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Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty Paperback – 1 May 2014
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Seventeenth-century Korea was a country in crisis--successive invasions by Hideyoshi and the Manchus had rocked the Choson dynasty (1392-1910), which already was weakened by maladministration, internecine bureaucratic factionalism, unfair taxation, concentration of wealth, military problems, and other ills. Yu Hyongwon (1622-1673, pen name, Pan'gye), a recluse scholar, responded to this time of chaos and uncertainty by writing his modestly titled Pan'gye surok (The Jottings of Pan'gye), a virtual encyclopedia of Confucian statecraft, designed to support his plan for a revived and reformed Korean system of government.
Although Yu was ignored in his own time by all but a few admirers and disciples, his ideas became prominent by the mid-eighteenth century as discussions were underway to solve problems in taxation, military service, and commercial activity. Yu has been viewed by Korean and Japanese scholars as a forerunner of modernization, but in Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions James B. Palais challenges this view, demonstrating that Yu was instead an outstanding example of the premodern tradition.
Palais uses Yu Hyongwon's mammoth, pivotal text to examine the development and shape of the major institutions of Choson dynasty Korea. He has included a thorough treatment of the many Chinese classical and historical texts that Yu used as well as the available Korean primary sources and Korean and Japanese secondary scholarship. Palais traces the history of each of Yu's subjects from the beginning of the dynasty and pursues developments through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He stresses both the classical and historical roots of Yu's reform ideas and analyzes the nature and degree of proto-capitalistic changes, such as the use of metallic currency, the introduction of wage labor into the agrarian economy, the development of unregulated commercial activity, and the appearance of industries with more differentiation of labor.
Because it contains much comparative material, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions will be of interest to scholars of China and Japan, as well as to Korea specialists. It also has much to say to scholars of agrarian society, slavery, landholding systems, bureaucracy, and developing economies.
Winner of the John Whitney Hall Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies
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Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
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1288 pages
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English
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University of Washington Press
Publication date
1 May 2014
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"Marks a watershed in East Asian studies on Confucian statecraft and Korean studies on the Choson dynasty (1392 - 1910) in particular. . . . Will remain for decades to come a cornerstone of Korean Studies and required reading for specialists and students alike who are interested in Confucian statecraft and institutions in East Asia."--Journal of Asian Studies
About the Author
James B. Palais was professor of history at the University of Washington and the author of Policy and Politics in Traditional Korea.
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Publisher : University of Washington Press; Reprint edition (1 May 2014)
Language : English
Paperback : 1288 pages
======
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. THE EARLY CHOSŎN DYNASTY, 1392–1650
1. Confucian Statecraft in the Founding of Chosŏn
2. The Disintegration of the Early Chosŏn System to 1592
3. Post-Imjin Developments in Military Defense and the Economy
PART II. SOCIAL REFORM: YANGBAN AND SLAVES
Introduction
4. Remolding the Ruling Class through Education and Schools
5. New Schools: Conservative Restraints on Radicalism
6. Slavery: The Slow Path to Abolition
Conclusion
PART III. LAND REFORM
Introduction
7. Land Reform: Compromises with the Well-Field Model
8. Redistributing Wealth through Land Reform
9. Late Chosŏn Land Reform Proposals
Conclusion
PART IV. MILITARY REFORM
Introduction
10. The Royal Division Model: Rotating Duty Soldiers and Support Taxpayers
11. The Debate over the Military Training Agency, 1651–82
12. The Search for Alternative Modes of Military Finance
13. Military Reorganization, Weapons, and Walls
14. The Military Service System, 1682–1870
Conclusion
PART V. REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION
Introduction
15. The King and His Court
16. Reforming the Central Bureaucracy
17. Personnel Policy
18. Provincial and Local Administration
19. The Community Compact System (Hyangyak)
20. Yu Hyŏngwŏn's Community Compact Regulations
Conclusion
PART VI. FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
Introduction
21. Tribute and the Taedong Reform
22. The Taedong Model for Official Salaries and Expenses
23. Copper Cash and the Monetary System
24. Yu Hyŏngwŏn's Analysis of Currency
25. A Cycle of Inflation and Deflation
26. Cash and Economic Change after 1731
Conclusion
Epilogue: The Complexities of Korean Confucian Statecraft
Notes
Glossary
List of Kings of the Chosŏn Dynasty
List of Names
======
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Seventeenth-century Korea was a country in crisis successive invasions by Hideyoshi and the Manchus had rocked the Choson dynasty (1392-1910), which already was weakened by maladministration, internecine bureaucratic factionalism, unfair taxation, concentration of wealth, military problems, and other ills. Yu Hyongwon (1622 1673, pen name, Pan gye), a recluse scholar, responded to this time of chaos and uncertainty by writing his modestly titled Pan gye surok (The Jottings of Pan gye), a virtual encyclopedia of Confucian statecraft, designed to support his plan for a revived and reformed Korean system of government.
Although Yu was ignored in his own time by all but a few admirers and disciples, his ideas became prominent by the mid-eighteenth century as discussions were underway to solve problems in taxation, military service, and commercial activity. Yu has been viewed by Korean and Japanese scholars as a forerunner of modernization, but in Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions James B. Palais challenges this view, demonstrating that Yu was instead an outstanding example of the premodern tradition.
Palais uses Yu Hyongwon s mammoth, pivotal text to examine the development and shape of the major institutions of Choson dynasty Korea. He has included a thorough treatment of the many Chinese classical and historical texts that Yu used as well as the available Korean primary sources and Korean and Japanese secondary scholarship. Palais traces the history of each of Yu s subjects from the beginning of the dynasty and pursues developments through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He stresses both the classical and historical roots of Yu s reform ideas and analyzes the nature and degree of proto-capitalistic changes, such as the use of metallic currency, the introduction of wage labor into the agrarian economy, the development of unregulated commercial activity, and the appearance of industries with more differentiation of labor.
Because it contains much comparative material, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions will be of interest to scholars of China and Japan, as well as to Korea specialists. It also has much to say to scholars of agrarian society, slavery, landholding systems, bureaucracy, and developing economies.
Winner of the John Whitney Hall Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies
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PublisherUniversity of Washington Press
Release dateApr 28, 2015
=====
Introduction
Since liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 Korean historians have been waging a mighty struggle to rid themselves of the
burden of Japanese colonial historiography, which decreed that for the five hundred years of the Chosŏn (Yi) dynasty (1392–1910) Korea
was mired in stagnation and incapable of development and progress. In the last few years this struggle has been won because the
efforts of Korean historians have shown that Korea appeared to be caught up in significant changes in its social structure, economy,
and other important institutions, particularly after emerging from the disaster inflicted on the Korean people by the marauding armies of
Hideyoshi Toyotomi between 1592 and 1598.
Despite the success in demonstrating that change rather than stasis is a better way of understanding the flow of history in the latter
Chosŏn dynasty, the interpretation of the nature of that change has not been as successful. In crude outline the essential argument
about the nature of change was that the rigid social structure of the early Chosŏn period, often described as “feudal,” had been
disrupted and opened to greater upward and downward social mobility, and that the primary cause of social change consisted of the
growth of the market and the liberalization of the economy. Economic liberalization flowed from the increase not only in agricultural
production, but also in per capita productivity and the creation of a surplus over subsistence gained through developments in
agricultural technology and methods. There was, in addition, the creation of a new class of entrepreneurial farmers seeking to maximize
production and wealth, expansion of the marketing of the agricultural surplus, development of handicraft industry and an increase in
the division of labor, and the intrusion of private merchants into the privileges and profits of state-licensed merchant monopolies.
These economic developments showed signs of a transition toward capitalism, particularly in the partial monetization of the economy
after 1608, the growth of private merchant activity and the accumulation of commercial capital, the development of private enterprise in
cotton textiles, ginseng cultivation, mining, pottery, and metallurgy, and increased division of labor in minting, mining, and ceramics.
These changes were allegedly accompanied by a shift from “feudal” relations between landlords and tenants and slaveholders and
slaves. Commoner tenants as well as slaves were subjected to demands on their labor as well as payment of rent to a system of
contractual, short-term sharecropping and hired labor. There was a rapid decline in the slave population from about one-third to less
than one-tenth of the population after 1780–1800. As the line between slaves and commoners began to disappear, so too did the
dividing line between the semiaristocratic yangban and commoners dissolve as the new entrepreneurial peasants accumulated wealth
and pushed their way into the upper echelons of society.
More recently, a number of scholars have been associating these developments with a virtual rise of the masses (minjung) and a
higher level of national consciousness. In contemporary historiography the masses have become the most important factor in
explaining the surge of dynamism in the late Chosŏn period and the drive toward modernity and capitalism in the economy. There is
heightened awareness of Korea as an independent nation in contradistinction to the universalistic moral philosophy of Confucianism
and the subordination of nationality and independence to the dependence, if not subservience, of Korea to Chinese imperial authority.
These revisionist interpretations of the history of the late Chosŏn dynasty have been consciously designed not only to prove the
existence of dynamism and development, but also to counteract the previous emphasis on political history and the actions of the
educated yangban class at the top of the political structure. The focus of more recent historians has been the activities of the previously
neglected mass of the people, who failed to leave much of a written record of their lives because the educated elite monopolized the use
of writing.
The contribution of the new Korean historiography to our understanding of Korean history has been valuable by uncovering very
important, but previously unnoticed, trends in the economy. What is needed at this stage, however, is to restore some balance by
examining the ideas and policies of the educated officials and statecraft writers of the time, who were attempting to analyze the
problems of society and devise solutions for them. Their efforts are of invaluable aid in understanding the nature of Korean society and
the changes it was experiencing in the last half of the dynasty.
YU HYŎNGWŎN’S PAN’GYE SUROK
There are a number of ways by which the current wisdom of the changes that occurred in the late Chosŏn dynasty could be studied, but
it is my belief that a useful beginning could be made by analyzing what was probably the greatest piece of writing on the problems of
statecraft in Korean history up to the time of its composition. That work is the Pan’gye surok (A miscellaneous account of the man from
Pan’gye), written by the scholar-recluse, Yu Hyŏngwŏn, probably between 1652 and 1670. Born in 1622 to a yangban family of officials,
Yu made two brief but desultory attempts at the civil service examinations, but he gave up on the prospect of an official career and
chose to spend the rest of his life in scholarly contemplation and writing.
Yu’s work is especially valuable for our understanding of the late Chosŏn period because he was living through the beginnings of
the changes described above, and he wrote with great clarity and detail on what he perceived to be the major problems facing the
country. Yu has been portrayed by contemporary historians as one of the first, if not the foremost, of a new school of scholars of
Practical Learning (Sirhak) who turned their attention away from earlier concerns with Confucian ethics and metaphysics to the
problems of statecraft. The first scholar to study Yu’s work after liberation in 1945 was Ch’ŏn Kwan’u, who even regarded Yu’s work and
the Sirhak movement as a whole as reflecting the trend toward modernity and nationalism that characterized the late Chosŏn period.¹
One of the tasks of this book will be to revise that interpretation, but its ultimate goal will be to transcend the interpretation of
Confucian statecraft in isolation from surrounding historical circumstance. I will discuss the nature of the major changes taking place in
Korean society throughout the Chosŏn dynasty from 1392 to the conclusion of the Kanghwa Treaty in 1876 to assess the relationship
between scholarly statecraft thought and historical reality and the influence that each had on the other.
CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT THOUGHT IN THE CHOSŎN PERIOD
The Chosŏn dynasty has been generally known as the age of Confucianism in Korean history, not because Confucian thought was not
important in Korea prior to 1392, but because Confucianism played a secondary role to Buddhism and native modes of social and family
organization. After 1392 the Neo-Confucian thought of Sung dynasty China as epitomized in the writings of Chu Hsi in the twelfth
century became the basis not only of the educational curriculum and the civil service examination system, but also of ritual practice,
family organization, and ethical values for an increasing percentage of Korean society. Neo-Confucian beliefs, norms, and practices may
have taken two to three hundred years to permeate the lowest levels of village life, although during that time other beliefs like
Buddhism, Taoism, shamanism, and geomancy were preserved, especially among the uneducated peasants. Eventually the
Neo-Confucians dominated Korean society and thought even though they may not have been able to convert everyone to all their beliefs
and practices.
The Neo-Confucian ideologues who participated in the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392 played an important role in carrying
many features of the Confucian statecraft program into effect. Since a number of institutions were introduced or strengthened at their
insistence, it was clear that the early Chosŏn period represented the zenith of the influence of Confucian statecraft ideas on practical
administration. A strange development ensued thereafter, however. The influence of Confucian statecraft scholars outside the
bureaucracy on public policy waned almost to the point of extinction. Since all active officials in the regular bureaucracy of the Chosŏn
dynasty were certified through the civil service examinations as orthodox believers in the Neo-Confucian canon, there could be no clear
accusation that the regime was failing to live up to its obligation to respect Confucian principles of governance. Active officials,
however, were subjected to the debilitating effects of routinization, neglect, and even corruption as well as lingering practices and
institutions carried over from the Koryŏ dynasty without Confucian rectification.
Furthermore, scholarly interest among Korean Confucians had gravitated away from the initial stress on an unsophisticated
conversion of the benighted masses from Buddhism, animism, and other “barbaric” tendencies to the knowledge and practice of lives
governed by Confucian ethical and social principles. The stress on tutelage of the unenlightened shifted by the sixteenth century to a
more sophisticated concern with the interpretation of the abstruse metaphysics associated with fundamental cosmic principles and the
rectification of the mind’s proclivity for immoral, unethical, and antisocial actions. But as the major concern of Confucian scholars
shifted to an inner struggle for the correct understanding of the mind’s relation to pure cosmic principle, contemplation and writing on
problems of statecraft faded as a subject of scholarly interest. For the Neo-Confucian ethicist, good government was simply a problem
of the moral conversion of sinners to saints, to borrow a Christian phrase, not the manipulation of institutions, which was left to active
officials to work out in practical affairs. To draw another analogy with the twentieth-century West, the relationship of statecraft thought
to ethical metaphysics was analogous to the relationship between applied and pure science; the former was useful and practical but less
respected than the latter, which dealt with fundamental truths.
For those reasons, the initiative for institutional reform came in the middle of the sixteenth century from active officials after the
serious deterioration of many institutions had run its course. Those initiatives were taken by men like Yulgok (the ho or pen name of Yi
I), Cho Hŏn, and Yu Sŏngnyŏng, who provided the impetus for others like Kim Yuk to sustain an institutional reform movement that
carried over into the seventeenth century. A few scholars out of office as well then began to shift their attention to matters of statecraft
and institutional reform after 1600, but it was not until 1650 or so that Yu Hyŏngwŏn embarked on an effort that would consume the
rest of his scholarly life. That effort was to lay out the fundamental principles for institutional reform based on traditions hallowed by
Confucian scholars and officials back to the age of antiquity in China.
YU HYŎNGWŎN’S ROLE
The Seventeenth-Century Situation
Unfortunately, the seventeenth-century situation contrasted markedly from the transition from the Koryŏ to Chosŏn dynasties in the late
fourteenth century. The opportunity for Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s message to be heard by the king and bureaucrats at court, who were already
Confucian in belief and practice, was nonexistent. The channels of communication between rusticated scholars and the central
bureaucrats were closed off and amateur advice on matters of statecraft was held in low esteem.
This phenomenon was not the sole fault of the exclusive right of privileged communication with the throne by regular members of
the bureaucracy who had sought to block opportunities for access for nonofficials to elevate their own prestige. Fault also lay in the
hereditary factionalism that had emerged in Korea after 1575 and served to further narrow access to the king. This was undoubtedly the
problem with Yu himself since he was a bona fide member of the yangban Munhwa Yu clan living in Seoul. His father and grandfather
had held office, he had a prestigious ancestor in Yu Kwan who associated with Cho Kwangjo’s disciples in the early sixteenth century,
and his mother was the daughter of a high official in the Yŏju Yi clan. His wife was from the P’ungsan Sim clan, and her father, Sim
Sugyŏng, was a minister of the right – all of which should have qualified him as a social equal of officeholding yangban. Unfortunately,
his father, a member of the Northerner (Pug’in) faction associated with King Kwanghaegun, suffered disaster when the Westerner
faction (Sŏin) deposed the king and replaced him with King Injo in 1623. That same year his father was implicated in a plot to restore
Kwanghaegun to the throne and was killed during interrogation under torture. Thereafter, the Northerners were excluded from
opportunities for important bureaucratic posts.
Yu passed the chinsa examination, but abandoned all interest in pursuing a higher degree or an official post. He formed associations
with members of factions out of power and was known by leaders of the Southerner faction (Nam’in) like Yun Hyu and Hŏ Mok, who
had their heyday from 1689 to 1694, and were later purged from power for a hundred years until King Chŏngjo restored some of them to
the government in the late eighteenth century. Yu spent most of his life as a recluse in the district of Puan in Chŏlla Province, where in
1652 he began work on his magnum opus, the Pan’gye surok. He finished it nineteen years later in 1670, only three years before his
death. It is one of only three of his twenty known works that remain, the other two include his recently discovered survey history of
Korea in the format used by Chu Hsi himself for China and recently compiled short fragments. He wrote treatises on Neo-Confucian
metaphysics, a synopsis of Chu Hsi’s writings, a Korean geography, a study of the Chinese pronunciation of Chinese characters, works
on military affairs and methods, and other studies of prose and poetry, medicine and acupuncture.²
Some have argued that factional exclusion and the rustication of members of minority factions were, in fact, the phenomena that
created the great scholars of practical affairs like Yu Hyŏngwŏn, but even if that were true, it did not serve to provide an audience for
their ideas at court. The transmission of Yu’s ideas was confined to his descendants, disciples, and intellectual heirs outside the
bureaucracy until the middle of the eighteenth century when they began to affect some active officials who cited his proposals during
the debate over the equal-service reform (kyunyŏkpŏb).
Yu’s magnum opus, the Pan’gye surok, was not well known while he was alive, and it did not attract King Sukchong’s interest when
Pae Sanggyu recommended it to him in 1678. It was presented by No Sahyo and other scholars and degree holders to Sukchong again
in 1694, but again without stirring the king’s interest. It was known and admired by the statecraft scholar, Yi Ik, of the early eighteenth
century and by Yi’s disciple, An Chŏngbok of the late eighteenth. The text itself was made known to the court as early as 1678, and
recommended to King Yŏngjo by a former royal secretary, Yang Tŭkchung, in 1741. Yŏngjo almost authorized its printing in 1750, but
postponed the decision until 1769, although he permitted only three copies to be made and had them stored at the Namhan Mountain
fortress and in the Historical Repository.³ In 1770 he authorized the governor of Kyŏngsang Province to begin work on a wood-block
edition. One cannot be sure from the history of its publication just how well known its contents were, and it appears that until
publication of the final work in twenty-six kwŏn in 1770, a shorter version of only thirteen kwŏn lacking the chapters on Chinese sources
was more widely circulated.⁴
In 1770 Yŏngjo also authorized Hong Ponghan to supervise the compilation of an encyclopedia of laws and institutions modeled
after the Wen-hsien t’ung-k’ao of Ma Tuan-lin. This first edition contained no references to Yu’s work, but King Chŏngjo, who was
dissatisfied with the errors and omissions in it, authorized Yi Man’un to undertake a second enlarged edition that included statements
by Yu and others known to have read his work. Although the second edition was completed in 1782, it was not published in type until
1908, which may have restricted the spread of Yu’s ideas. Nevertheless, Yu’s work had to have been known to the most prestigious
scholar-officials at court, if not the country as a whole.⁵ When the Taewongun undertook a series of reforms in the 1860s, however, Yu’s
ideas, and those of the statecraft writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were reflected in many of the policies adopted.
Therefore, the institutional reforms of the late Chosŏn dynasty got under way before Yu began writing on those questions, and an
even longer lapse, three quarters of a century, occurred before his own statecraft views became known to the court and the educated
public. For those reasons this book will attempt to survey the developments that were taking place before, during, and after Yu’s life to
compare his ideas with the reform proposals raised and solutions reached without benefit of his advice and wisdom. This exercise will
not consist simply of a comparison of two unconnected bodies of thought, because Yu himself was influenced by the ideas and actions
of government officials from the late sixteenth century to the end of his life in 1672. It will thus be possible to trace the direction of
influence and the degree of intercommunication in the transmission of ideas, and the separation between active officials and armchair
scholars on the leading institutional issues of the day.
Discussing the writings of an armchair scholar when his work was unknown to men who counted in government affairs, let alone
the public at large, might appear to some as a futile, antiquarian exercise with no relevance to the understanding of real history. Some
might even regard a study of an armchair Confucian writer as a waste of time with only the marginal utility of revealing the views of an
single idealist. The best defense against this charge is that Yu Hyŏngwŏn did what contemporary historians and social scientists do –
and what contemporary politicians cannot do – he provided a detailed study of the history of institutions from their origin and
development throughout three millennia of Chinese as well as Korean history, and a lively discussion of the views of leading officials
and statecraft scholars for overcoming the problems of those institutions. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Yu’s own
recommendations for reform, he provided what was truly an epochal and pioneering study of the institutions of his time that was far
more valuable and enlightening than the usual recitation of eternal and universal Confucian moralistic verities that peppers the oft too
brief and vague memorials of thousands of active officials.
Rationality and Empiricism within the Confucian Tradition
In the twentieth century, Yu, along with other members of the Sirhak or practical learning group, have been described variously by
scholars as the harbingers of modernity because in their investigation of the problems of real life and the real world they seemed to
presage the beginnings of a materialist rejection of Confucian moral idealism. In their use of reason and empirical observation as a
means of questioning the standards of their time they seemed to threaten the solid unity of fact and value enshrined in holistic
Confucian philosophy. In their awareness of Korean uniqueness and national identity they appeared to pose a threat to universal and
cosmopolitan Confucian culture. In their concern for the welfare of the common man they suggested a populist attack on hereditary
privilege, and in their desire for wealth and power they threatened to break the stranglehold of Confucian physiocracy and unleash the
forces of production and the market.
As this study will reveal, however, these generalizations about Sirhak thought are misleading half-truths, often the product of an
anachronistic misreading of the essence of Confucian statecraft in terms of modern, Western categories of positivistic science. Where
rationality and empirical method is discovered, it is usually interpreted as a sign of modernity, when in fact traditional premodern or
nonscientific Confucianism could be quite rational and even empirical in its approach to problem solving in the art of government. But
Confucian rationality and empiricism were not based on a rigorous epistemology. Confucian thinkers could move with ease from blind
dogmatic faith in the virtually holy writ of the ancient Chinese classics to a critical use of reason in attacking the anomalies of
contemporary society and back again with hardly a hint of remorse over any logical contradiction.
Nevertheless, what was certainly lacking was an exaltation of reason as a criterion of knowledge higher than the bequeathed wisdom
of the classics. Nor is there to be found in Yu’s writings any suggestion that sense data are the only reliable sources of information or
knowledge such that a new political science could be created independent of the maxims of Confucian wisdom. Yu’s statecraft never
separated the facts of sensual experience from the moral truths of Confucianism and never treated the facts of human society separately
from the underlying cosmological principles that inhere in the universe. Yu was always a Confucian in morals and philosophy, holistic
in his fusing of moral truth and empirical knowledge. Thus to separate the rational and empirical elements of his thought from the total
context of his philosophical understanding of the world is to do violence to the comprehensive nature of the Confucian world view.
Yu’s Historical-Mindedness
Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s significance as a statecraft thinker is not to be found in the creation of new and independent theories of government
and politics. He believed, as most Confucians, that the greatest wisdom was the product of the Chinese sages of antiquity and that the
models of government institutions were to be found in the san-tai period in Chinese history, the age of the three dynasties of Hsia,
Shang, and Chou. Yu did not believe it was possible to improve on the wisdom of the sages and he did not have the temerity to
presume that he could attain, let alone surpass, their creative genius. The task for him was to identify and extract the fundamental
principles of government theory and institutional practice as used in ancient times and adapt it to the quite different historical and
social circumstances of seventeenth-century Korea. His acknowledgment of the necessity of adaptation meant, of course, that his own
hopes for creating the best possible society would always be less than ideal, that Utopian aspirations would always be constrained by
the contingency of existing social and historical circumstances. The fascinating aspect of his thought is to be found rather in his
working out of compromise positions between the ideal and the real, revealing in the process that his realization of the impossibility of
total restoration of the world of the ancient sages forced frequent pragmatic compromises.
Kim Chunsŏk in a recent study has drawn similar conclusions. He agrees that Yu was not a Restorationist despite his admiration for
sage antiquity, and that he acknowledged the need to adjust principle to contemporary circumstance. Kim also held that Yu regarded
almost all institutions in the period of the “later age” (huse) after the fall of the Chou dynasty, including the statutes of the early Chosŏn
law code, the Kyŏngguk taejŏn, as immoral, corrupted, and deserving of reform, if not abolition. In my view, however, Kim’s conclusion
derives from his concentration only on Yu’s land reform proposals and not consideration of other issues like military and other
reforms, which reveal a surprising willingness to accept some of the early Chosŏn institutions and restore them to their pristine form.
Yu’s attitude toward the past and his sometimes pragmatic compromise with current reality pose a far more complex problem than Kim
was willing to allow.⁶
Igi Debate and Sirhak: Idealism and Materialism
Some scholars have attempted to connect the writers of the sirhak group with one of the two bipolar alternatives in the philosophical
debate over the primacy of either principle or material force (igi) in the composition of the cosmos and the human mind. Principle was
defined in the Neo-Confucian lexicon as the “ought” as well as the “is” of existence, why things are both what they are and what they
ought to be.⁷ Material force represented the material component of all objects, but since the mind had no observable materiality, it
could not have been matter in the common sense of the term. For that reason Hoyt Tillman employed “psycho-physical energy” and
Wing-tsit Chan used “material force” to represent it.⁸
Although principle and psycho-physical energy (igi) were supposed to be inseparable parts of a duality according to Chu Hsi’s
formulation, Korean scholars in the sixteenth century debated whether abstract and ideal principles or the materiality of objects and the
human mind really governed the operation of the human psyche and human behavior. Although almost all the sixteenth-century
participants in the debate agreed on the notion that principle and psycho-physical energy were mixed together or intertwined, their
disciples and descendants began to create a polarity in the debate and take sides, unfortunately mostly (but not exclusively) along the
lines of the political factions that formed after 1575. For that matter, preference for psycho-physical energy had already occurred in the
writings of Chang Tsai in the Sung dynasty, which was picked up by Sŏ Kyŏngdŏk (pen name, Hwadam, 1489–1546) and Na Hŭnsin
(pen name, Chŏng’am, 1465–1547) in Korea in the previous century.
In any case, it was not the divergent interpretations of principle and psycho-physical energy of the two most illustrious
scholar-officials of the sixteenth century – Yi Hwang (pen name, T’oegye) and Yi I (pen name, Yulgok) – who triggered the rivalry, but
the followers (emphasis mine) and intellectual heirs of those men. The disciples of T’oegye were generally known as advocates of the
primacy of principle, and those of Yulgok as proponents of psycho-physical energy. The attempt by some twentieth-century scholars to
link these two alternatives to the Western dichotomy between idealism and materialism and then identify statecraft writers with
material-force monism and Western materialism has not proved convincing. Yu himself was certainly no materialist, and to the end of
his life he became an advocate of the supremacy of principle.
The summary of his ideas about principle and psycho-physical energy in the brief biography written by An Chŏngbok of the late
eighteenth century indicates that Yu insisted strongly on the monism of fundamental cosmic and metaphysical reality and claimed that
principle and psycho-physical energy were never separated from each other despite arguments of other philosophers to the contrary.⁹
This idea has been further explored recently by Yi Usŏng and Kim Chunsŏk, who have studied the recently published collection of his
writings on miscellaneous issues and other materials.¹⁰ Yi found in a letter Yu wrote to Chang Tongjik at the age of thirty-seven se that
he was inclined to favor the notion that psycho-physical energy took primacy over principle because he could not imagine how principle
could even exist in the absence of psycho-physical energy since principle had no materiality to it. A decade later, however, at the age of
forty-eight se he changed his mind and declared that both principle and psycho-physical energy existed together and were intermixed
with one another, and that principle did not owe its existence to psycho-physical energy.
He rejected Yulgok’s view that principle and psycho-physical energy “issued forth” or made their appearance jointly. He preferred to
think of the “mind of Heaven” (ch’ŏnsim, the equivalent of principle in the world) as always a part of “the mind of man” (insim, the
equivalent of the imperfect human mind beclouded by the psycho-physical energy within it) and never separated from it. But this did
not mean that he automatically adopted that position because he had decided to follow T’oegye. On the contrary, he also thought that
T’oegye’s perception of the igi relationship, that “when principle emerges, psycho-physical energy follows it, and when psycho-physical
energy emerges, principle rides on it” was too suggestive of dualism, connoting the possibility of separation between moral principles
and the inert materiality in which it inheres.
Instead, he worked out his own formulation, that principle and psycho-physical energy were “never separated” and that principle, or
moral principles, often referred to as the “mind of the Way” (tosim, equivalent to the mind of Heaven) was also to be found in the mind
of man, which was vulnerable to human desire and corruption. Yi Usŏng suggested that he probably received some inspiration for this
viewpoint from the first important statecraft scholar of the seventeenth century, Han Paekkyŏm. Han’s essay on “The Four Origins and
Seven Emotions” (sadan ch’ilchŏng), rejected Yulgok’s view that moral principles in the mind (the four origins) were produced by the
mind of Heaven, while the source of the seven emotions (i.e., impure feelings and desires rather than pure virtue) was the mind of man.
Han’s correction to this formulation was that psycho-physical energy was responsible for the emergence (of both), but that principle
was to be understood as the reason why anything (i.e., psycho-physical energy) emerged or appeared in the world at all – a position that
at once refuted both Yulgok’s and T’oegye’s positions.
Yu reinforced his preference for principle by making the conventional argument that principle was to be found in everything in the
universe, but he emphasized not only things and events, but in particular the laws and institutions of the real world, which he had
chosen to be the objects of his own study. He called his version of principle, “real principle” (silli), and the object of his study “real
facts” (silsa). Yi Usŏng wrote that Yu’s shift to a position close to principle-monism meant that his objective was now to determine what
Heaven’s principle (ch’ŏlli) was with respect to institutions, an exercise completely free from any utilitarian objective.¹¹
Kim Chunsŏk expanded on Yi’s analysis by pursuing Yu’s formulations on what he thought was Yu’s creation of a new philosophical
basis for his statecraft study based on a critical evaluation of the views of Chinese and Korean scholars since Chu Hsi. Kim held that Yu
did not simply follow everything written by Chu Hsi, but went back to the classics and used his own independent reason to choose
among alternative formulations, a scholarly method that he applied as well to his study of institutions and laws. Kim calls the method
one of “critical verification based on the citation of evidence” (pip’anjŏg’imyŏ silchŭng [chŏn’gŏ] juŭijŏg’in hangmun t’aedo).¹² Kim’s
formulation is an interesting one, and it will be kept in mind as we analyze Yu’s writings on Chosŏn institutions.
Kim chose to emphasize the contribution Yu made to the establishment of a philosophical justification for the study of the real
world and “real facts” (silsa) by introducing a new term, “real principle” (silli), which he defined as a monistic entity in which
psycho-physical energy was included and subordinated to it. Since real principle was to him the essential feature of the universe, he
stated that he would not be looking for laws of movement and action totally divorced from moral principles because those principles
were an inseparable component of that world.
Yu extended his notion of real principle to all aspects of Confucian philosophical debate, in which principle was equivalent to the
Great Ultimate (t’aegŭk), Heaven (Ch’ŏn) or Heaven’s principle (Ch’ŏlli), the Way (to), the mind of the Way (tosim), human nature
(sŏng), the four basic virtues in the human mind (sadan), and the idea of sincerity (sŏng, or being true to one’s self) in the Doctrine of the
Mean. In his formulation, however, real principle was not an equal partner with all those concepts that had been regarded as antithetical
to the elements in the above list – the corruptible mind of Man (insim), psycho-physical energy (ki), the human emotions (chŏng), the
seven emotions (ch’ilchŏng), and human desires. On the contrary, all of them were part of the unity that pervaded all of the world and
humanity in which real principle was an irremovable part. Kim argued that the contribution of this formulation to those who came after
Yu, men like Yi Ik and Tasan (Chŏng Yagyong), was that they rejected the whole igi debate for its fundamental misunderstanding of the
unity in the cosmos and its creation of an unnecessary dualism that only reinforced factional strife.¹³
These new studies by Yi Usŏng and Kim Chunsŏk confirm my conviction that Yu’s unitarian world view was based on his concept of
the interconnectedness of moral principles and the mundane affairs of government and the real world, and that he was the last person
one might expect would launch the separation of fact from value that supposedly marked the beginning of objective and empirical
reason and empirical observation and its divorce from Christian revelation and faith in the Renaissance.¹⁴
THE CONFUCIAN FRAMEWORK OF STATECRAFT DEBATES
Almost all the participants in the debate over institutional reform in late Chosŏn were card-carrying believers in Confucianism, just as
Yu was. Despite the current enthusiasm for Yu and other so-called sirhak scholars of practical learning because of the misperception
that they were leading the way out of traditional Confucianism towards some form of “modernity,” the dialogue was limited to
Confucian alternatives alone until Christian heterodoxy intruded on the Korean scene in the late eighteenth century. And even then, the
vigorous persecution of Christianity in 1791 and 1801 drove the potential for ideological disruption at the highest level of government
underground, restoring the spectrum of acceptable alternatives once again to the Confucian framework.
Nonetheless, working within the Confucian framework did not mean conformity only to a single ideal or a single solution of
contemporary problems. At the least, Yu’s work represented a rejection of several aspects of the status quo in Chosŏn life, which most
Confucian scholars and officials at the time defended as proper or rationalized as legitimate. His statecraft scholarship also marked
both a resurgence of a reform movement that had begun in official circles in the late sixteenth century, and a shift to matters of
statecraft and institutional reform by scholars outside the Korean capital and bureaucracy.
Whether the role of Confucian statecraft thought was to safeguard the status quo or demand change depended on the
circumstances involved. In crude terms, Korean Confucian statecraft was most reformist at the beginning of the Chosŏn dynasty in the
late fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries, again in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in response to the routinization of
government institutions and bureaucracy, and finally after the imsul peasant rebellion of 1862. In between, the tide of Confucian
statecraft thought reverted to a conservative mentality dedicated to the preservation of the status quo and stability.
EARLY CHOSŎN INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR DEGENERATION
Early Chosŏn Institutions
Since Yu’s thought represented that second wave of reform and his writings were geared to the problems of the Chosŏn dynasty at its
midpoint, and not at its creation, it is essential that the reader should understand the reasons why his reform program did not simply
replicate all the proposals of the late Koryŏ reformers. For that reason, Part 1 of this book will consist of a lengthy background section
consisting of three chapters devoted to the institutional makeup of the early Chosŏn dynasty (chap. 1), the deterioration of those early
Chosŏn institutions up to and including the devastating effects of Hideyoshi’s invasion in the 1590s (chap. 2), and the nature of the
recovery and institutional reconstruction that was undertaken in the half-century prior to the beginning of Yu’s two-decade long study in
1650 (chap. 3).
The description of the institutions of the early Chosŏn dynasty is essential because the essence of Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s critique, based
on his own Confucian perspective on institutional questions, was that the institutions adopted at the beginning of the dynasty were not
fully informed by the proper Confucian spirit. Part of his reasoning for this was that those institutions were not created according to the
proposals made by the most thoroughgoing Confucian reformers of the transition period (particularly land reform). The incomplete
Confucianization of early Chosŏn institutions was caused either by unavoidable circumstance or by the different, nonideological
perspective of the dynastic founder, Yi Sŏnggye, who was a military commander and politician rather than a philosopher or moralist.
His second reason was that the late Koryŏ Confucian ideologues were either mistaken in their confidence in certain institutions that
they thought constituted essential elements of a Confucian state (like the examination system, which had been criticized by Chu Hsi
and a number of other Neo-Confucian worthies), or they neglected to rectify things that they mistakenly thought were legitimate and
acceptable (like inherited slavery).
The Period of Degeneration
Chapter 2 will be devoted to a discussion of the forms of degeneration and change in early Chosŏn institutions that brought both the
Chosŏn dynasty and the Korean nation to the verge of destruction in the 1590s. These forms can be conveniently divided into
conventional categories. In politics, the Confucian emphasis on limited monarchy, equal opportunity for all men of moral rectitude to
move into the ranks of officialdom, and probity in administrative behavior was undermined by regal aspirations to tyranny, the raw
political ambition of officials, favoritism, factional coalition in defense of personal interest, and backbiting calumny against political
rivals. In society, reciprocity based on an exchange of loyalty and noblesse oblige and the bestowal of honor and prestige in accordance
with moral capacity was overwhelmed by the narrower and more traditional bonds of blood and kinship that were carried over from the
hoary traditions of the Silla and Koryŏ dynasties. An ever-narrowing group of yangban semiaristocrats closed off all access to their ranks
by the use of inherited wealth and privilege and sharp-eyed selection of marriage partners, and an ever-increasing body of slaves were
prevented by the stigma of birth from receiving the dignity due to ordinary human beings. This was possibly the most egregious
anomaly in Confucian society, an hereditary aristocracy of blood and kin in the midst of a slave society (approximately 30 percent of the
population) that beggared the promise of the Confucian message that only the most worthy men would lead, and only the least worthy
would hold up the rear and bear the burden of support.
In military defense, an optimum system of service for all, given the conventional exemptions of yangban and slaves, a state of
readiness blessed by a nationwide system of garrisons, and a high state of morale and an uncorrupted officer corps were all weakened
and virtually destroyed. There had been an expansion of exemptions, replacement of duty soldiers by tax payments, a disappearance of
troops from garrisons, and neglect by officers of the conditions of their garrisons and the training of their men in order to profit from
support payments from the taxpayers. In civil administration, a body of reasonably honest officials and clerks and a modicum of
cooperation at the village level between local officials and their clerks, the local elders and ordinary peasants had been lost. The clerks,
who were shorn of their salaries by the new dynasty, began to scramble for fees and gratuities to support themselves, to accept bribes
from men seeking favors, to peddle their influence, and to funnel illicit gains to their superiors in the regular bureaucracy. Cooperation
disappeared as the local gentry lost their public spirit in their attempts to evade taxes and service, and reinforced their superiority as
landlords and creditors at the expense of the peasantry. The communality and commonality of village life was undermined by divisions
of status, wealth, and class.
In economic distribution, a reasonable system of distribution based on the secure possession of plots of land for every peasant
family was lost as the ranks of the dispossessed increased, as smallholders became tenants or hired laborers of rich landlords, or as the
truly distressed commended themselves to others as slaves. In taxation, a logical, tripartite system of taxes geared to a predominantly
agrarian and noncommercial society in which a grain tax on land, a labor service tax on labor, and the collection in kind of special
tribute products from villages was kept to the lowest possible level to guarantee subsistence to the peasant was left far behind. The
tribute system was gradually replaced by private contracting arrangements and illicit market transactions, service was skewed by marked
and conspicuous evasion with heavier transfers to those still in the system, and the grain tax remained too small to cover official
disbursements.
In commerce and industry, a regulated system to restrict commerce and industry to the supply of necessary goods for the ruling
class in the capital and bare necessities for subsistence peasants in the countryside was undermined. Private merchants had begun to
break free from restrictions, engage in both wholesale and retail trade, accumulate capital, and to corner markets to make larger profits,
and private artisans began to abscond from their state employers to produce goods for the market on their own.
What was the nature of this transition? It certainly represented the degeneration of the institutions created at the beginning of the
dynasty, but not all such developments were negative because departures from a restricted and controlled economy could be regarded
by many as favorable and progressive developments of a freer economy. Can we pin labels on it redolent of the transition from tradition
to modernity, like the journey from feudalism to capitalism, from communal land to private property, from bound labor to free labor,
from licensed monopolies or guilds to free merchants and free markets, from stagnation to development? There are certainly
resemblances between these changes in Korea from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries that appear similar to
those in the West from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, but bedrock differences remained, impervious to facile comparison.
Land was privately owned from the outset, but it lacked an independent legal system to guarantee it against predators, whether the state
or influential private parties. The economic and political systems were not feudal in the classical Western sense because the centralized
bureaucratic state was already in place, autonomous fiefs were not granted to military vassals, and the peasants were not bound to the
land. About one-third of the labor supply was unfree, and they were chattel slaves, closer perhaps to the social system of ancient Rome
than either the Western Middle Ages or early modern Europe. The smallholders, tenants, and hired laborers were legally free, but still
repressed by state officials, landlords, and local magnates – and they remained that way to the end of the dynasty. The economic system
did experience a loosening of the bonds and regulations imposed at the beginning of the dynasty, but the growth of the market and
private merchant activity was restricted, licensed monopolies remained to the end of the dynasty alongside unlicensed or private
merchants, and currency, either in metallic or paper form, disappeared entirely from the market just as other, presumably “progressive”
developments in the economy were taking place.
Finally, class structure was not moving in the direction of freedom. Mobility there was, both upward and downward, but because the
yangban class at the top through the highest civil service examination (munkwa) was becoming narrower, and the class of hereditary
slaves were remaining in place if not growing in size until about 1780–1800, there was no corollary liberalization of society to
accompany moderate economic liberalization. The state, not terribly powerful but stronger than it had been in any past dynasty,
remained under the control of a class of bureaucrats educated in Neo-Confucian thought but recruited primarily from the ranks of the
yangban families, not the general public.
The Disaster of the Imjin War, 1592–98
Could the Chosŏn dynasty, the political entity that prevailed over this disintegrating system, have continued indefinitely? If Chinese
history were to provide the template for comparison, it would have been unlikely. There were too many things wrong in 1592 for Korean
society to have continued much longer without popular rebellion. In any case, we will never know, because a deus ex machina in the
form of the Hideyoshi war machine with a century of practice in bloody combat and armed with its new Portuguese-style muskets and
cannon cut a bloody swath through the Korean countryside. If anyone had had any doubts about the health of the Chosŏn dynasty, its
utter incapacity for self-defense removed those doubts forever.
Prior to the invasions only a few men of foresight could see trouble brewing from the weakness of domestic institutions and the
growing threat from Japan, but most of the public was complacent. Once the invasion hit the country, however, everyone was aware that
Chosŏn institutions were at fault, and that something had to be done to prevent a recurrence of disaster in the future.
What might have been called to task to atone for the disaster were some of the fundamentals of governance: the monarchy,
inherited privilege and slavery, and Confucian ideology. King Sŏnjo could easily have been held responsible for failing to foresee the
Japanese threat and strengthen defenses. Inherited privilege could have been identified as the reason for the incompetence of the
bureaucracy and for the evasion of tax and service by the yangban. Confucianism might have been held responsible for its inability to
stem the deficiency of morale, the loss of bureaucratic honesty and devotion, the loss of revenues and service, and the inefficiency of
government. But because the invasion was sudden and descended on the people like a natural disaster, neither king nor monarchy,
neither inherited privilege nor slavery, and neither Confucian philosophy nor Confucian statecraft were held responsible.
Leszek Kolakowski, in attempting to explain why the Communist system in Russia and East Europe did not collapse long before
1989, remarked that supposedly objective measures of decrepitude like economic inefficiency and wartime disaster were not sufficient
to overthrow a regime without the mental readiness of the population for it. “As with most closed ideological systems, communism was
for a long time immune to criticism, and no empirical evidence to the contrary made a difference, since the ideology could easily absorb
any facts that seemed to falsify it and dismiss them as irrelevant.” The same statement could be applied to Korean faith in Confucian
ethics and statecraft in the seventeenth century. What chance could there have been for the overthrow of Confucianism and the
institutions of bureaucratic monarchy when there was no observable challenge to its monopoly over the Korean mind at the time? There
was no equivalent to the “slow but inexorable erosion of Communism as a living faith” in Chosŏn Korea in that period.¹⁵
Seventeenth-Century Reconstruction
Since the evidence of failure did not provoke an attack on the ideological beliefs and institutional arrangements that produced it, the
survivors of the Imjin War set about searching for ways to remedy the major problems without a revolutionary abandonment of these
impedimenta. Yu Hyŏngwŏn was also captive to this general mood, for he spent most of his adult lifetime in a search through the
materials of his beloved tradition for solutions to institutional breakdown. He was convinced that it was not the Confucian tradition that
was at fault for Korea’s problems, but the misguided way that it had been applied.
In the half century before Yu Hyŏngwŏn took up his pen, change began to appear in Chosŏn institutions, some initiated by
reformist officials, others as manifestations of trends beneath the surface but under way for over a century. Some of these changes were
failures. After 1598 political power was determined more than ever by factions, culminating in the successful coup against King
Kwanghaegun in 1623. In the rebuilding of the military defense system, the shortage of troops was overcome, not by the enlistment of
the yangban malingerers and draft dodgers, but by the incorporation of slaves into the military for the first time.
The restructuring of military defense was adversely affected by the influence of factional politics. The new divisions created after
1623 became playthings of the politicians who participated in the coup of that time, and the consequence was the weakening of national
defense and eventually defeats in 1627 and 1637 at the hands of the Manchus, who in 1644 succeeded in overturning the Ming empire.
After the Manchu victory in 1637, the Manchus chose not to rule directly but imposed harsh terms of tribute on the Korean economy
and kept a sharp eye on the Korean military system to ensure that no major rearmament projects that might lead to an alliance with the
surviving Ming restorationist armies could be pursued.
A respite was provided in the rebuilding of the economy because the destruction of land and the loss of population created a
surplus of land and allowed the survivors to begin to restore their fields to annual production, but the state chose not to interfere in the
system of distribution. It chose to reduce the land tax to a minimum for the benefit of reconstruction, but it allowed the return of
yangban and landlords to their lands, the mobilization of private resources and capital, and the continuation of slavery and tenancy for
the cultivation of large holdings.
The most striking changes took place in the economy. In the agrarian sector new techniques and methods spread and served to
increase production, allowing surpluses that gradually began to be marketed. The state sought to convert tribute contracting into a
system of state purchase of necessities from merchants and the market, which stimulated commerce. Officials sought to introduce
metallic currency into the market to increase the speed and efficiency of exchange, and private merchants began to expand their
activities beyond the restrictions of licensed merchants.
Thus, when Yu Hyŏngwŏn began to write his massive study of the problems of contemporary statecraft, Korean conditions had
changed significantly from the previous century, but the Chosŏn government had by no means solved its major problems in the fifty
years since the Imjin War. Yu had to decide whether the bureaucratic monarchy was functioning the way it should, whether the king had
too much or too little power, and whether the right men were being recruited into government positions. He faced problems of agrarian
reconstruction, land distribution, taxation, and military service. He had to decide whether the current system of landownership based
on inheritance, purchase, and sale, and the use of slaves and tenants for the cultivation of estates should be maintained or changed. He
had to ponder the problems caused by a largely hereditary and privileged yangban ruling class and a slave society. He had to
contemplate the methods for the recreation of national defense in the face of Manchu surveillance. He had to decide whether the
economic changes stemming from the taedong reform of the tribute system, the expansion of market and commercial activity, and the
introduction of currency into the economy should be checked in favor of a return to the simpler economy of early Chosŏn times, or
accepted and promoted. In general, he had to decide whether to maintain fundamental principles or adjust to changing circumstances
and, devotée of Confucian statecraft wisdom as he was, he had to find a way to apply that lore to the problems of his age.
FORMAT OF THE BOOK: PARTS II–VI
This book will be divided into five sections (Parts II–VI) to deal with the major topics that Yu discussed in his Pan’gye surok. In each
case, the presentation of Yu’s ideas will be fit into the context of the previous history of the institutions involved and the development
of those institutions after his death to illustrate the source of the influences on him, and the influence of his ideas on subsequent
policies.
The first three parts of the book will be related to the central question of inherited status, particularly the yangban ruling class and
the slaves. Part II on Social Reform will explore Yu’s solution to two questions: what he regarded as a thoroughly inappropriate manner
for the education and recruitment of officials that had resulted in the domination of officeholding by a closed group of yangban, and the
suffering and injustice visited on a third of the population and the loss of their services to the state by the system of hereditary slavery.
Part III on Land Reform will discuss Yu’s conclusion that the main cause for the maldistribution of wealth was the concentration of
private landed property in the hands of the yangban and landlords, and his proposals for eliminating this system and achieving an
equitable redistribution of land. It will also discuss the subsequent history of land reform thought and policy to the early nineteenth
century to determine whether Yu’s ideas had any influence on policy, and whether they set in motion a progressive movement leading to
more radical or modern solutions.
Since the allocation of service was also related to the weakness of national defense stemming from exemptions and nonregistration
of yangban and slaves on the basis of inherited status and other privileges, the material in Part IV on Military Reform will discuss Yu’s
methods for solving this problem. Part IV will also deal with national defense in general, including strategy, tactics, weapons, and
fortifications, in order to judge the flexibility and receptivity to new developments, but the section will end with coverage of
developments in military organization and service from Yu’s death to the end of the nineteenth century. In that period the Ch’ing peace
eliminated any foreign military threat and shifted Korean attention to the financial problems relating to the support of the military. As
military defense shifted away from strategy, tactics, and weapons to finance, the distribution of service and taxation once again returned
to the center of attention. This meant that the inequity in the distribution of that burden based on exemptions and evasion became a
serious problem that affected the lives of the mass of the population and the very viability of the dynasty. In that context, Yu’s ideas
were an important part of the debate over reform.
Part V will shift focus to the consideration of Yu’s plan for the reform of the central bureaucracy and its mode of operation, and Part
VI will treat the economic changes that were taking place in the seventeenth century, Yu’s response to them, and developments that
occurred through the end of the eighteenth century. The chapters in Part V will deal with agencies involved with the king and his court,
the central and local government, including both regular officials and clerks, and the attempt to reinvigorate institutions of local
=====
EPILOGUE
The Complexities of Korean Confucian Statecraft
This book has been devoted to a study of Confucian statecraft in the last half of the Chosŏn dynasty with respect not only to its ideas,
but to its relevance to government policy and action. The material presented in the text reveals that it is very difficult, if not impossible,
to define Confucian statecraft in action in simple terms for a number of reasons. The ideas that constituted the Confucian statecraft
tradition were not always internally consistent. The conflict between historical contingency and ideal Confucian objectives inhibited or
obstructed the achievement of those objectives; antinomies within Confucian thought and practice guaranteed conflict over the
definition of goals and priorities; and the impossibility of recovering the ideal norms of classical antiquity because of the irreversibility
of the transition from the Chou feudalism to Ch’in centralized bureaucracy meant that difference of opinion was unavoidable over the
crucial question of compromise between the ideal and the real. For these reasons, the statecraft thought of Yu Hyŏngwŏn, which has
constituted the focus of this study, cannot be taken as the only, the best, or the most representative example of Korean Confucian
statecraft thought in Korea. Some of his ideas were truly unusual and some were acceptable to most Confucians, but others were
rejected as unworkable, even by those who regarded themselves as his intellectual disciples. The reason why I chose him as the focus
for this study was because he was the first Korean scholar of the Chosŏn dynasty to write a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the
deficiencies of his society in the seventeenth century, providing us with an excellent entrée into statecraft writing and the nature and
complexity of a Korean Confucian society under stress. His scheme for the rectification of institutions provides a template for us to
compare the ideas and policies of both scholars and officials involved in the contemplation of policy to the end of the dynasty.
THE INCOMPLETENESS OF THE CONFUCIAN TRANSFORMATION
At the beginning of the Chosŏn dynasty, there were very few people in Korean society who would be regarded as thoroughgoing
Confucians because despite the presence of Confucian ideas for two millennia, Buddhism functioned as the dominant religion at the
upper levels of society, and folk religion, which included animistic spirit worship and shamanism, was pervasive among the rural
peasantry. The new dynasty was ushered in by a small coterie of converts to the Neo-Confucian doctrines of Sung dynasty China,
particularly as digested and recapitulated by Chu Hsi in the twelfth century. These men set out on an effort to convert all of Korea to
belief in Neo-Confucian principles and the practice of Confucian norms.
They and their successors at the top of government and society went a long way to achieving their aims, but they never fully
completed their task. Even though the peasants were eventually converted to Confucian ancestor worship and patrilineal family
organization and the like, they never fully discarded their fear of the spirits in general. Total conversion of Korean society to Confucian
belief was also hindered because its educational enterprise was underfunded. The early Chosŏn state’s official school system proved a
failure even before the end of the fifteenth century, and even the private academies after the mid-sixteenth century were not created to
educate all benighted peasants. Their Confucian overlords needed them more in the fields than in the schoolroom.
The inadequacy of mass education was not the only reason for the violation of Confucian norms and standards in real life. Many of
the officials who had been schooled and indoctrinated in Confucian moral standards placed private interest over the public good, took
bribes to enrich themselves and their own families, exploited peasants and slaves to increase their wealth, and foreclosed on mortgages
to expand their landed properties instead of fulfilling their role as moral examplars for society at large. Even though Neo-Confucian
bureaucrats were supposed to run Korean affairs as they would a moral order, many of them were incapable of living up to the high
standards of the moral code.
In this sense the history of the Chosŏn dynasty could be viewed as a morality play in which a solid core of true believers did battle
with the reality of human weakness and foible. Neo-Confucians understood the persistence of human imperfection because they had
been taught that inner goodness in the mind was obscured or obstructed by psychophysical force. Historical experience had also
demonstrated that dynasties were not static or perpetual; they had a life of their own that led to decline marked by the breakdown of
social order and rebellion in which the forces of evil seemed to win the day.
Confucianism, however, was not discredited despite its failure to halt moral and dynastic decline because of the view that chaos and
disorder was the fault of leadership, education, or institutions, not the moral philosophy itself. Confucian standards could outlive one
dynasty and be resuscitated by the next. Confucian thought was thus preserved as the dominant system of belief and the source of
statecraft wisdom from the Sung through Ch’ing dynasties in China despite the overthrow of individual dynasties. Korea had only one
dynasty dominated by the Confucian vision, the Chosŏn dynasty. It should have come to an end in 1592 when Hideyoshi invaded Korea
because by that time the Chosŏn state had been weakened by maladministration, internecine bureaucratic factionalism, unfair taxation,
the concentration of wealth, the evasion of responsibility, and the deterioration of national defense. If Confucian statecraft were to be
judged by consideration of the results of a government run by Confucians, Confucian statecraft should have been deemed a failure in
1592. But when the war was over in 1598 both the Chosŏn state and the Confucian philosophy that guided it remained intact.
Confucianism in the Midst of Contingent Circumstance
When Neo-Confucianism was adopted as the leading belief and ideology at the beginning of the Chosŏn dynasty, society and social
institutions were already well developed. The state was organized as a monarchical bureaucracy, and society was structured
hierarchically on the basis of hereditary or semihereditary principles, including strict discrimination between status categories. This
situation alone meant that the early Chosŏn Neo-Confucians had inherited institutions that were less than ideal.
Monarchy and Centralized Bureaucracy. The existence of a ruler or monarch had been recognized by Confucians as a necessity for
civilized government since Confucius himself, but absolute monarchy and a centralized government organization had always been
major problems for Confucian statecraft thinkers. Rulers could be a danger and threat to the Confucian moral and social order because
they were usually more concerned with the retention of their political power than conformity to moral norms. Confucians had an
ambiguous if not contradictory attitude toward rulers, particularly the bad ones. Mencius had taught that since an immoral ruler lost his
Heavenly Mandate to rule, the population had the right to overthrow him and replace him with another. Confucians might justifiably
withdraw their loyalty from such an immoral ruler, but they might also feel that it was their duty to stick with him to lead him from
immorality to morality.
Because Confucian thought emphasized loyalty to the ruler, some have believed that Confucian thought was conducive to the
creation of monarchical despotism, especially in the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties in China. The Korean situation was somewhat different
because most Confucian officials were drawn from yangban families with a long history of honor, wealth, prestige, and status that
outshone the royal clan. It is true that at the beginning of the dynasty they supported an army general in his usurpation of the throne
because they felt that greater royal authority was essential for transforming society from Buddhism and animism to Confucian belief.
But once the new dynasty was in place, the Confucian officials began what became a protracted battle against most kings to preserve
their own families’ hold on power, wealth, and position, and to induce them to accept Confucian standards of statecraft.
When the Chosŏn dynasty appeared, Korea had long been organized as a centralized bureaucracy, but centralization had been
incomplete, at least by the standards of most Chinese dynasties. The Neo-Confucian supporters of the new dynasty successfully
overcame that deficiency by extending central control to all the districts of the kingdom, but they were never enamored of centralized
bureaucracy as the best form of government organization because it represented the political system of the Ch’in dynasty that had
destroyed the beloved feudal political configuration of the Chou dynasty in the late third century B.C.
The Ch’in bureaucratic system was based on Legalist thought that seemed diametrically opposed to Confucian moral philosophy.
The Legalists took a negative view of human nature, eschewed moral education and persuasion as useless methods for the
establishment of order, and insisted on the necessity of reward and punishment as the only means for keeping human beings under
control. All Confucian officials who served bureaucratic dynasties after the Ch’in had to use punishment as the means for enforcing
conformity. Some sought to temper it with Confucian compassion, but others became such adept users of coercion that punishment
became as much a feature of the bureaucratic Confucian state as moral suasion. Even the most moralistic Neo-Confucians resorted to
punishment as the ultimate recourse for forcing the ignorant and recalcitrant to conform to Confucian moral ideals, revealed only so
clearly in Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s regulations for the conduct of his proposed schools. Yet most Confucians believed that the unmitigated use
of punishment was symptomatic of the moral failure of the ruler and the state.
Unfortunately centralized bureaucracy had proved to be permanent, and Confucians had to adjust to these unfortunate
circumstances as the only way for their philosophy to survive. The conflict between the two ideals – moral suasion versus coercion –
was never solved, and the dividing line between the two was left to arbitrary judgment or circumstance.
The Social Legacy: Heredity, Property, and Slavery. The ruling class of the early Chosŏn dynasty consisted of yangban families that
constituted a semiaristocratic bureaucratic elite that owed much of their prominence to the inheritance of status, and they ruled over a
slave society sustained by the system of inherited slave status. Neo-Confucians in the first two centuries of the dynasty barely raised the
question of the moral conflict between Confucian principles and semihereditary bureaucracy and hereditary slavery. It was not until the
immense pressure exerted on the Chosŏn state by a series of catastrophic invasions after 1592 that the Confucian bureaucrats began to
think of requiring idle yangban and slaves to perform military service.
The inheritance of social status, whether yangban or slave, was not only responsible for revenue shortages and inadequate defense
because of tax-exemption privileges, it also contributed significantly to obstructing the achievement of the Confucian ideal of expanded
opportunity for education and officeholding. The preservation of class interest by yangban landlords and slaveowners was the main
obstacle to converting society to a moral basis for the distribution of prestige, office, and wealth, but reform was made doubly difficult
by the antinomies within the Confucian moral system. Confucians were morally obliged to preserve the patrimony of their families,
including slaves as well as real estate, and to show the utmost respect for one’s elders and superiors in the social order, a moral
obligation used by landlords and slaveowners to legitimize private property and slavery.
Even though the idealistic Confucians agreed that the virtuous ruler was obliged to guarantee subsistence to the common peasant,
ideally through the grant of a minimal plot of arable land according to the well-field model of the Chou dynasty, they were faced with the
reality of private property that had determined land tenure in Korea for over a millennium. Since the early Chosŏn kings ignored appeals
for nationalization and egalitarian redistribution, they confirmed the private property of the landlords and opened the door to the
recreation of the same conditions in the maldistribution of wealth that had prevailed in the late fourteenth century. As a result most
Confucians paid only lip service to the notion of national ownership and egalitarian redistribution.
Even less attention was paid to hereditary slavery that had been in practice since the tenth or eleventh centuries, possibly because
slavery itself had never been condemned as immoral. At least the question of hereditary enslavement of the innocent should have been
raised by committed Confucians, but few did so. In any case, the class interests of the landlords and slaveowners in a slave society
constituted an insuperable obstacle to idealistic Confucian purists.
Agriculture over Commerce and Industry
These class interests were abetted by the overpowering and enduring belief by Confucian scholars and officials alike that agricultural
production was the only legitimate way to produce wealth. Food and clothing were necessary to subsistence, but all else was
superfluous and contributed to unnecessary, ostentatious, and immoral consumption. Industry and commerce were acknowledged as
necessary activities, but only in a limited way. Artisans had a role to play in providing the population with necessary nonagricultural
goods, but any expansion in the production of luxury items would corrupt the morals of the people. Likewise commerce was necessary
for the circulation of goods, but any excessive profiteering would reduce the production of necessities by inducing peasants to abandon
their primary agricultural tasks in pursuit of commercial profit.
These ideal principles were compromised in real life because the nobility, yangban, landlords, and the rich were allowed to enjoy the
luxuries of life, the skilled artisans were employed, often by the state, in producing the brocades, silks, fine pottery, and other
“unnecessary” items of conspicuous consumption, and merchants were subsidized, often with monopoly licenses, to provide those
items to the king and upper class. Only the peasants were left to fulfill the Confucian moral norms of frugality, but more by deprivation
and the lack of wealth than by adherence to abstract moral norms. These violations of Confucian norms of simplicity, frugality, and
modesty existed in every dynasty because those with the wealth to buy luxury goods refused to dispense with them. Confucians had
either to engage in constant scolding of the recalcitrant or resign themselves to tacit or hypocritical acceptance of human weakness. The
Physiocratic emphasis on agricultural production and the concomitant denigration of industrial and commercial activity in Korean
Confucian thought supported the preeminent economic and political position of the landlords by hindering the accumulation of wealth
by artisans and merchants, and by forbidding their participation in the competition for bureaucratic office.
International trade did not provide a major stimulus to commerce in general because of the restrictions of the tributary system with
China, the suspicion and lack of trust between Koreans and their Chinese or Manchu suzerains, the predatory aggressions of the Wakō
pirates from Japan in the fifteenth century, the involvement of the Japanese with their own internal wars in the sixteenth century, and the
reimposition of severe limits on foreign trade activity after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1636. In fact, these real limits on international
trade probably accounted as much as Confucian doctrine for the restrictions on the development of the economy.
Bureaucratic Routinization and Crisis
Chinese had experienced the rise and fall of dynasties so frequently in their long history that they became convinced that dynasties had
a life of their own governed as much by bureaucratic routinization and laxity as the loss of moral fiber. Korean dynasties lasted for much
longer periods than the Chinese for a number of complex reasons, but the Chosŏn dynasty began to exhibit characteristics of
bureaucratic deterioriation by the end of the fifteenth century.
Laxity and corruption in administration that increased over time meant that registration of the taxpaying population was not
maintained, taxes and services were levied more heavily on the poorest peasants, and military service was eroded by evasion.
Bureaucratic laxity and corruption was exacerbated by the elimination of salaries for all clerks at the beginning of the dynasty. The
policy was undertaken by the regular officials to elevate themselves over the influential local hyangni or local clerk class of the late Koryŏ
and prevent them from rising to the regular bureaucracy, but it forced all clerks into a life of corruption by demanding fees and
gratuities to make a living.
By the end of the sixteenth century the capacity of the bureaucracy to rectify the problems of maladministration was weakened by the
emergence of internecine factional strife within the bureaucracy after 1575. The unfortunate consequence of this sad state of affairs was
the devastation wrought by Hideyoshi’s invasions in the 1590s. Someone looking at Korea in 1598 after the last of the Japanese returned
home, might well have concluded that both the Chosŏn dynasty and the experiment in Confucian statecraft had been a failure.
THE SEVENTEETH-CENTURY GOVERNMENT REFORM PROGRAM
Even before the Japanese invasions a number of Confucian bureaucrats had sounded the clarion call of reform. Yulgok (Yi I), by his
analysis of the failure of domestic institutions and the weakness of the military, and Cho Hŏn, by his comparison of Chosŏn
deficiencies with Ming advantages in administration, commerce, and other areas, led the appeal for institutional rectification, but their
appeals were largely ignored.
Ironically the devastation of the Imjin Wars solved some of the major problems of the dynasty and gave Confucian statecraft a
second chance. While the destruction of land and property reduced both individual wealth as well as state revenue, it alleviated
population pressure on the land, induced a period of tax remission, and allowed peasants a period to revive agricultural production.
Even though the government had a lower tax base, it was able to begin land and population registration again as a basis for future
revenues and service. The irregularity of the local product tribute tax and the injustice of its operation in practice led to conversion of
the system. Intimate contact with Ming officials made Korean officials more aware of the far greater development of commerce and
economic activity in China than Korea, and stimulated the emulation of some Ming commercial practices. In short, national catastrophe
laid the basis for a reform effort in the seventeenth century that was by no means totally successful, but resulted in important
institutional reforms.
Defeat in battle awakened the regime to the problem of tax and service evasion and stimulated measures to broaden requirements
by bringing idle yangban, tax evaders, and slaves into the military service system. It stimulated the establishment of new divisions and
the adoption of Western firearms. The leading role in this reform effort was played by active officials rather than armchair scholars.
Of course, the record of accomplishment in this century was mixed. The most obvious failure in the reform effort was the attempt to
reconstitute a viable military force. The formation of new divisions was influenced more by political considerations than by the logic of
national defense, and the Yi Kwal rebellion of 1624 shifted priorities from national defense to the prevention of rebellion.
A second factor was the inability of the regime to recruit and retrain a sufficient force of foot soldiers, and to recognize the
importance of firearms and training in their use. The government must have relaxed its efforts after conclusion of a treaty with the
Japanese in 1609 and underestimated the military strength of the Manchus.
Probably the most important reason for the disasters of the two Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1637, however, was the change in
foreign policy from Kwanghaegun’s regime, a change that has to be attributed to Confucian influence. It was, after all, the Westerner
faction that seized power in a coup d’état in 1623 and insisted on outright support for the Ming dynasty because of its moral obligation
to the Ming Wan-li emperor for his (belated) dispatch of reinforcements to Korea in 1592. The Westerners were intellectually and
morally incapable of continuing Kwanghaegun’s more pragmatic policy of adaptation and delay. What was worse, after the Manchu
imposition of sovereignty over Korea, it became impossible for Korean kings to rebuild Korean military forces in the face of Manchu
surveillance.
Under the protection of the Manchu Ch’ing dynasty, however, the threat of foreign invasion was removed and a strong military
defense became unnecessary. The armed forces were kept in place mainly to ensure domestic tranquillity, but because its cost was far
too large for that purpose, it functioned more and more as an oppressive mode of taxation. Since military service was deemed
demeaning to begin with, the tendency to evade it grew, and a smaller and smaller group of commoner peasants were left to carry the
whole fiscal burden. The most serious weakness of the Ch’ing peace, however, was the desuetude with which officials considered
military defense because when the Ch’ing state lost its power in the nineteenth century to defend itself, let alone its Korean tributary,
Korea found itself helpless and isolated.
The need for more adult males for the payment of the military support tax, if not actual duty as soldiers, continued to stimulate
plans for drawing more slaves into the military service system or liberating them from inherited slavery. During the Imjin Wars slaves
were incorporated in considerable numbers into the sog’o units and manumitted in return for military merit or purchase, but after the
war the price of purchase was too high to allow much reduction of the slave population. The need for adult males subject to military
service, however, kept slaves as military support taxpayers. The same motive also explains the origin in official circles of the long debate
over the matrilineal rule for the manumission of offspring of the sons of commoner mothers in mixed slave/commoner marriages, first
instituted in 1669. This marked an important step in the state’s interference with the slaveowner’s control over his slaves.
The idea for reforming the local products tribute system began in the late fifteenth century, but the stimulus needed to accomplish
the task also occurred as a result of the Imjin Wars. The illicit system of tribute contracting underway since the late fifteenth century
demonstrated the advantages of market purchases of goods over in-kind tax payments, and state officials simply applied to the whole
country what had already been tried by some officials – financing the cost by an extra tax. The taedong reform carried out in the
seventeenth century contributed to even greater commercial activity than before.
Almost the same officials who championed the adoption of the taedong reform also pioneered the introduction of metallic currency.
From their observation of the Ming economy they realized that metallic currency was needed to overcome the cumbersome use of grain
and cloth as media of exchange to lubricate market transactions.
The reform of the military system, the matrilineal rule in mixed marriages, the taedong law, and the currency reform of the
seventeenth century represented a series of positive responses to serious problems by active Confucian officials, and their policies
provided both inspiration and working models for the new statecraft scholars.
YU HYŎNGWŎN’S REFORM PLANS
The response to crisis is certainly one of the main reasons why Korean scholars in the seventeenth century began to shift their attention
from Confucian moral metaphysics to the problems of statecraft. The same thing happened in the late Ming dynasty and spawned the
statecraft writings of Ku Yen-wu and Huang Tsung-hsi, but Yu Hyŏngwŏn, unaware of their existence, derived no inspiration from them.
In China the reaction against Sung learning in the sixteenth-century Ming period took the form of Wang Yang-ming’s emphasis on
the inner, meditational approach to self-rectification rather than the apparently external and superficial approach to book learning and
scripture by Chu Hsi and Sung Learning. Since Wang Yang-ming had been condemned as a heretic by T’oegye (Yi Hwang) in Korea in
the mid-sixteenth century, very few Koreans became followers of his thought. Born into the Northerner faction, Yu must have abided by
T’oegye’s condemnation to adhere to the teachings of Chu Hsi and the Sung school, but he insisted that the study of institutions as
well as book learning was critical to the rectification of self and society.
Using better institutions to find moral men to assume office was only part of his plan. He also believed that there was only one
model for perfect institutions – the systems used by the sages in ancient China, but because he agreed that a literal recreation of ancient
institutions was unworkable, he did his best to extract principles that would work in quite different circumstances under the mode of
centralized bureaucracy.
The degree to which he departed from ancient institutions and compromised with current reality varied from one institution to
another. In some cases, he appeared tainted by blind fundamentalism, despite his demurral to the contrary, when he insisted that the
carving out of embossed squares in the landscape would remedy the administrative problems caused by population growth,
geographical mobility, and laxity in registration. In others, he modified ancient institutions by compromising with post-Chou reality
whether of the Chinese or Korean variety.
For example, he was most adamant in demanding a program of nationalization and redistribution of land to eliminate the evil of
private property, and yet he rejected the idea that he was simply copying the well-field system of ancient Chou China. Since he felt that it
was as necessary to create a hierarchy of wealth that would match the moral capacity of his new officials rather than the inherited
prestige of the yangban or their talent in literary composition, he prescribed extra allotments to those officials – a plan that he compared
to the limited-field system of the Han dynasty. In short, he claimed he was fusing Chou and Han models as the optimum
accommodation to post-Chou circumstance. Furthermore, he supported his argument for the 100 myo basic land allotment by a
practical proof, rather than just a blind appeal to the classics, by demonstrating that there was sufficient land area in Korea to provide
for the the Korean population.
Although Yu argued that he selected crucial elements of ancient patterns on reasonable and empirical grounds, many of his choices
were really arbitrary and idiosyncratic. Other Confucians could and did ignore his insistence on the embossed square and the
superiority of the 100-myo unit, for example, let alone the need for confiscation and nationalization of private property.
In his rejection of hereditary slavery, he argued that slavery was unjustified because all human beings were essentially the same and
none deserved to be treated as chattel, but by no means did he really signify an absolute commitment to equality or a justification on
rational grounds alone. To the contrary, he sought ultimate authority in classical precedent, which prescribed slavery as an appropriate
punishment for certain serious crimes, but never as a status to be inherited by innocent children. True to this principle he never called
for the total manumission of all slaves, just an end to inherited slavery. On the other hand, he clearly communicated his willingness to
compromise with Korean tradition by tolerating the continuation of slavery for a period far longer than one generation. He provided for
them to continue to work for their masters, receive a land grant from the state, continue their participation as soldiers and support
taxpayers, serve as clerks and runners in official agencies, and assume inferior roles in his regulations for his community compacts. His
support for adoption of the matrilineal rule also reflected his acknowledgment that the reduction of slaves in society would take several
generations.
He extolled the virtues of the Chou system of militia service, but his plan for the reform of military service was only indirectly related
to the militia ideal. Instead, he urged a return to the early Chosŏn system of discrete rotating duty soldiers supported by a separate body
of support taxpayers, but he justified its relation to the militia system by arguing that it was a self-sufficient method of finance that did
not drain revenues from the state exchequer. Assigning support taxpayers to duty soldiers was far better than loading a heavy tax burden
on the population for financing the burdensome professional soldiers created by expansionist dynasties in the post-Chou era. Here
again, he demonstrated flexibility in one dimension countered by dogmatic rigidity in another. After all, a professional military corps
might have been just what Korea needed in view of the sorry performance of regular Chosŏn troops against the Japanese and Manchus.
His respect for early Chosŏn military organization was not matched, however, by his rejection of the tribute system, which he
condemned in practice even though it had been created by the venerated founders of the Chosŏn dynasty. He was convinced of the
logical and empirical superiority of an increased land tax as a method for financing both material purchases and other administrative
costs of both the king and the state, but he was not content to rely on logic alone. He defended his position on the grounds that tribute,
particularly royal tribute, was an immoral and unrestrained exercise in monarchical acquisitiveness that deserved to be brought under
control by a more reasonable system of taxation.
His admiration for hired or wage labor as a means of replacing slave cultivators on the estates of the large landlords or
uncompensated labor service by commoners certainly appeared as a rational and innovative response to changing circumstances rather
than a dogmatic mimicking of classical precedent. He argued that wage or hired labor was preferable to slave labor on moral grounds
because it would eliminate the cruel and coercive treatment of slaves, and on apparently liberal grounds because hired laborers entered
into employment by free choice and willing agreement.
These arguments undeniably had aspects of humaneness and liberalism to them, but his thinking was by no means free of the
constraints relevant to his times. He did not argue that wage labor had proved its superiority by his own observation of contemporary
facts, but rather by hearsay information about wage labor in China. Wage labor was not a new phenomenon; it had been around since
long before the beginning of the dynasty without doing damage to Korean social custom. In fact, he argued that hired labor would not
promote the freedom of the individual laborer at all. To the contrary, he guaranteed that the Chinese experience demonstrated that hired
laborers were as respectful and subordinate to their employers as Confucian standards required. Choosing one’s employer was neither
to produce freedom of choice in society at large, or to transform laborers into commodities and wage slaves in a capitalist system.
One of Yu’s overarching themes was the establishment of a truly moral society ruled by moral officials. He denigrated the
examination system for its failure to producing honest and dedicated officials, but he saw the answer in adapting ancient institutions,
particularly resuscitating the moribund official school system and initiating the face-to-face evaluation of candidates for office. Yu’s
ideal society was to be as hierarchical as contemporary Korean society, but on an almost completely different basis – demonstrated
superiority in Confucian ethical behavior.
Yu was a defender of popular or peasant welfare, but his sympathies for the common peasants, slaves, lowly clerks, and women
were often balanced or offset by his commitment to the necessity of hierarchical relations. He sought to level the playing ground by
having the state confiscate the landed property and reduce the slaves of the yangban and landlords, but he often made certain
concessions to social reality by accommodating aspects of inherited status that favored members of the noble family, merit subjects
and their relatives, and the sons of officials without office of their own, and to denigrate nothoi, clerks, slaves, and women. He was
willing to prolong the period of slavery because he felt that the yangban were emotionally and physically as yet incapable of dispensing
with their slave labor. At one point, he even assured the yangban families that his reforms would not destroy them because their wealth
and traditional respect for education would guarantee the success of their sons in his new system of schools. He could make such
concessions to existing privilege because of his commitment to the propriety of hierarchical respect relations, and his sympathy for the
members of his own class.
His plan to refurbish the schools would only have provided for the body of regular officials. He also had to cure the endemic
corruption of the petty clerks without elevating them to the same level as the regular officials. His solution was to provide them with
salaries through an improved system of taxation. Whether guaranteed salaries for clerks would have eliminated corruption as Yu hoped
is something that one can never know because it was never tried, but it would certainly have been an improvement over the existing
situation.
Finally, at the lowest end of the bureaucracy, the local district, where the magistrate and his irregular local clerks, village headman,
and village officials came into direct contact with the people, he hoped to overcome the damage done by corrupt local officials by
replacing them with semiautonomous institutions like community compacts and village granaries, copied from models created in the
Sung dynasty, staffed by prominent men of virtue. They were to take charge of teaching villagers and common peasants to practice
Confucian moral standards, provide mutual aid, relief, and loans, and implement mutual surveillance against criminals and
wrongdoers.
Unfortunately, Yu’s plan for the moral reformation of all levels of the bureaucracy was the least effective of all his ideas. The
examination system was never replaced by a refurbished school system and a serious and sustained method of recommendation. A
salary system for petty clerks was never instituted to the end of the dynasty, and the community compacts were attempted only in a few
instances. Only the adoption of village autonomy for the administration of loans was attempted under the Taewongun in the 1860s.
Otherwise, local nonofficial organizations were dominated almost exclusively by local yangban in protection of their own interests and
local clerks were left unchecked to profit from bribery.
Yu’s recommendations for improvements in the economy, particularly the use of metallic cash, did have some influence on the next
century. When Yu began to write his masterwork around 1650, active officials were already attempting to introduce metallic currency to
lubricate market transactions. Yu responded to their initiative and sought to add some wisdom to it by consulting the Chinese classics
and histories.
Consulting the classics did not necessarily mean that he was conservatively tied to backward economic ideas because what he
found in those sources was often more developed than contemporary practice in Korea. In fact, Chou China appeared to have had a
larger commercial sector than Korea, certainly a more advanced use of money. He found that industry and commerce were not evil, as
some ideologues believed, but necessary for the production and circulation of items of utility among the population. It was just that
they were secondary to agricultural production and had to be limited lest the attractiveness of profit lured too many peasants from the
primary occupation of agricultural production.
Yu agreed with the most progressive Korean officials of his time that market development should be encouraged, certainly as a
means of reforming the corrupted tribute system. He admired Cho Hŏn’s reports of the more advanced Ming economy, but he did not
intend to move as far as the Chinese had by allowing sons of merchants to take the examinations. Since he included land allotments for
merchants in his ideal land distribution scheme, it is obvious that he expected commercial activity only to supplement basic income
from farming, not replace it. His economic vision was quite a bit behind late Ming economic developments, not to mention earlier
dynasties.
Nonetheless, it was his fear of the adverse consequences of inflation because of mistakes in the management of currency in past
Chinese dynasties that makes him look quite conservative. To be sure, many economists in favor of sound money and stability in the
twentieth century fear the adverse consequences of inflationary policies, but this concern for stability does not interfere with their
progressive perspective on the capacity of a healthy capitalist economy to expand steadily. Yu, however, was witnessing the beginnings
of a cash economy when the mistrust of the value of that cash was powerful. The slightest symptom of inflation was liable to destroy
confidence in the cash and destroy the whole experiment. For that reason he felt that the only secure way to use cash was to limit its
type to the penny cash, where the face value was only slightly more than the intrinsic worth of the metal.
A money system based exclusively on copper pennies was by itself a brake on the potential for expanding the economy. He favored
it because his economic concepts were tied closely to moral rather than utilitarian objectives. Nickles, dimes, and quarters, let alone
dollar bills, were not only sure guarantees of inflation, they were also evil seeds that would burgeon into moral decay by stimulating
greed and avarice, destroying frugality, and leading the peasants to abandon their fields in search of easy profit.
In short, Yu’s economic thought was progressive by comparison with the relatively backward situation of Korea in the sixteenth
century, but quite limited with respect to developments in Ming China or Tokugawa Japan, let alone the West.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS
Institutional Changes
There were four major institutional changes in the eighteenth century about which Yu Hyŏngwŏn had something to say: slavery, military
service, land, and the economy. The reform of the slave system was probably the most significant of any reform in the dynasty. The
matrilineal succession rule was adopted permanently in 1730, official slaves were abolished in 1801, and the percentage of private slaves
in the population dropped below 10 percent after 1780, but the abolition of hereditary slavery and of slavery altogether did not occur
until the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars like Kim Yongsŏp would like to attribute this phenomenon to the emergence of an
entrepreneurial spirit among the peasantry that allowed slave cultivators to accumulate surpluses and buy their way out of slavery, but
the concrete evidence for this thesis is weak. Even though the high opportunity cost involved in recapturing runaway slaves and the easy
economical alternative of replacing slaves with tenants and hired laborers were more likely causes, it is difficult to discount the effect of
Yu’s direct challenge to slavery on Confucian moral grounds, particularly because his views became widely known among the educated
class in the late eighteenth century. His contribution to the decline of slavery and Korea as a slave society may be his most outstanding
contribution to the improvement of Korean life.
Yu had much less direct influence on the debate over the equal service reform (kyunyŏkpŏp) of 1750, a misnomer if there ever was
one. Yu’s idea had been to reconstitute and rebuild the military establishment by which the military cloth tax paid by a discrete group of
support taxpayers would finance rotating duty soldiers. He had also argued for the reintroduction of military affairs into the education
and training of officials, the adoption of Western firearms, and the reorganization of a defense system.
By the eighteenth century, however, the Chosŏn military system lost its raison d’être and the military cloth tax became a bane on the
existence of the commoner peasant. Because of the widespread evasion of registration and service, the shrinking number of commoner
peasants had to bear the full weight of the military cloth tax. Yu did not anticipate this outcome, but his concern for the maldistribution
of tax burdens was carried on by many other active officials, who promoted some method of lightening the tax load on commoner
peasants by shifting slaves to commoner status and including the service-exempt yangban and the legions of tax-evading scholars and
putative students in the ranks of the support taxpayers. Slaves did escape servitude primarily by running away, but they escaped the net
of the military service registrars by fair means or foul. The result of three quarters of a century of discussion to extend the military cloth
tax to yangban was disappointing, however, because King Yŏngjo finally capitulated to their interests and only reduced the tax on
commoners. The tax reduction had but temporary and limited effects, for by the middle of the nineteenth century it became one of the
major causes of peasant rebellion.
Another issue was the land tax, an issue where Yu’s ideas were far beyond the capacity of his age. He had recognized that the
maldistribution of land, not just the land tax, was the primary cause of peasant poverty in an agrarian society. His appeal for national
confiscation and redistribution did not elicit much of a response in the seventeenth century because the land tax was still quite light.
The adoption of the taedongmi rice surtax on land to provide funds to replace local tribute, however, increased the severity of the land
tax in the structure of taxation.
Even then the nominal land tax rate still remained relatively low, but the trend toward the concentration of land in the hands of large
landlords, the loss of land by smallholders, and their decline to landless sharecroppers and laborers exacerbated their economic
hardship. By the end of the eighteenth century, the time had become ripe for some kind of remedial action. The armchair statecraft
scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often referred to as the Sirhak school, were by no means unified on the solution.
Some like Tasan (Chŏng Yagyong) backed the radical nationalization and redistribution plan, but others like Sŏngho (Yi Ik) opted for a
more conservative land limitation system than Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s. Most serious officials dismissed redistribution as unrealistic because
the defense of landed property had become impregnable. The turning point was reached in the 1790s when King Chŏnjo put out a call
for advice on the land question but he failed to take any serious action to alleviate the problems of land distribution and taxation. The
land problem carried over into the nineteenth century with disastrous consequences, because it was identified as one of the three major
causes of the Imsul rebellion of 1862.
The third of the major causes of that rebellion was the maladministration of credit, loans, and relief handled mainly by district
magistrates and their clerks. As more peasant smallholders were reduced to the margin of subsistence by the loss of land to landlords
and then driven over the edge to starvation by natural disaster, they were reduced to dependency on relief payments and loans. Unable
to repay the loans because of their marginal economic position, the loans were turned over and the interest payments became a
permanent tax. When rebellion broke out in 1862 the peasants directed their ire against the district magistrates and their clerks, the ones
responsible for the administration of the land and military service taxes and the collection of interest payments on loans.
In the recovery plan of the Taewongun in the 1860s, a few of Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s recommendations for action played a small role. His
plan for nationalization and redistribution was simply ignored, only a half-hearted effort was made to carry out a cadastral survey to
register cultivated land for fairer collection of the land tax, and his suggestion for the adoption of recommendation in the selection of
officials was tried as a supplement to the examination system. The Taewongun was the first to mint multiple denomination cash, as the
more advanced eighteenth century experts on currency had advocated, but that policy was contrary to Yu’s advice to limit metallic
currency to penny cash. His prediction that it would produce inflation came true.
On the other hand, his idea of extending military service to all male adults but officials, modified in the course of the debate in the
eighteenth century to an extension of the military service tax to yangban households, was finally adopted. And his recommendation for
the transfer of relief and loan administration from the district magistrates to the leadership of prominent gentry was adopted.
It was not to be expected that Yu’s seventeenth-century perspective would have remained relevant to nineteenth-century
circumstance, but Yu did inspire a number of well-known reformers in the eighteenth century, and the germ of several of his reform
ideas was preserved in the frost of two centuries of administrative deterioriation, recalled to life by the Taewongun to save the dynasty
from collapse.
Commerce and Industry
Yu Hyŏngwŏn learned much from the debate over the emergence of a more active commercial economy in the seventeenth century, and
he was one of the spokesmen for progress in the context of that time. He expected commerce to play a more active role in the economy
than in the past century, and he welcomed the introduction of copper cash to promote a more fluid exchange system, but his ideas were
only known to a few until the turn of the eighteenth century. When they did, some of his ideas that were progressive for the seventeenth
century had become conservative in the eighteenth.
The reason was that King Sukchong was unable to manage the currency to prevent inflation in those arteries of trade that used cash,
and he shut down the mints in frustration. The fear of inflation was inherited by King Yŏngjo in the 1720s, who believed that a return to
a noncash agrarian economy would be better for the Korean population. The policies of these two kings did not reflect the dominant
opinion at court. In fact the kings were far less enlightened or progressive than a number of officials, contrary to Kings T’aejong, Sejong,
and Sejo who unsuccessfully sought to introduce metallic and paper money into Korea in the fifteenth century. Only reluctantly was
King Yŏngjo persuaded that cash had become a permanent aspect of Korean commerce, and that minting cash was the best way to
solve the economic bottlenecks created by long-term deflation.
Even though a number of active officials had become more open and progressive in their attitude toward currency and suggested
the minting of multiple-denomination and silver cash and paper money, Yŏngjo refused to go beyond penny cash, a policy left intact
until the Taewongun’s regime in the 1860s. This was essentially the same attitude of Yu Hyŏngwŏn in the mid-1600s, but after currency
became indispensable to the economy, the fear of inflation and penny cash led to deflation and a serious brake on economic growth.
The development of commerce had also led to the rise of private, unlicensed merchants and artisans – even members of the official
establishment who engaged in both private as well as official production of goods – who challenged the licensed monopolies and took
over an increasing share of the market without government permission. This phenomenon represented a departure from the licensed
monopoly system of the early Chosŏn dynasty, but government officials tolerated it nonetheless. They did not ban it as an unacceptable
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