706 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION
hut the line between instruction and indoctrination was paper thin in the Con-
fucian tradition.
Were village compacts an attempt to affirm the communal spirit of the local
village and protect it against the oppressive power of the magistrate, or was it
only a poorly disguised system for penetrating the village to reduce it to total
obedience to the state'? Was the community compact to be run by the moral elite
of the community. which in Korea meant the local yangban, larger landlords,
or slaveholders'? Was the purpose of moral exhortation designed to affirm the
norms of the village, or to replace them with foreign Neo-Confucian values super-
imposed from the top'?LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT IN CHINAYu took his model for local control from a Chinese institution described first in
the Rites of Chou and carried on intermittently through the Sung dynasty. The
term he used for local control, hyangdang, referred to two of the six hierarchi-
cal units of local organization described in the Rites of Chou, supposedly for
the early Chou period at the beginning of the first millennium B.C. The system
of local control was not uniform for the whole country, as described in the Rites
of Chou, since Chou territory was supposedly laid out in very regular fashion
according to the distance of the territory from the capital or royal domain. The
organizational units mentioned above were specific to an area referred to as the
six hsiang, which were located just outside the capital and its suburbs to a point
100 Ii from the capital. These hsiang were organized on the basis of a basic,
five-family unit called the pi, and each succeeding unit increased by multiples
of five, so that the hsiang, or hyang in Korean, was the highest and largest, con-
sisting of 12,500 families, and the tang (the dang of hyangdang in Korean) con-
sisted of 500 families. Each one of the five units was headed by a man of rank
and status. The capital and urban areas, and rural areas outside the six hsiang,
werc organized in similar fashion but with different titles.
The task of this local organization was to supervise the triennial census of
population and property (the ta-pi), and the head official of each unit was to admin-
ister all government instructions and edicts handed down from superior units.'
Note also that the hierarchy of units were based on man-made mathematical pro-
portions, not on the far less tidy pattern of natural villages, topographical fca-
tures, or market systems. It represented a bureaucratic imposition of a regular,
ideal pattern over the irregular and actual pattern of human clusters.
Yu traced the history of this system of local control in later periods as well.
Kuan-chung (d. 645 B.c.), the important minister of Duke Huan of the state of
Ch' i, was a statesman devoted to the development of economic wealth and mil-
itary strength. Hc was the strategist who helped the duke achieved hegemony
over an alliance of feudatories in central China against the southern league led
by the state of Ch'u, and was also interested in the formation of groups of five
families within the suburbs of the capital and a different organization of five-