Political Leadership in Korea

Dae-Sook Suh, Chae-Jin Lee, Dae-Sook Suh, Chae-Jin Lee

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780295954370
• eBook ISBN: 9780295802800
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

Included in this volume are studies of the traditional leadership of the Yi dynasty as well as twentieth-century legislative, party, and bureaucratic leadership, and an evaluation of views of political leaders in South Korea, as well as two studies of the Communist system in North Korea.

PART I

Traditional Perspectives

1. Political Leadership
in the Yi Dynasty

JAMES B. PALAIS

INTRODUCTION

Traditional Korean society during the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) was governed by a centralized bureaucratic monarchy. Its social structure was hierarchical and dominated by a powerful aristocracy, yangban, whose status was based, for the most part, on inheritance and reinforced by landholding, degree-holding, and office-holding. Since its economy was overwhelmingly agrarian, there was no significant bourgeoisie to challenge the political supremacy of the yangban bureaucrats. One of the major features of the Yi dynasty polity was the relative weakness of the monarchy and centralized authority because of the aristocratic, bureaucratic, and normative restraints on royal power.¹ For such a polity, therefore, it is possible to describe its elite groups and its leaders, but it is difficult to find examples of leadership if that term is interpreted in the narrow sense as the exercise of personal power and authority over and above the limits imposed by traditional structures and norms.²

Since legitimacy and supreme authority were vested in the king, only kings or those who controlled the throne could attempt to act independently or arbitrarily; but even royal power was hedged in with restraints. Authority was channeled into a single bureaucratic structure that served to restrict the potential for individual leadership. While there were certain bureaucrats who were more prominent than their peers and who made their mark on history by force of personality and political skill, very few had the opportunity to exert innovative leadership in the formulation of goals and policies. Bureaucratic organization produces great leaders only with the utmost difficulty, and the Yi dynasty bureaucracy was no exception. Work was ritualized, every functionary was the subordinate of some other functionary or of the king. Individual initiative was repressed because it constituted a challenge and threat to the career and power of superiors. Abhorrence of excessive power was probably the main feature of the Yi dynasty polity.

Because authority and legitimacy were predominantly traditional-legal, as Max Weber has defined it, there was little opportunity for the exercise of charismatic leadership.³ The legitimate leaders of traditional Korean society were kings, bureaucrats, local yangban gentry, and yangban literati. The only charismatic figures were rebels and leaders of heterodox religious movements, but all of these were suppressed by the state when they became a political threat to the established order. The opportunity for creative leadership only came with the weakening of the old order in the late nineteenth century, the nationalist and Communist movements of the early twentieth century, and the creation of new polities in North and South Korea after 1945.

ROYAL LEADERSHIP

The potential for leadership among the kings of the Yi dynasty was limited by the restraints on their authority. Korean kings suffered from four major types of problems. Their traditional legitimacy was relatively weak; they were engaged with the bureaucracy and the aristocracy in competition for political power; they had to compete with the landowning and privileged aristocracy for control over economic and man-power resources; and they were hamstrung by the normative restraints of Neo-Confucian thought.

The traditional authority of the Korean king was relatively weak as he was subordinate to the Chinese emperor in the Sinitic cosmological and political order—under the terms of the tributary system the king received investiture from the Chinese emperor. While this process of external legitimation never really interfered with the independent resolution of succession problems by the Koreans themselves (even in the case of usurpers), it did weaken the ideological basis for royal absolutism.

The second type of restraint on royal authority came from de facto control of the bureaucracy by the yangban. While the civil service examination system, which was the chief means of recruiting officials, was theoretically open to commoners as well as yangban, the yangban monopolized the system to the exclusion of other status groups. The yangban bureaucrats restricted the king’s freedom to appoint and dismiss officials by their control of the Ministry of Personnel; they used the offices of the censorate⁴ as a means of checking royal authority by constant and vigorous remonstrance; they used the Royal Secretariat to inhibit the flow of royal orders when it served their purpose; and they used the Royal Lectures to indoctrinate young kings in standards of Confucian morality of which they were the supreme arbiters. In short, the aristocracy used bureaucratic institutions as a means of checking royal authority instead of implementing royal commands.

One of the major symptoms of relative royal weakness and yangban bureaucratic strength was the appearance of bureaucratic factionalism, a phenomenon that colored Korean political life for over two centuries after 1575. Although individual kings were not always subordinated to the power of the factions, the existence of the factions meant that the kings had failed to keep individual bureaucrats isolated and therefore more susceptible to royal control.

Among the major reasons for the strength of the yangban bureaucrats vis-à-vis the throne was that they were not entirely dependent on the throne for their position in society. Because yangban status was in most instances inherited, the king could only try to control their access to the higher levels of society as represented by academic degrees and office-holding, but even in these instances his power was restricted. Although an individual official could lose favor and position at court, his family could maintain its status and recoup its fortunes in later generations.

Private ownership of land also provided an independent economic base for yangban families. One of the most difficult problems for Korean kings, particularly after 1600, was maintaining control over wealth and man power. The Korean ruler was dependent on relatively independent landowners and landlords for his exploitation of national resources, chiefly through the taxation of land, its product, and labor service requirements. Royal control over these resources was limited by the expansion of private control over unregistered and untaxed land, and the decrease in the size of the tax-paying population. As bureaucratic efficiency decreased and bureaucrats became more exploitative in their treatment of the peasantry, peasants found it advantageous to commend their lands to powerful local yangban in order to gain protection from rapacious bureaucrats. As a consequence, the king’s control over taxes and labor service decreased still further. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, kings waged a struggle to increase their control over resources, and this brought them into conflict with the aristocratic and landowning class. One criterion of royal leadership, therefore, was the extent to which a king could increase his command of resources and cut into the wealth and privileges of the upper class.⁵ The little success that most kings achieved in this effort testifies to the relative weakness of the kingship in the Yi dynasty polity.

The fourth restraint on royal power was a normative one deriving from certain aspects of Confucian thought. Yangban bureaucrats and literati insisted that kings subordinate themselves to universally accepted Confucian norms of regal conduct. They insisted that kings tolerate the remonstrance of the educated and “virtuous” scholar-officials, and that they defend the hierarchical social status system on the grounds that it represented the proper application of Confucian moral teaching to the organization of society. The yangban defense of social distinction on moral grounds was, in fact, merely a rationalization of their tax-exemption privileges, but it proved an effective weapon in their protracted struggle with the throne for the control of resources.

Among the twenty-seven kings of the Yi dynasty there were several who displayed distinct qualities of leadership, although hardly two were alike in their approach to political problems. Yi Sŏng-gye (posthumous title, T’aejo, r. 1392–98), the founder of the Yi dynasty, was an exceptional leader because of his ability to gather support from political, military, and intellectual sectors for the usurpation of power and the establishment of a new dynasty. He provided the dynasty with a foundation of support based on the establishment of tributary relations with the Chinese Ming dynasty, land reform that weakened the late Koryŏ landed aristocracy and provided a stable revenue base for the new regime, promotion of Neo-Confucianism as state-supported orthodoxy in opposition to the Buddhist establishment of Koryŏ, and creation of a revised structure of central administration.⁶ Having successfully created a new dynasty, however, T’aejo was unable to maintain firm political control and abdicated the throne to one of his sons, Yi Pang-wŏn, in the midst of a violent struggle over succession. Yi Pang-wŏn, a skillful though unscrupulous politician, defeated his brothers in the contest for succession and took the throne as the dynasty’s third king, T’aejong (r. 1400–1418).⁷ He completed the task of providing political stability for the new dynasty.

It is, of course, not unusual that not all the succeeding kings of the Yi dynasty were charismatic leaders, since their right to rule was traditional and inherited, but even the founders of the dynasty—T’aejo and T’aejong—were not truly charismatic either. T’aejo was a military commander who turned his army against the capital and seized power with the support of a group of Confucian scholar-officials who sought political positions for themselves and the destruction of the old Koryŏ landed aristocracy. T’aejong was a prince who came to power with the support of private military forces prior to the centralization of military power under the new government. Force and politics, not charismatic leadership, were the keys to their success. Once the new system of centralized bureaucratic administration was established under T’aejong, succeeding kings had to deal with the major problem of aristocratic and bureaucratic restraints on their authority.

An excellent example of the Yi dynasty style of royal leadership is provided by King Sejong (r. 1418–50), probably the most outstanding ruler of the dynasty. Sejong’s leadership was manifested in military affairs, institutional reform, and cultural achievements. He extended the system of garrison defense into the northern provinces and responded aggressively to Japanese pirate raids in the south. He introduced important modifications into the land tax and crop assessment systems with the objective of producing graded and equitable taxation. He was also largely responsible for the invention of the Korean alphabet, han’gŭl.⁸

For all his accomplishments, however, it would be difficult to call Sejong a true despot. He was continually subjected to the carping criticisms of bureaucrats and Neo-Confucian purists, but he was able to control them by besting them at their own game rather than by resorting to force and punishment. He surpassed some of his tutors in the Royal Lectures in knowledge and understanding, he gave guidance and leadership to the scholars in the Hall of Worthies, Chiphyŏnjŏn, and pushed through the invention of the alphabet despite serious opposition, and in general he refused to be cowed by his officials. In his later years, he even defied them with a mild but open display of Buddhist piety.⁹ Though he chafed under the Korean system of restrained monarchy, he learned to live with it and to use it skillfully to accomplish his major goals. Of course, the dynasty was still young, and the yangban had probably not become as firmly entrenched in terms of its social status and tax-exemption privileges as in later centuries. Sejong also did not have to deal with the problem of a contracted revenue base. Nevertheless, Sejong was still subjected to criticism and restraint that in other monarchies would be regarded as lese majesty. The key to his success was that he knew the limits of his power and was able to operate efficiently within them.

There were two other kings in the late fifteenth century, however, who were not so willing to abide by the traditional system of weak monarchs. King Sejo (r. 1455–68), one of Sejong’s sons who in 1455 usurped the throne from his nephew, King Tanjong, was faced with the difficult problem of repressing the political opposition to his usurpation. He also attempted to alter the institutional structure of the state for the purpose of creating a powerful monarchy. He weakened the State Council by establishing direct royal control over the Six Ministries. He abolished the Hall of Worthies, lessening the institutionalized influence of scholars loyal to the deposed king, although he continued support for scholarly work. He also strengthened the military defense and communications structures throughout the country, tightened the system of population registration, produced the first major law code of the dynasty, and reformed the system of land allotments and official stipends.¹⁰ Had his policies been continued, it is conceivable that there would have been a growth in the degree of royal despotism in the Yi dynasty and a subordination of the bureaucracy to the monarch, but his policies and, in fact, his whole style of rule, were reversed by the next king, Sŏngjong (r. 1469–94).¹¹ Because of Sŏngjong’s respect for Confucian norms of royal behavior, the power of the throne vis-à-vis the bureaucracy and the literati was weakened, and the censorate began to grow in strength, setting the stage for the rule of Yŏnsan’gun (r. 1494–1506), who represented the extreme of royal despotism in the Yi dynasty.

Yŏnsan’gun was determined to rule in grand style and to exert all the prerogatives of absolute monarchy. He felt constrained, restricted, and frustrated by the growth of bureaucratic power, particularly in the censorate. When he found that he could not gain proper submission to his authority, he sought to enforce his commands by the use of force. He purged and executed his bureaucratic tormentors in 1498 and 1504, abolished many of their rights and privileges, and even turned their beloved National Academy, Sŏnggyun’gwan, into a royal pleasure park.¹² To generations of Confucian historians who came after him, Yŏnsan’gun was the archtyrant. He appears to have been driven to psychotic excess by bureaucratic busybodies. Yet there was a method to his madness. He believed that a king’s authority was absolute, and that he had the right of life or death over all his subjects. He sought to illustrate this power by the often whimsical execution of his officials. As a result, he carried royal authority further than it had ever been or would be carr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Traditional Perspectives
• Part II: Institutional Context of Leadership
• Part III: Bureaucratic Elite and Popular Perceptions
• Part IV: Political Leadership in the Communist System
• Part V: Concluding Observations
• Appendix: Toward a Political Leadership Profile for a Changing Society
• Index
• Contributors