Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions

Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty

James B. Palais

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805115
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

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

PART I

The Early Chosŏn Dynasty, 1392–1650

CHAPTER 1

Confucian Statecraft in the Founding of Chosŏn

The founding of the Chosŏn dynasty was an exceptional period in the sense that Confucian scholars, officials, and ideologues were intimately involved in the political movement that led to the overthrow of the Koryŏ dynasty and establishment of the new Chosŏn dynasty under the military commander, Yi Sŏnggye. Not all Confucians (or Neo-Confucian believers in the Chinese Sung dynasty’s version of Confucian doctrine) supported Yi’s usurpation because some regarded it as an act of disloyalty to the Koryŏ throne, but those Neo-Confucian ideologues who did support the Chosŏn dynasty contradicted their own ethical obligation to serve the last Koryŏ ruler in the hopes of achieving the adoption of a Confucian program for the new state. For that matter, the Neo-Confucian supporters of the new dynasty did not agree on all aspects of reform for two reasons because fundamentalists thought that the new dynasty should come as close as possible to the recreation of the vaunted institutions of the ancient Chou dynasty of China, while others believed that compromises had to be struck between ancient ideals and contemporary Korean reality. Nonetheless, virtually all hoped to effect a total moral, religious, and cultural conversion of the Korean people from the evils, corruptions, and barbarities of late Koryŏ dynasty life to the refined, glorious, ordered, and ethically superior heights of a society inspired by a Neo-Confucian vision.

The vitality of the Neo-Confucian movement as a political force was fueled by the new, antagonistic attitude toward Buddhism that had originated in T’ang dynasty China in the ninth century with the anti-Buddhist polemics of Han Yü. The so-called Neo-Confucian philosophical movement of the Sung dynasty continued that spirit after 960, and the Korean Neo-Confucians of the fourteenth century adopted it in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and found it quite relevant because Korea was still dominated religiously and spiritually by Buddhism and the Buddhist establishment.

Buddhism had been the paramount spiritual force in Korea since the fourth century, but because of its philosophically tolerant approach toward Confucianism, the two faiths coexisted without rancor. Confucianism was respected for its practical utility in educating officials to the methods of government and aiding in the maintenance of social order. Since the Buddhists directed their main attention toward spiritual salvation and escape from the defiling attachments of the illusory and transient real world, they were not jealous of the role that Confucians played in the world of practical rule and bureaucratic life.

When Korean Confucians became enamored of Neo-Confucian thought, they attacked Buddhism for the corruption of its monks, the submersion of the faith into materialism as a consequence of its accumulation of landed property and slaves, and more seriously, its subversion of Confucian moral values by an emphasis on individual salvation at the expense of filial obligation and family welfare. The passionate attachment to the new faith and the conviction that Neo-Confucian moral philosophy was the only acceptable fount of wisdom put an end to toleration and fueled the vehemence of the reformist spirit in general.

That passion for reform extended to the political and social realm as well. To be sure, the distaste and contempt for corruption was an obvious goad to reformist zeal, but a more crucial source of discontent stemmed from the usurpation of political power and property by private hands. Private control over resources meant the destruction of the public good to the Confucian mind, and the king, the ruler of the state, was supposed to function as the guardian of that public good.

Almost every administrative deficiency in the late Koryŏ period could be translated as a manifestation of the violation of that moral principle. The monarchy and central authority was not accorded proper respect by the private holders of power. Most of the officials were members of the hereditary yangban class who held their posts by virtue of their prestigious ancestors. Their cousins in the countryside held two-thirds of the magistrate’s posts in the districts, running them as semiautonomous bailiwicks of personal power. The king was left with insufficient revenues for the central government and the national army because a succession of kings had been intimidated into granting tax-exemption privileges for most of the best land in the country. The king was unable to use the labor power of the country in the service of his own or the national interest because about one-third of the population consisted of private slaves almost totally under the control of their private masters, and the commoner peasants who served as tenants on their estates were little better off than the slaves. Even the Buddhist establishment could be regarded as another arm of the privileged Koryŏ yangban, whose sons dominated the Buddhist clergy and controlled vast monastic estates, peasant tenants, and private slaves that were likewise exempt from the taxes and labor service requirements of the central government.

To be sure, the debilitated state of the Koryŏ kingship was by no means entirely the fault of the Korean yangban. Koryŏ kings were virtual puppets under a succession of military commanders since the military coup of 1170, and after a brief exile on Kanghwa Island while the Mongols ran rampant and unopposed over Korean territory on the peninsula, they once again became pawns, this time in the hands of Mongol overlords from 1258 to 1355. During that period the military disappeared as a serious political force and the kings retained some authority, but they were able to offer little resistance against the emergence and domination of the Koryŏ state by the yangban families who dominated the central bureaucracy, the estate owners, and slaveholders.¹

The Neo-Confucian supporters of Yi Sŏnggye proposed a program to reverse all these problems, and they did so from a feeling of moral outrage. They fully supported the creation of a bureaucratic monarchy to a level of prestige and power that surpassed anything that had been seen since the military dictatorship of Yŏn Kaesomun in the mid-seventh-century Koguryŏ dynasty. They did so not because they admired tyranny, but because they saw a more powerful king as the agent who would break the domination of hereditary yangban aristocrats of Koryŏ by requiring passage of the civil service examination as mandatory for appointment to the most prestigious offices. Once the new dynasty was in place, they expected to restrain the tendency toward arbitrary and tyrannical rule by subjecting the king to the ethical admonishments of his Confucian advisers and remonstrance officials.

Since the central bureaucracy would hence be the exclusive locus of men educated in the Neo-Confucian canon, they planned to expand central, bureaucratic control over the whole country by requiring that all district magistrates be appointed from the pool of regular officials at the capital. They also aspired to build up the defense establishment by creating a national structure of command in both the capital and the provinces, expanding the number of forts and bases throughout the country, and requiring all adult male subjects of the state except slaves to perform some service for the military. They wanted to increase the tax revenues of the king and central government, and one of them, Chŏng Tojŏn, even hoped to divest the landlords of their private property by having the new state nationalize all land and distribute subsistence grants to all peasant families.

In the economic realm they sought to counter the flourishing commercial life of the private merchants by reducing merchant activities to a minimum, taxing the merchants, and returning the excess of merchants to productive lives as primary producers of food and clothing. This, too, was based on the moral precept that merchant activity was inherently evil because it catered to the selfish desires of men for profit and wealth through the manipulation of the market, rather than through honest toil and productive enterprise.

Their practical program for the restructuring of government institutions was also accompanied by a social, cultural, and religious program. The Neo-Confucians laid out plans to replace traditional kinship and marriage practices by replacing bilateral kinship organization, occasional matrilocal marriage, and greater status and inheritance rights for women with a patrilineal kinship and inheritance system, and a reduction of the place of women by subordinating them to the male heads of household.² They worked to replace Buddhist funeral ritual with Confucian ceremony and ancestor worship, and they also called for the physical as well as religious obliteration of Buddhism, including the confiscation of most of its estates and slaves.

Most of these elements of the ideal Neo-Confucian statecraft program for the new dynasty, including the most radical ideals of the ideologues for land reform, can be found in the writings of Chŏng Tojŏn, one of the leading supporters of the new regime in the first decade of the Chosŏn dynasty.³

ACHIEVED OBJECTIVES OF THE CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT PROGRAM

General Governmental Policies

Much of the Neo-Confucian statecraft program was adopted shortly after the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392. The king was accorded more prestige and power and guaranteed more than sufficient revenue for his needs by a major increase in the volume of tax revenue. It would come from the land tax produced by a cadastral survey of all land in the kingdom and from the local product tribute tax that required payments in kind of special items from each district of the kingdom to the king or agencies of the central and local government. The king imposed labor service on the adult male population for the transport of tribute goods to the capital, the construction of roads, walls, and buildings, and service in the national army. Even the relatives of officials and yangban were required to serve in the military, although not necessarily as ordinary infantrymen. They were allowed membership in special elite units at the capital set aside in honor of the prestige of their families, but at least it represented an expansion of their requirements far beyond the late Koryŏ period.

Administrative authority was centralized in the six ministries and other agencies in the capital, and central control over every local district was expanded by replacing all local magnates (instead of about one-third of them as in the Koryŏ period) with members of the capital bureaucracy as district magistrates. Steps were also taken to create provincial governors permanently stationed in provincial capitals to coordinate control of the district magistrates, and subordinate army and navy commanders with a complement of local garrisons.

Passage of the civil service examinations was required for access to the highest posts in the bureaucracy in an attempt to create a meritocracy of talent in place of the late Koryŏ aristocracy. Since the curriculum for education in preparation for the examinations was primarily Chu Hsi’s commentaries on the Four Books in emulation of the reforms incorporated in the early fourteenth century by the Yüan emperors, the indoctrination of all new officials and educated youth in orthodox Neo-Confucian ideas was designed to establish the basis for the gradual inculcation of those ideas and norms among the public from the top down. A school system was created from the National Academy (Sŏnggyun’gwan) and the Four Schools in the capital down to the local schools (hyanggyo) in the provinces to provide higher education in the Confucian curriculum. Local schools, called sŏdang, were run privately to provide elementary education for village youth.⁴

Economic Policy

Industry. Chŏng Tojŏn wrote only a few lines on the topic of artisans and merchants, but he did so only to stress the need for the imposition of punitive taxes on both to reduce the number of people engaged in these “lesser occupations” so that peasants would not abandon agriculture in pursuit of higher profits from commercial and industrial activity.⁵ The Confucian reformers were thus not that specific about their prescriptions for an economic policy, but the policies adopted by the new government that were geared toward the control and restriction of commerce and handicrafts were generally in conformity with the conservative spirit of the Neo-Confucians.

The early Chosŏn economy was primarily agrarian, with most production coming from self-sufficient peasant families who produced grain mainly for subsistence and wove their own clothes at home. There was only a small number of professional artisans (chang’in or kongjang), who were either “good” or “base” (commoner or slave) in status. Those of good status were free and independent artisans, but most were also employed by agencies of the central government or by provincial governors or district magistrates where they were registered by those agencies as part of their labor service obligation. Officials meted out punishment if the goods they produced for the government were not up to par. When they were off official duty in government manufactories, they were free to work on their own but owed an artisan’s tax to the state.

These professional artisans were engaged mainly in producing specialized ramie and silk textiles, shoes, furniture and cabinets, kitchen utensils, leather goods, tiles, paper, lacquerware, pottery, weapons, and armor and in smelting and metallurgy. The number of the artisans employed by the central government throughout the country was limited by law to about 6,600 men of which 2,800 in 130 categories were employed in the capital, and 3,800 in 27 categories in the provinces. These artisans, concentrated to a serious degree in the capital, were employed primarily to produce the goods needed to maintain the prestige of the ruling class.

In the countryside there was far less division of labor, and most artisans there were in engaged in the manufacture of weapons, agricultural tools, paper, pillows, and bedding. Most were private artisans who operated on their own and were only mobilized on occasion for government work to make necessities or tribute products for the king and court. About one-third of the provincial registered artisans were located in Kyŏngsang Province, but there were never more than a couple in each town or district. In Chŏlla Province, the towns of Chŏnju and Namwŏn, known for papermaking, only had twenty-three paperworkers each. Even the largest towns like Kyŏngju, Sangju, Andong, and Chinju only had one or two blacksmiths or metallurgists. The yamen of provincial governors and military commanders had the most artisans, about a dozen each.⁶

Most local industry at the beginning of the dynasty was in textiles – hemp, ramie, and cotton. Despite government efforts to promote the silk industry, silk weaving did not flourish, and high quality silk products were imported from China to the end of the dynasty.⁷ Cotton textile production began in the mid-1290s in China, and cotton seeds were first brought to Korea around 1364, but cotton cloth did not become a major source of clothing until the 1460s. In 1469 Yang Sŏngji recommended that it be designated as an item of tribute for the three provinces in the south, and by 1516 the position of cotton as a medium of exchange became more firmly established.⁸

By the early Koryŏ dynasty, the state asserted control over salt production and granted rights to salt flats to princesses as a means of support. As royal authority waned, private magnates gained control over the salt flats, but in 1309 King Ch’ungsŏn, under the influence of Yüan dynasty methods, confiscated all salt flats in the hands of private magnates, members of royalty, and Buddhist temples. He then designated certain households along the coast as “salt households” and entrusted responsibility for salt production to them. By the end of the dynasty, however, salt production was taken over by corrupt officials, wealthy private parties, and smugglers, and the salt households either fled their lands to escape excessive levies or were driven off the salt flats by the Wakō pirates.⁹

The mining industry was also limited by the circumstances of the time. Early in the Chos...