Yu's COMMUNITY COMPACT REGULATIONS 737lizing the population to ensure sufficient tax collection as well as the promotion
of agricultural production. Furthermore, in conformity with Chinese mutual aiel
anel surveillance organizations, he wanted to keep everyone under control, tieel
to their villages and urban wards, and registered for taxes and labor service. By
binding every individual to a team of families and requiring immediate reports
of all movement into and out of villages and towns, there would be no oppor-
tunity for individuals to escape from the state's tax and labor service obliga-
tions. Despite his encouragement of greater commercial activity in his essay on
cash, he by no means could have approved any free migration to the cities to
participate in commerce or to supply an increased demand for industrial labor.
At the end of this essay, he also commented on some of the fundamental fea-
tures of the system. He observed that even if the country were governed by a
sage king, it would not be possible to succeed in "nurturing livelihood, carry-
ing out [royal] instructions and orders, unifying customs and mores," and estab-
lishing a "government of moral transformation" unless a hyol/gdang system of
local control were in place.
In this section he finally referred to the pao-chia system of the Sung, not that
of the Northern Sung introduced under the sponsorship of Emperor Shen-tsung
and Wang An-shih, but the five-family pao units proposed by Chu Hsi in his
proposed Village Granary Regulations for mutual protection and reliance. Nev-
ertheless, Chu Hsi's lessons were by no Illeans a departure from either the tra-
ditional purposes of mutual surveillance or the pao-chia system of the Northern
Sung during Wang An-shih's era. He pointed out that the pao organization would
guarantee full tax payments even if some members ran away and would reas-
sign duties annually. It would be able to discover any embezzlement, tax delin-
quency, evasion of military duty, criminal activity, failure to obey government
prohibitions, and malfeasance by the P{/o's officials themselves. It would then
report all such acts to the district authorities, who would then arrest those guilty
of wrongdoing, point them out to the community. and administer severe pun-
ishment.
Yu commented that even though these remarks of Chu Hsi were connected
with his village granary system, he was really talking about the necessity for
"organizing households" (p 'yonho), the most important aspects of which wcre
mutual protection for people when they made promises or compacts. reward-
ing merit, and punishing crime. He added that the creation of mutual aid and
surveillance organizations for local control would be far preferable to the lax-
ity and disorder on the current Korean scene.s
REGULATIONS FOR Yu's COMMUNITY COMPAClPrinciples of OrganizationYu then proposed his own set of regulations in which he evidently copied Yul-
gok's precedent of establishing community compacts at the subdistrict or county