COMMUNITY COMPACT SYSTEM 721sibility for the equitable distribution and collection of taxes and assignment of
labor service, bypassing the regular magistrates altogether!
He also created a parallel system of neighborhood elders (/i-lao) who assumed
many of the responsibilities included in the community compacts under dis-
cussion here: adjudication of lawsuits, cases of physical assault, robbery, mur-
der, and sexual offenses, surveillance over vagrants, and reporting of malfeasance
by magistrates and clerks to the central government. The elders were also respon-
sible for moral exhortation, particularly the bi-weekly recitations of T'ai-tsu's
Six Edicts and the conduct of ceremonies to award local exemplars of moral-
ity. The elders were protectcd from arbitrary arrest by the district magistrates,
tax collection was taken out of the hands of the magistrates, and villages were
allowed to run their own affairs.
Despite the reputation ofthe early Ming for the creation of despotic rule, John
Watt has showed that T'ai-tsu was "a champion of the rural underdog" who sought
"to diminish the power of officialdom over rural society," and in so doing he
"displayed a confidence in village society unequaled before the present day."
His design was not, therefore, simply to maximize central control, but to hem
in local officials "between pressures and controls issuing from all levels," and
"to involve rural society itself in the attainment of its [the emperor's] goals.^30
The early Ming /i-chia system of local participation and control was never
adopted in Korea, and the closest the Koreans ever came to it was the Taewongun's
adoption of the village granaries in the 1860s. Cho Hon was reporting the situ-
ation in Korea in the late sixteenth century after the /i-chia system had broken
down. It proved unstable because emperors after T'ai-tsu lacked his commit-
ment to the perspective of the common peasant, and the growth of population
and new markets created discrepancies between wealth and tax asscssments, fixed
tax quotas and increasing government demands for rcvenues, and distortions in
the structure of wealth in the villagesY
What Cho Hon observed was the effect of a movement in the early sixteenth
century to restore some of the virtues ofT'ai-tsu's system, but he failed to record
the contributions to community compacts made by thc famous statesman-philoso-
phers, Wang Yang-ming, Lo Ju-fang, and Lii K'un, throughout that century.3^2
Cho's memorial made no impression on King Sonjo himself, but it was very
important to Yu Hyongwon, who copied out over half the text in his Pan' gye
surok.^33
Yulgok's Two Community CompactsSow/ill Communit\' Compact of 1571. In 1571, as magistrate of Ch'ongju in
Ch'ungch'ong Province, Yulgok simplified and modified the Lii-Family Commu-
nity Compact to fit existing Korean kye associations and wrote regulations for
his Sow6n Community Compact. He insisted that the compact would not work
as an agency of moral rectification unless the district magistrate and the head of
the kyc association (kyejang) were upright and diligent in encouraging the mem-