The Origins of the Choson Dynasty

John B. Duncan

• Editorial: University of Washington Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805337
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia coreana

The Origins of the Choson Dynasty provides an exhaustive analysis of the structure and composition of Korea's central officialdom during the transition from the Koryo dynasty (918-1392) to the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) and offers a new interpretation of the history of traditional Korea.

1

The Koryŏ Political System

The Koryŏ dynasty’s political system was at one time conventionally described as a replica of that of T’ang China. Indeed, if one relies solely on the description of political institutions in the “Monograph on Officials” (Paekkwan chi) of the dynastic history, the Koryŏsa (History of the Koryŏ), it is hard to come to any other conclusion. Recent studies have shown, however, that the way in which the Koryŏ government actually worked was quite different.¹

Although these studies have piqued scholarly interest in Koryŏ political institutions, research in this area has been carried out almost in a vacuum. Historians drawing contrasts between Korea in the Koryŏ period and China have usually proceeded from the assumption that the Chinese dynastic histories describe the actual structure and operation of Chinese institutions. Furthermore, there has been virtually no effort to interpret findings on the Koryŏ in light of what is known about premodern polities in other parts of the world, aside from one or two attempts to use Max Weber’s work on bureaucracy. Even those efforts, however, have been almost universally rejected because of the strongly aristocratic nature of Koryŏ society.² Thus while studies on Koryŏ political institutions accumulate, we have very little sense of how the Koryŏ system compares with the political systems of other countries.

The classic comparative study of historical bureaucratic societies is S. N. Eisenstadt’s The Political Systems of Empires. Eisenstadt’s conclusions, which point to the existence of substantial aristocratic elements as an important variable in determining the nature of traditional bureaucratic polities, are drawn from an examination of several major societies, including Sassanid Persia, Ottoman Turkey, Byzantium, and China. Koryŏ Korea was smaller than those polities, but it shared many of their features and grappled with similar problems. A reconsideration of Koryŏ institutions in the light of Eisenstadt’s findings should give us a better understanding of how the Koryŏ system worked and what it shared with other historical polities, as well as in what ways it was different.

Eisenstadt sees the historical bureaucratic society as a type of polity that falls between feudal and patrimonial systems and “modern” political systems. Feudal and patrimonial systems arise in poorly differentiated societies where material and human resources remain embedded in various ascriptive descent or territorial collectivities. Modern political systems, on the other hand, form in highly differentiated societies with large amounts of free-floating resources that can be used by the state in pursuit of its political goals. In the historical bureaucratic society, with its limited degree of social differentiation, free-floating resources—those not tied up in feudal fiefs or estates, freely alienable and subject to taxation by the state—coexist with resources still embedded in traditional ascriptive groups. Maintenance of the historical bureaucratic polity is dependent on the continuing coexistence of both types of resources. Failure to preserve some degree of free-floating resources will result in the regression, in Eisenstadt’s terms, to a feudal or patrimonial type, while a predominance of free-floating resources will lead to the demise of the historical bureaucratic polity in favor of “modern” democratic or totalitarian regimes. By the same token, many of the differences among historical bureaucratic polities can be explained by the extent of social differentiation. Less differentiated societies, where social and economic roles are embedded in traditional ascriptive groups, produce fewer free-floating resources and thus tend to have weaker political systems, while more differentiated societies tend to have stronger, more complex political systems. The Koryŏ was a relatively poorly differentiated society, in which rulers struggled constantly with ascriptive elites for access to resources.

Initiative for the formation of bureaucratic societies, Eisenstadt argues, comes from rulers, whose aim is to create a more centralized and unified system in which they can monopolize decision making without being bound by traditional aristocratic or tribal entities. He notes that opposition to rulers comes from groups, typically landed aristocrats, who feel threatened by centralizing activities. To overcome such opposition, rulers find allies among groups who are opposed to the old aristocrats and have something to gain from the establishment of a centralized polity. Institutionally, rulers seek to establish administrative organs whose budgets they can control and which they can staff with loyal and qualified personnel, thereby making administrative bodies as independent as possible from traditional groups. As we will see, the tenth-century Koryŏ rulers attempted to use newer social elements while implementing institutional changes designed to enhance their control over the political process.

Eisenstadt cites a number of factors that limited the power of the rulers of historical bureaucratic polities. Among those factors was the legitimization of rulers by traditional religious beliefs, which tended to bind the new rulers within the old nexus of power relations. The founding of the Koryŏ was legitimized in large measure by Buddhist and geomantic ideas that were part and parcel of the legitimating ideology of the dominant social groups.

Other important factors were the extent to which political roles were not distinguished from basic societal roles and traditional ascriptive units still performed crucial political functions. These were closely linked to the low level of differentiation in Koryŏ society, which is revealed most clearly in its system of local administration. The dynasty did not exercise direct rule over most of the countryside; instead routine administration of the vast majority of the country’s prefectures and counties remained the hereditary prerogative of local elites upon whom the dynasty relied to maintain order and mobilize resources. The descent groups of these local elites formed a hierarchical territorial status system that was the constitutional foundation of the Koryŏ polity.

Eisenstadt points out that the continuing importance of ascriptive and particularistic criteria in the structure and composition of elite groups was another major limiting factor on the power of the rulers.³ The tradition of hereditary privilege in the powerful descent groups that dominated local society in ninth- and tenth-century Korea was carried over into the capital-based official descent groups that emerged out of the local elites to become the dominant political stratum in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This tradition not only sanctioned the ascriptive privileges of elite groups, both local and central, but also greatly limited the amount of resources available to rulers, thus forming conditions that engendered and shaped struggles between kings and elite social groups over resources and political power.

Eisenstadt also notes that value orientations of rulers constituted a major variable in determining the nature of the polity. He defines two major types of value orientations in historical bureaucracies. One is a political-collective orientation, in which the primary goal is strengthening of the state through territorial expansion. This orientation leads rulers to pursue policies that enhance their access to resources and undermine the balance between free-floating and traditional embedded resources that is essential for existence of the polity. The other is an orientation toward the maintenance of culture in which the primary goal is to ensure perpetuation of the polity through diffusion and maintenance of cultural values. Societies oriented thus, of which China is a classic example, tend to be much more stable, maintaining or recreating themselves over long periods of time.⁴

Manifestations of both orientations can be found in the Koryŏ. The dynasty’s original name of Later Koguryŏ expressed the founders’ irredentist aspirations for the lost territories of Koguryŏ in the northern reaches of the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria. Although the Koryŏ did enjoy some early success in expanding its borders, particularly in the northwestern region, where it reached all the way to the Yalu River, any further expansion in the northeastern reaches of the peninsula or across the Yalu into Manchuria was blocked by the rise of the powerful empires of the Khitan Liao (907–1125) and the Jurchen Chin (1115–1234). By the time the Koryŏ worked out a settlement with the Liao in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, it had already begun to shift to a cultural maintenance orientation. This was challenged in the mid-twelfth century by the nativist war party of the monk Myoch’ŏng (d. 1135), but Myoch’ŏng was defeated by Kim Pu-sik (1075–1151), a Confucian scholar-official whose primary concerns were creation of a Silla-based political identity and diffusion of Confucian social values.⁵ Thereafter, continuing pressure from the Jurchen Chin and the eventual incorporation of Korea into the Mongol Yüan (1260–1368) empire effectively precluded any resurgence of expansionist sentiment until very near the end of the dynasty.⁶

What, then, was the essential nature of the Koryŏ political system under the cultural maintenance orientation? Winston Lo, in his discussion of the cultural maintenance orientation of Sung China, argues that the main functions of the state were “protecting the realm from its domestic and foreign enemies and maintaining the social hierarchy and the traditional lifestyle to which the different social strata were accustomed.”⁷ This statement seems to apply generally to the Koryŏ as well, especially in the middle and later centuries when reform efforts were designed primarily to maintain or restore the status quo. Such a cultural maintenance orientation would seem to be particularly well suited to a poorly differentiated society with strong ascriptive tendencies.

CENTRAL POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS

The Koryŏ lasted nearly five hundred years, but few would have predicted such longevity when Wang Kŏn established the dynasty in the early tenth century. The authority of Korean kings had long been constrained by powerful aristocratic constituents, and coups d’état had been the order of the day in late Silla as various aristocratic descent groups took turns seizing the throne. Wang Kŏn was hampered by the same problems that had plagued the late Silla monarchy. He himself rose to the throne via a coup, and his new regime was essentially a confederation of powerful warlords within which he was little more than primus inter pares.⁸ The most pressing problems, therefore, for the early Koryŏ kings were legitimating themselves, enhancing the prestige and power of the throne, and creating bureaucratic institutions through which they could carry out their political aims.

The Kingship

We can gain some sense of the magnitude of the problems faced by the Koryŏ founders from a brief overview of the difficulties that plagued their Silla predecessors. The dominant center of political power in the early Silla state was the aristocratic Hwabaek Council, which exercised a broad range of powers, including choosing kings, deliberating on major policy questions, and executing policy decisions. As competition for domination of the Korean Peninsula among the three kingdoms of Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla began to heat up in the sixth and seventh centuries, the balance of political power shifted from the Hwabaek Council toward the throne, reaching a peak during the first hundred years after Silla’s victory. The kingship became the hereditary prerogative of the descendants of King Muryŏl (r. 654–61), who came to the throne by overturning a Hwabaek Council decision in favor of another man. Muryŏl’s descendants carried out a number of bureaucratizing reforms, including a change in office nomenclature designed to enhance the bureaucratic subordination of government officials and replacement of the stipend village (nogŭp) (a grant that allowed its high-ranking recipients to collect land rents and corvée services from residents of a fixed area) with a monthly stipend system.⁹

Despite these changes, the Silla polity remained a poorly differentiated system in which political roles were closely linked to social status. Silla’s caste-like Bone Rank system, which took shape in the sixth century, allocated political offices on the basis of social status. Only persons belonging to the Holy Bone (Sŏnggol) caste or—later, after the demise of the Holy Bone line in the early seventh century—the True Bone (Chin’gol) caste, could occupy the throne, and only men born into the Holy or True Bone caste could sit on the Hwabaek Council or rise to high political office. Below the True Bone caste were the sixth, fifth, and fourth headranks (tup’um). Men born into the various headrank strata were limited to functionary positions in the bureaucracy, with the highest-ranking group, the sixth headrank, allowed to rise only to mid-level posts. Thus a major feature of the Silla political system was the high degree to which political roles were embedded in ascriptive collectivities.

When the reforms of the seventh and eighth century Silla kings began to impinge on True Bone privileges, an inevitable aristocratic backlash began in the mid-eighth century with the reversal of some of the most important bureaucratizing reforms of King Kyŏngdŏk (r. 742–65), including a revival of the stipend village system, and soon led to a series of revolts that culminated in the assassination of King Hyegong (r. 765–80). Hyegong’s death marked the end of hereditary succession in Muryŏl’s line and opened the door for free-for-all competition for the crown among the True Bone aristocrats of the capital. No fewer than 20 different individuals sat on the throne during the last century and a half of the Silla as segments of the Kim and Pak descent groups fought for power, each believing that its True Bone status gave it a valid claim to the throne.

Although the material base of True Bone power in earlier years appears to have been control over traditional tribal resources, the caste lost much of its tribal power base as a result of the centralizing bureaucratic reforms of the seventh and eighth centuries.¹⁰ After the revolts of the mid-eighth century, however, True Bone elites began to amass large landed estates (chŏnjang) and became, in effect, a landed aristocracy.¹¹ The revival of aristocratic power resulted in the ninth-century rebirth of council politics in the Chŏngsadang.¹²

Aristocratic preoccupation with power struggles in the capital led to neglect of the routine business of governing, especially in the provinces. This opened the way for local strongmen (hojok), who referred to themselves as generals (changgun) or as lords of walled towns (sŏngju), to assemble private military forces throughout the peninsula. Over time many of these strongmen joined forces, either by alliance or subjugation, as they sought to bolster power and increase territory. By the beginning of the tenth century, their alliances coalesced into two large entities capable of challenging Silla: Later Paekche and Koryŏ.¹³

These local warlords appear to have been of diverse social origins. Some of the most prominent were disaffected aristocrats who had relocated to the countryside, such as the Silla prince Kungye and the descendants of Kim Chu-wŏn in Myŏngju (modern Kangnŭng). Others included rebellious local officials, members of Silla’s border defense units, and even village chiefs. Another significant group were men of obscure backgrounds who were active in maritime trade.¹⁴ The rise of such elements suggests that Silla underwent a process of social differentiation that produced new social groups, such as maritime traders, who could contest the True Bone landed aristocracy’s domination of Korean society, and that practical power replaced hereditary privilege as a primary determinant of social status.¹⁵

Under the leadership of Wang Kŏn, a man of maritime trading origins who ousted Kungye as king in 918, the Koryŏ eventually succeeded in establishing unified rule over the Korean Peninsula, accepting Silla’s surrender in 935 and defeating Later Paekche on the battlefield in 936. Wang Kŏn used a variety of ideological elements to legitimate his rule. It is clear from his reign title, “Heaven-given” (Ch’ŏnsu), that he sought to justify his overthrow of Kungye in Confucian terms by claiming to have received the Mandate of Heaven. This was the first time a Korean ruler is known to have made use of the Mandate and would appear to have given Wang Kŏn a powerful new means of legit...