About the author: Mr. Qu Tongzu, male, born in Changsha, Hunan, is a historian. 1936 graduated from sociology department of yenching university. He used to be a professor at Yunnan University. After 1945, he worked as a researcher at Columbia University and Harvard University in the United States and an associate professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Mr. Qu Tongzu returned to China 1965. He has served as a librarian of Hunan Literature and History Museum, deputy director of the Literature and History Research Committee of Hunan Provincial Political Consultative Conference, and researcher of the Institute of Modern History of China Academy of Social Sciences. He is the author of China Feudal Society, China Law and China Society, Local Government in Qing Dynasty and Society in Han Dynasty. In 2006, he was elected as a member of Honorary Department of China Academy of Social Sciences.

Reading this book by Mr. Qu Tongzu, I can't help crying. You can also flick your fingers to calculate. China has several academic works in modern times, which can systematically analyze the former grass-roots system in just 400 pages.

I deeply regret that I was too lazy to read Mr. Qu's book carefully earlier, otherwise I wouldn't be confused about the history of the system for a long time.

Although this book has been translated and introduced as a legal history, no one doubts its unshakable position in the history of the legal system.

Some people, from state and county officials to bookkeepers, clerks, long-term followers and screen friends, may question that they are all investigated from the aspects of type, organization, function, status and recruitment, service years, economic benefits, supervision and control, which is suspected of mechanical science classification, but we still have to be grateful. Finally, someone can make this field that everyone has been working on for a long time clear, at least it is an effective attempt.

The so-called social history research method used by Mr. Qu is now in full swing. Needless to say, I am afraid that Mr. Qu himself did not deliberately participate.

Behind the explanation of transcendence and modernity, we can see a traditional Confucian scholar, Mr. Qu, who insists on serving the humiliation of the literati. Perhaps, this has hindered its efforts to solve the problem of grassroots construction to a certain extent.