COMMUNITY COMPACT SYSTEM 733
a Mutual Meeting Association (Sanggwanhoe) modeled after the community
compact to embellish their draft of the rules of the compact. Song praised the
contributions of Chu Hsi, Cho Kwangjo, T'oegye, and Yulgok, but he only wrote
the introduction to the compact and nothing more.^50 Song, like many others,
paid lip service to the institution, but did nothing about it.
CONCLUSION
The idea of using local organs of self-government for mutual aid and surveil-
lance derived from the description of local government in The Rites of Chou
and concrete examples of those practices in Chinese history. Although Yu
Hyongwon began his discussion of community compacts with the Lii-Family
Community Compact and Chu Hsi's emendation of it, those texts were not intro-
duced seriously until the early sixteenth century.
On the other hand, the principles of mutual aid and surveillance and the empha-
sis on moral education were present in Korea from the beginning of the Choson
dynasty. At that time a movement for moral rearmament was led by a new batch
of officials who were ardent students of Neo-Confucian philosophy and attempted
to introduce moral texts into the required educational curriculum and moral com-
ponents into existing institutions oflocal self-government. Famous scholar-offi-
cials like T'oegye and Yulgok wrote compact regulations, but the spirit of their
work reflected a strict application of punishment to enforce conformity, and in
Yulgok's case, a reaffirmation of the existing Korean code of status relations,
many of which had disappeared from Chinese life. Cho Hon also advertised the
Six Edicts of Ming T'ai-tsu and the importance of community compacts in Chi-
nese local life in the late sixteenth century. The culmination of this movement
at the national level, however, yielded only an ephemeral flash of brilliance when
in 1573 King Sonjo agreed to adopt a program to adopt community compacts
throughout the country for moral education, aid, admonition, and punishment.
Less than a year later, however, he rescinded the order with the approval ofYul-
gok himself because of the devastating effects of a famine and peasant economic
hardship.
That decision left only private initiative at the local level as the means for adopt-
ing community compacts. The few extant examples of the seventeenth century
indicated the greater influence of Korean traditions, such as in the provisions of
Hwang Chonghae's Golden Orchid Kye of 164 J that referred to Korean aristo-
crats as yangban instead of scholars, and slaves instead of lower persons, and
paid homage to older traditions of respect for members of the matrilineal descent
group. Seventeenth-century kings, however, were not active supporters of com-
munity compacts.
There was hardly any influence on Korean thinking about these problems from
the institutions of the Ch'ing dynasty. Since the Manchu rulers were particu-
larly concerned about gaining the support of Chinese scholars for their regime,
the Shun-chih emperor promulgated his own Six Edicts in 1652 and established