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North Korea The Chosn Dynasty: Florescence
One of General Yi's first acts was to carry out a sweeping
land reform long advocated by Confucian literati reformers. After
a national cadastral survey, all extant land registers were
destroyed. Except for land doled out to loyalists called merit
subjects, Yi Sng-gye declared everything to be owned by the
state, thus undercutting Buddhist temples, which held vast farm
lands, and locally powerful clans. Both groups had exacted high
rents from peasants, leading to social distress in the late Kory
period. These reforms also greatly enhanced the taxation power of
the central government.
Buddhist influence in and complicity with the old system made
it easier for the Confucian literati to urge an extirpation of
Buddhist economic and political influence, and exile in the
mountains for monks and their disciples. Indeed, the literati
accomplished a deep Confucianization of Chosn society, which
particularly affected the position of women. Often prominent in
Kory society, women were now relegated to domestic chores of
child-rearing and housekeeping, as so-called inside people.
As neo-Confucian doctrines swept the old order away, Korea
effectively developed a secular society. Common people, however,
retained attachments to folk religions, shamanism, geomancy, and
fortune-telling, influences condemned by both Confucianism and
the world at that time. This Korean mass culture created
remarkably lively and diverse art forms: uniquely colorful and
unpretentiously naturalistic folk paintings of animals, popular
novels in Korean vernacular, and characters like the
mudang, shamans who summoned spirits and performed
exorcisms in kt, or shamanistic, rituals.
For more than a century after its founding, Chosn flourished
as an exemplary agrarian bureaucracy deeply influenced by a cadre
of learned scholar-officials who were steeped in the doctrines of
neo-Confucianism. Like Kory, the Chosn Dynasty lacked the
typical features of a feudal society. It was instead a classic
agrarian bureaucracy.
Chosn possessed an elaborate procedure for entry to the
civil service, a highly articulated civil service, and a practice
of administering the country from the top down and from the
center. The system rested on an agrarian base, making it
different from modern bureaucratic systems; the particular
character of agrarian-bureaucratic interaction also provided one
of Korea's departures from the typical Chinese experience.
James B. Palais, a widely respected historian of the Chosn
Dynasty, has shown that conflict between bureaucrats seeking
revenues for government coffers and landowners hoping to control
tenants and harvests was a constant during the Chosn Dynasty,
and that in this conflict over resources the landowners often won
out. Controlling land theoretically owned by the state, private
landed interests soon came to be stronger and more persistent in
Korea than in China. Although Korea had a centralized
administration, the ostensibly strong center was more often a
façade concealing the reality of aristocratic power.
One interpretation suggests that Korea's agrarian bureaucracy
was superficially strong but actually rather weak at the center.
A more conventional interpretation is that the Chosn Dynasty was
ruled by a highly centralized monarchy served by a hereditary
aristocracy that competed via civil and military service
examinations for access to bureaucratic office. The state
ostensibly dominated the society, but in fact landed aristocratic
families kept the state at bay and perpetuated local power for
centuries. This pattern persisted until the late 1940s, when
landed dominance was obliterated in a northern revolution and
attenuated in southern land reform; since then the balance has
shifted toward strong central power and top-down administration
of the whole country in both Koreas. The disruptions caused by
the Korean War magnified the sociopolitical consequences of these
developments.
The scientific Korean written alphabet
han'gl (see Glossary)
was systematized in the fifteenth century under the
greatest of Korean kings, Sejong (r. 1418-50), who also greatly
increased the use of metal moveable type for book publications of
all sorts
(see The Korean Language
, ch. 2). Korean is thought to
be part of the Altaic group of languages, which includes Turkic,
Mongol, Hungarian, Finnish, Tungusic (Manchu), and possibly
Japanese. In spite of the long influence of written Chinese,
Korean remains very different in lexicon, phonology, and grammar.
The new han'g l alphabet did not come into general use
until the twentieth century, however. Since 1948 North Koreans
have used the Korean alphabet exclusively while South Koreans
have retained usage of a mixed Sino-Korean script.
Confucianism is based on the family and an ideal model of
relations between family members. It generalizes this family
model to the state and to an international system--the Chinese
world order. The principle is hierarchy within a reciprocal web
of duties and obligations: the son obeys the father by following
the dictates of filial piety; the father provides for and
educates the son. Daughters obey mothers and mothers-in-law;
younger siblings follow older siblings; wives are subordinate to
husbands. The superior prestige and privileges of older adults
make longevity a prime virtue. In the past, transgressors of
these rules were regarded as uncultured beings unfit to be
members of society. When generalized to politics, the principle
mean that a village followed the leadership of venerated elders
and citizens revered a king or emperor, who was thought of as the
father of the state. Generalized to international affairs, the
Chinese emperor was the big brother of the Korean king.
The glue holding the traditional nobility together was
education, meaning socialization into Confucian norms and virtues
that began in early childhood with the reading of the Confucian
classics. The model figure was the so-called true gentleman, the
virtuous and learned scholar-official who was equally adept at
poetry and statecraft. In Korea education started very early
because Korean students had to master the extraordinarily
difficult classical Chinese language--tens of thousands of
written ideographs and their many meanings typically learned
through rote memorization. Throughout the Chosn Dynasty, all
official records and formal education and most written discourse
were in classical Chinese. With Chinese language and philosophy
came a profound cultural penetration of Korea, such that most
Chosn arts and literature came to use Chinese models.
Confucianism is often thought to be a conservative
philosophy, stressing tradition, veneration of a past golden age,
careful attention to the performance of ritual, disdain for
material goods, commerce, and the remaking of nature, combined
with obedience to superiors and a preference for relatively
frozen social hierarchies. Much commentary on contemporary Korea
focuses on this legacy and, in particular, on its allegedly
authoritarian, antidemocratic character. Emphasis on the legacy
of Confucianism, however, does not explain the extraordinary
commercial bustle of South Korea, the materialism and conspicuous
consumption of new elites, or the determined struggles for
democratization by Korean workers and students. At the same time,
one cannot assume that communist North Korea broke completely
with the past. The legacy of Confucianism includes the country's
family-based politics, the succession to rule of the leader's
son, and the extraordinary veneration of Kim Il Sung.
The Chosn Dynasty had a traditional class structure that
departed from the Chinese Confucian example, providing an
important legacy for the modern period. The governing elite
continued to be known as yangban but the term no longer
simply connoted two official orders. In the Chosn Dynasty, the
yangban had a virtual monopoly on education, official
position, and possession of land. Entry to yangban status
required a hereditary lineage. Unlike in China, commoners could
not sit for state-run examinations leading to official position.
One had to prove membership in a yangban family, which in
practice meant having a forebear who had sat for exams within the
past four generations. In Korea as in China, the majority of
peasant families could not spare a son to study for the exams, so
upward social mobility was sharply limited. But because in Korea
the limit also was specifically hereditary, people had even less
mobility than in China and held attitudes toward class
distinction that often seemed indistinguishable from the
attitudes underlying the caste system.
Silla society's "bone-rank" system also underlined that one's
status in society was determined by birth and lineage. For this
reason, each family and clan maintained an extensive genealogical
record, or
chokpo (see Glossary),
with meticulous care.
Because only male offspring prolonged the family and clan lines
and were the only names registered in the genealogical tables,
the birth of a son was greeted with great felicitation.
The elite were most conscious of family pedigree. A major
study of all those who passed examinations in the Chosn Dynasty
(some 14,000) showed that the elite families were heavily
represented; other studies have documented the persistence of
this pattern into the early twentieth century. Even in 1945, this
aristocracy was substantially intact, although it died out soon
thereafter.
Korea's traditional class system also included a peasant
majority and minorities of petty clerks, merchants, and so-called
base classes (ch'ommin), that is, castelike hereditary
groups (paekchng) such as butchers, leather tanners, and
beggars. Although merchants ranked higher than members of
low-born classes, Confucian elites frowned on commercial activity
and up until the twentieth century squelched it as much as
possible. Peasants or farmers ranked higher than merchants
because they worked the land, but the life of the peasantry was
almost always difficult during the dynasty, and became more so
later on. Most peasants were tenants, were required to give up at
least half their crop to landlords as tax, and were subject to
various additional exactions. Those in the low-born classes were
probably worse off, however, given very high rates of slavery for
much of the Chosn period. One source reported more than 200,000
government slaves in Seoul alone in 1462, and recent scholarship
has suggested that at one time as much as 60 percent of Seoul's
population may have been slaves. In spite of slavery being
hereditary, however, rates of escape from slavery and manumission
also were unusually high. Class and status hierarchies also were
built into the Korean language and have persisted into the
contemporary period. Superiors and inferiors were addressed quite
differently, and elaborate honorifics were used to address
elders. Even verb endings and conjugations differed according to
station.
Chosn Dynasty Confucian doctrines also included a foreign
policy known as "serving the great" (sadae), in this case,
China. Chosn lived within the Chinese world order, which
radiated outward from China to associated states, of which Korea
was the most important. Korea was China's little brother, a model
tributary state, and in many ways the most important of China's
allies. Koreans revered things Chinese, and China responded for
the most part by being a good neighbor, giving more than it took
away. China assumed that enlightened Koreans would follow it
without being forced. Absolutely convinced of its own
superiority, China indulged in a policy that might be called
benign neglect, thereby allowing Korea substantive autonomy as a
nation.
This sophisticated world order was broken up by Western and
Japanese influence in the late nineteenth century. Important
legacies for the twentieth century remained, however. As a small
power, Korea had to learn to be shrewd in foreign policy. Since
at least the seventh century, Koreans have cultivated the
sophisticated art of "low determines high" diplomacy, a practice
whereby a small country maneuvers between two larger countries
and seeks to use foreign power for its own ends. Although both
North Korea and South Korea have often struck foreign observers
as rather dependent on big-power support, both have not only
claimed but also strongly asserted their absolute autonomy and
independence as nation-states, and both have been adept at
manipulating their big-power clients. Until the mid-1980s, North
Korea was masterful not only in getting big powers to fight its
battles, but also in maneuvering between the Soviet Union and
China to obtain something from each and to prevent either from
domination. And just as in the traditional period, P'yongyang's
heart was with Beijing.
Nonetheless, the main characteristic of Korea's traditional
diplomacy was isolationism, even what scholar Kim Key-hyuk has
called exclusionism. After the Japanese invasions of the 1590s,
Korea isolated itself from Japan, although the Edo Shogunate and
the Chosn Dynasty established diplomatic relations early in the
seventeenth century and trade was conducted between the two
countries. Korea dealt harshly with errant Westerners who came to
the country and kept the Chinese at arm's length. Westerners
called Korea the Hermit Kingdom, a term suggesting the pronounced
hostility toward foreign power and the deep desire for
independence that marked traditional Korea.
Data as of June 1993
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