Ming dynasty made villages' richest families collect taxes or pay the shortfall

When the Ming dynasty was founded in 1368, its new government faced a basic administrative problem: an empire of tens of millions of farming households, most in villages days from the nearest county seat, and no way to staff a tax collector for every settlement without an impossibly large bureaucracy the state's own revenue couldn't yet support. Taxes assessed but never actually collected from scattered rural households were as useless as no tax system at all.

The obvious fix, hiring and training a national corps of local tax officials, would have required exactly the fiscal capacity the state was trying to build in the first place — a chicken-and-egg problem no cash-poor new dynasty could solve by throwing money at it. The state needed collection to happen using resources and knowledge that already existed at the village level.

In 1381, the Hongwu Emperor established the lijia (里甲) system: villages were grouped into units of 110 households, with the ten wealthiest families in each unit rotating, one year at a time, as the group's registered tax administrators. That year's ten households were personally responsible for collecting from the other hundred, and if the total came up short, whether from bad harvests, evasion or families that had simply fled, the rotating collector households had to make up the difference themselves.

Made each village's ten wealthiest families rotate as tax collectors, liable for shortfalls, turning local wealth into unpaid state enforcement.

Rotating collectors had personal financial exposure to shortfalls, giving them a strong incentive to collect.

Collectors already lived in the community, so they had local knowledge and social leverage.

The state avoided hiring officials, using existing local wealth as an unpaid extension of state capacity.

When you can't afford to monitor everyone, make a rotating subset of the parties personally liable for the group's shortfall, using their local knowledge and self-interest as enforcement.

The system became the empire's basic unit of rural administration and tax collection for well over a century, extended by a parallel liangzhang (粮长, grain captain) system that similarly deputized wealthy households to organize and personally escort grain-tax shipments to state granaries, with the Ming legal code recording severe punishments for grain captains who abused the position to extort the households under them.