for vio-
lation of his regulations. In other words, the state would be brought in to admin-
ister punishment against those violations, whether perpetrated by officials and
clerks on one side, or members of the public and the peasantry on the other. As
we will see in the next chapter, his concept for local government was also
informed by a commitment to tightly knit associations for mutual surveillance
as well as mutual aid. Yu did not reject bureaucracy in principle, but he mis-
trusted it: he favored local control, but not wanton liberalism or freedom from
authority. His local autonomy would remain collective and benign, but nonethe-
less coercive.