Ch 15 - A Crumbling Dynasty

Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

The degeneration of Choson's central government, widespread favoritism, nepotism, and bureaucratic corruption was surpassed only by the level of similar practices by provincial governments, where bribery and price gouging were commonplace. Low-level functionaries became political fixtures, men often considered to be little more than a pack of wolves who lay awake nights devising new schemes to fleece the peasants.

The spreading belief in Catholicism and government-sanctioned persecutions of Catholics at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a grave and growing indictment of Choson's yangban society. However, religious conflict represented only one element of a much larger phenomenon underway in Choson;  the unraveling of the Yi Dynasty itself. Royal power diminished in the wake of factional battles and interclan power struggles that accompanied a repeated succession of minors to the Phoenix Throne.

By the nineteenth century, about the only sure way to get an appointment to government office was through bribery or through a clan or factional relationship to someone already in high office. Widespread favoritism and nepotism in appointing government officials not only precluded the selection of officials on the basis of merit, it also handicapped the bureaucracy and contributed to a degeneration of the entire governing process. The concentration of governing power in the hands of a succession of royal in-law clans made the once highly esteemed national examination system little more than an empty formality. Many talented and competent young men looked upon the examination system with such a degree of contempt that few even bothered to take the examination.

In the early years of the Yi Dynasty, magistrates were chosen from a prominent local family in the district they were to govern. Magistrates appointed under this system had every incentive to show moderation in governing, because any indiscretion or corruption would not only injure their personal reputation, but would also endanger the standing of their entire family. The method was eliminated amidst the dramatic social changes underway in the early 1800s, when officeholders were selected from among the friends and relatives of some high ranking bureaucrat in Seoul. The system of appointments soon degenerated into a kind of administrative freelancing operation bent on the exploitation of an unknown constituency.

Government corruption and inefficiency were hardly problems isolated to Seoul. The degeneration of Choson's central government was surpassed only by the level of similar practices in the provincial governments, where money began to make itself felt in politics. Bribery and price gouging became common practices in the country side and public offices were often bought and sold like any other commodity. By the early 19th century, it had become such a common practice for a district magistrate to "buy" his office, that a regular schedule of prices was set for the post. A small magistrate's position could be had for as little as the equivalent of five hundred dollars, while a provincial governorship would go for as much as fifty thousand dollars. Once in office, a district magistrate received bribes from local men seeking appointment to his administrative staff. The handsome returns earned by unscrupulous officials in Seoul only fed their avarice. To increase their profits, they shortened the tenure of political offices, thereby creating a higher "turnover" and increasing the payment frequency.

The price of political office became a direct tax on the common people. To cover the price of admission - not to mention trying to feather his own nest during his short term of office - each governor or magistrate was obliged to tax the people heavily. The Seoul government did not interfere with this fleecing of the peasantry so long as the regular amount of taxes were paid to the treasury along with any other special taxes that might be laid on the people. In return for not interfering in the magistrate's little game, the government demanded only that if he went beyond the limit of the people's endurance and they rose up and killed him or drove him from office, neither he nor his family would trouble the government to reinstate him or obtain redress of any kind. Of course there were many and brilliant exceptions, but to officials in the central government, the sooner a man was driven from office, the sooner they could find someone else to pay for the privilege of taking his place.

Provincial governors, military district commanders, and county magistrates, many of whom obtained their post through personal or family connections, or by outright bribery, frequently spent more time and interest on generating a return on their investment than in discharging their official duties. They were aided by petty local officials, bureaucrats and runners who, with their administrative know-how and knowledge of local affairs, became indispensable partners in what can only be described as organized embezzlement. The ability of such men to retain their office was measured by the skill they displayed in judging the limits of the people's patience and endurance and their ability to keep their finger on the pulse of the district or province they governed.

These "bureaucrats for hire" did not hold unlimited or even unrestrained power over the people in their jurisdiction. A newly appointed magistrate coming into a district he knew nothing about had to depend on local help to get the reins of government firmly in hand. His power was effectively curtailed and modified by means of the lower-level bureaucrats, or ajuns, functionaries who worked under him and actually carried out his directives. When the Yi administration stopped the practice of appointing magistrates from their local districts and placed their positions on the auction block, the locally established ajun families continued to retain the name ajun, and the term gradually narrowed to mean them alone.

The ajuns were political fixtures in their various districts. They were often considered to be little more than a pack of wolves, men who lay awake nights devising new schemes to fleece the peasants. There were many bad ajuns, but their real worth was in their role as a scapegoat for everyone else's shortcomings. They became a kind of dumping ground for abuse, a safety valve that prevented the social climate from exploding. The ajun was held hostage in his district by his family and local interests. His normal attitude was not that of an oppressor, but that of a buffer between the people and the magistrate. With one hand he held the rapacity of the magistrate in check, while he appeased exasperated peasants with the other. Serious trouble arose only when both the ajun and the magistrate were unscrupulous and connived together to exploit the populace.

Cloaked with government authority, ajuns took advantage of their position as the actual operational and enforcement arm of local government to freely manipulate the situation and extort the locals as they wished. Oppression in any extreme sense was the exception rather than the rule, yet the large sums of money and goods changing hands in the form of bribes tempted many a government official. In extreme cases, district magistrates and their staff devoted an inordinate amount of time to exacting as much wealth as possible from the their district. The resulting suffering fell directly on the shoulders of Choson's peasantry. Held in check by the rein of public opinion, if an ajunever lost the goodwill of his neighbors he could not move away to "greener pastures." Instead, he suffered the permanent consequences of his behavior right at home. Besides, if these men were even half as bad as they are sometimes described, the peasant population would probably have killed the lot of them long ago.

The principal sources of government revenue in Choson came from the various taxes and government levies imposed on the population through the land tax system, the military service tax system, and the state granary (rice loan) system. Land taxes were based of the amount of land under cultivation and its ability to produce. Unfortunately, the government-sponsored surveys designed to define the annual tax obligation had become corrupt and ineffective. The government's financial difficulties were rooted in the practice of exempting certain types of land from the tax register. Lands belonging to the royal clan were tax-exempt, as were lands used to provide income to support government offices.

The amount of tax-exempt land increased dramatically as the royal clan proliferated and government officials devised new ways to divert government income to their personal use. Numerous private individuals, especially in the grain-rich southern provinces, removed their own land from the tax registers through the skillful use of well-placed bribes. The collapse of the land tax system was so widespread that by the beginning of the 19th century most of Choson's regularly cultivated farmland was officially carried on the tax registers as wasteland, newly reclaimed land, or fallow land;  all of which was tax-exempt.

Adding to the peasant's tax burden was the rapacity of local officials who might, unknown to the government, "invent" and impose additional taxes, surcharges and handling fees of their own. From the farmer's point of view, the local tax collector was the government and the amount of tax paid depended largely on his character. Under an equitable man, the farmer's burden could be relatively light. He might even profit from his own labors. On the other had, if the local magistrate had bribed his way into office with the hope of becoming wealthy, the farmer's burden could amount to about half his harvest in taxes and various added fees and surcharges. The local tax collector extorted payments far above the amount fixed by the state merely to replace the public funds he had spent for private purposes. Throughout the country, tax collectors frequently collected far more in taxes than required by the government and lined their pockets with the difference.

In terms of value, the military service tax amounted to more than the basic land tax. Each able-bodied male was levied a tax of one bolt of cloth, which was supposedly used to aid the military. Because the cloth had to be produced by the peasants however, this tax often imposed a greater hardship than the land tax. The military service tax was also subject to the whims of the tax collector, whose own illegal exactions often included demands for payments of cloth on behalf of deceased family members. The overt corruption of local officials not only caused the peasants grief, but threatened the fiscal soundness of the central government. The royal court responded to this threat by dispatching secret inspectors who traveled the countryside incognito with orders to investigate and bring charges against any local official guilty of corruption. This effort at self-policing yielded no practical results however, since many of the inspectors proved to be just as susceptible to bribery as the local officials themselves. Even though a comparatively honest official might be appointed to serve as an inspector, it was no longer possible to stem the tide of dynastic decay.

The greatest confusion and corruption in Choson's three-tax system existed in the administration of the state granary system. The rice loan program was designed to help farmers by providing them with "interest-free" loans from the state granaries to help them get through lean spring periods. The loans were repaid at harvest time and included an officially set fee of ten percent for "wastage." This extra charge was intended to defray the local administrative expenses of the program, but it turned out to be nothing more than a pretext for charging interest. What had once been a method of giving relief to hard-pressed peasants evolved into a method of making usurious loans.

When Seoul demanded the ten percent wastage fee be sent directly to the capital, creative local officials devised a variety of practices to get around the edict. They fabricated false accounting records and often forced peasants to borrow much more than they needed. With the stroke of a brush, devious officials created, on paper at least, empty storehouses full of rice. Peasants were charged a variety of unrealistic fees for things like transportation, storage and, of course, wastage. Like the land tax, the farmer's ultimate tax rate depended on the district in which he lived. The abuses that plagued the rice loan system were far more corrupt and damaging than those practiced under either the land tax or military service tax systems.

The peasants were not alone in their suffering. Choson's highly stratified society, once dominated by the yangban class, gradually eroded after the 17th century and social upheavals affected everyone to some degree. By the turn of the 19th century, the occurrence of rapid upward and downward movements in social status had made the term yangban an increasingly vague description of a social class or group. A few powerful families dominated and controlled the royal court and political power had coalesced in the hands of the Noron faction lineages alone. The number of yangban who still had the capacity to exercise their claim to yangban status declined dramatically and many simply returned to the countryside where they fell to the status of a kind of local gentry.

Among those yangban lineages unable to obtain a government appointment for any of their family for several generations, some were forced by circumstance to become small-scale farmers known as chanban, or "ruined yangban." The chanban were those who had finally reached the point where they could no longer afford to maintain the dignity and authority that once marked their traditional status as yangban, and their numbers were steadily increasing. As yangban dropped in social stature, another group, the hereditary class of technical specialists in Seoul known as chungin, began moving up the social ladder. In the forefront of this social movement were language interpreters, men who had widened their horizons through close contact with Qing culture and travel to China. They had amassed fortunes through private trade activities and began using that wealth to expand their own influence in Yi society. Numerous chungin elements - physicians, meteorologists, astronomers, government artists, professionals with specialized knowledge and training - began pressing fresh claims to the social position they felt entitled to possess by reason of their skills.

Class relationships changed even in provincial society, an area previously the subject of widespread social discrimination. In northwest Choson, Pyongan Province saw a marked increase in the number of successful candidates passing the higher civil service examination. The success rate was so high that the small county of Chongju soon produced more degree holders than any other county in Choson, north or south. When taken together, all of these social developments could not help but represent a threat to a government ruling structure based on the domination of a few great families.

As the top of Yi society sank, social currents were also creating shifts at the base of Choson society. Improvements in agricultural technology - new techniques for transplanting rice and ridge and furrow plowing methods - created a farm labor surplus. In some instances, peasants became wealthy farmers and, through their wealth, managed to achieve the outward trappings of yangban status. The expanded real estate holdings of the royal clan and the continued corruption of the taxation system however, reduced many more peasants to the level of tenant farming in villages during the busy rice transplanting or harvest seasons. Still others either lost or gave up their land and became wage laborers who worked as craftsmen or miners.

If there was one saving feature in this social upheaval, it was that even if freeborn peasants lost their land, they no longer fell into slavery, for the practice was gradually disappearing. The large decrease in the slave population that occurred between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries was caused partly by the destruction of slave records during the Japanese invasions, partly by the government allowing slaves to gain their freedom through military service, and partly from slaves obtaining free status by virtue of military valor or similar unusual service to the state. Some simply bought their freedom outright. Even the government slaves still on the rosters no longer performed labor for the government. In effect, they too were free. The same was also true for many privately owned slaves whose financially hard-pressed yangban masters could no longer afford to keep them.

Faced with such circumstances, in 1801, King Sunjo's government decided to free its remaining slaves and ordered the rosters of government slaves to be burned. Thus, with few exceptions, government slaves shed their lowborn status and became free men. Although the institution of private slavery had not been formally abolished and slaves attached to local government agencies remained as slaves, a social change of major proportions had occurred. The old status system that had for so long upheld the distinction between master and slave was now officially crumbling.