Read A History of Korea Online
Authors: Professor Kyung Moon Hwang
Tags: #Education & Reference, #History, #Ancient, #Early Civilization, #Asia, #Korea, #World, #Civilization & Culture
A History of Korea (64 page)
While the Deliberative Assembly went about its work, the Japanese forces prosecuted their confrontation with China, declaring war on August 1 and swiftly gaining the upper hand. In a series of clashes, from Pyongyang, where the largest land battle of the war left much of the city in ruins, to the Manchurian areas of Dalian and the Shandong peninsula, to naval exchanges in the Yellow Sea,
the Japanese won decisively. Just as they had attempted, but failed, to do in the 1590s, the Japanese sought supremacy in East Asia by provoking a direct confrontation with China in Korea, and this time the result was a shift in the East Asian regional balance of power that would endure for a century.
THE SPIRIT OF KABO
This momentous reversal of the East Asian order would present a psychological and cultural shock to the Koreans, akin to the effect of the fall of the Ming dynasty two centuries earlier (
Chapter 10
). But for many Koreans, China’s downfall represented good riddance, a crucial external ingredient for furthering the internal process of enlightenment, reform, and self-strengthening. The Deliberative Assembly in fact could not have been clearer in its approval of this newfound independence from the centuries-long subordination to the Chinese: the first article of its reform program declared that Korea’s official dating system would no longer be based on the Chinese imperial calendar but rather on the founding, in 1392, of the Chos
n dynasty—1894, for example, was now “Year 503 After Foundation.” The second article called for a new kind of diplomatic relationship between Korea and China. But the articles that followed definitively set the stage for the staggering changes in state and society that the Deliberative Assembly would promulgate. In the rest of the first ten articles, in fact, the Deliberative Assembly declared an end to hereditary social status and slavery, a cessation of contract marriages of adolescents along with a lifting of the prohibition on widow remarriage, and the opening of the path to government service by commoners. By the time the Deliberative Assembly gave way to a cabinet-based government at the end of 1894, it had passed over 200 such bills, systematically overhauling patterns of Korean government, society, and economy that had been in place for centuries. With the exception of those concerning governing structure, most of these resolutions were not immediately implemented into practice, but they provided a blueprint and impetus for reform that would continue for decades.
The end of slavery in Korea
“Laws allowing public and private public slavery are completely abolished, and the sale of human beings is forbidden.” One is tempted to take this resolution of July 1894, the ninth passed by the Deliberative Assembly, as the Korean equivalent to the American Emancipation Proclamation of three decades earlier. Indeed this comparison inspires thinking about the striking parallels as well as differences between the Korean and American forms of slavery. Korea’s system was more ancient and endured in a population with no physical differences, while that of the US was based on, and had a lot to do with furthering, the notion of race. But the two slave systems shared fundamental features: hereditary slave status, the treatment of slaves as chattel property, and the dependence of the social structure and economy on their exploitation. In both cases as well, the perpetuation of slavery and discrimination relied upon the insistence of the “one drop of blood” rule in the face of widespread “miscegenation” through sexual exploitation. The similarities extended, in fact, to the gradual and pained process of true emancipation following legal eradication.
The fading of slavery in Korea had actually begun long before the Kabo Reforms, both legally and customarily. After reaching a peak, according to estimates from household registration records, of approximately 30 percent of the population in the late seventeenth century, economic trends toward the use of more wage labor made slavery gradually less efficient. And growing calls from scholar-officials condemning the practice as a violation of Confucian morality contributed to the government’s decision to eliminate the holding of “public,” or government, slaves (
kong nobi
) in the early nineteenth century. By the time of the Kabo Reform declaration that extended this ban to the private slaves, slavery had already been significantly diminished. The official emancipation of 1894, then, was largely a symbolic gesture; indeed, some forms of servitude did not end,
and even the first major revision of the household registration system in 1896 still made room for bound servants. It was not until 1909 that the registration form eliminated any possibility of accounting for them. Even these steps, however, did not totally destroy the reality of bondage, especially in the countryside, where servile laborers (
ms
m
) continued to tend to their masters until the Korean War (1950–53) period.
These legal steps of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, were still significant, for once slavery, bound servitude, and the legal distinction of “mean” or “low-born” people were eliminated from Korean society, their descendants truly enjoyed social liberation. This perhaps stems from the fact that Korean hereditary slavery, though meticulously maintained through record-keeping and other factors, had not been based on physical differences like “race.” In other words, in the modern era, with increasing urbanization and mobility, no one could really know who was a slave descendant. The contrast with America could not be starker. The flip side to this, however, is the contemporary Korean tendency, bordering on national amnesia, regarding this troubling component of the past: the casual claim that Korea’s form of slavery was somehow less inhumane finds easy support in the quirky belief among almost all (South) Koreans that they are descendants of the Chosn aristocracy.
The Deliberative Assembly, in short, kick-started the Kabo (“1894”) Reforms of 1894–6, the significance of which would reverberate over the course of Korea’s modern transformation.
The makeup of the Deliberative Assembly and of the Kabo Reform governments was equally revolutionary. Of the twenty or so members of the Deliberative Assembly, half came from the non-aristocratic secondary status groups. And while the Kabo government cabinets were formally led by men with traditional aristocratic ancestry, the ranks immediately below, from vice minister to administrators and their assistants, were filled with those from non-aristocratic backgrounds. This bespoke the prominence
of people from secondary status groups, especially northerners and the
chungin
technical specialists, in the Korean enlightenment movement from the 1860s onward. Their ascendance to the higher ranks of the new officialdom, in breaking through the centuries-old barriers of hereditary status, had much to do with the particularities of their longstanding roles, but also with their readiness to discard traditional ideas and ways. This tendency, shared by the enlightenment activists as a whole—both aristocratic and not—also drew them to Japan as a model of reform and self-strengthening. Such ties were reinforced in the fall of 1895 by the assassination, at the hands of Japanese soldiers and Korean accomplices, of Queen Min, who from the beginning had been a thorn on the side of Japanese interests.
The uproar over this craven act eventually engulfed the political scene and, by the opening weeks of 1896, anti-Japanese elements close to the monarch spirited away the Korean king to the safe haven of the Russian consulate, beyond the reach of the Japanese soldiers and Korean government officials. This provided the impetus for the widespread distaste for the Kabo government to erupt into a mob that helped to kill several top officials while chasing the rest to Japan. Thus ended the Kabo Reforms, the same way as they had begun back in the summer of 1894, with Korean progressives under the protection of the Japanese.
The forces unleashed by the events of 1894, however, would pave multiple paths of historical development determining the country’s modern fate: China would weaken further and not regain its dominant standing in northeast Asia for another century; the Tonghak Uprising would inspire countless other eruptions of armed anti-foreign resistance movements well into the period of Japanese colonialism (1910–45); and the Kabo Reforms would stand as a microcosm of Korea’s uneasy transitions at the turn of the twentieth century—at once embracing the models of the outside world, but ultimately becoming swamped by forces beyond Koreans’ control.
15
. . . . . . . .
The Great Korean Empire
CHRONOLOGY
| 1896 | April Founding of the Independence Club and publication of The Independent newspaper |
| 1896 | Revision of the household registration system |
| 1897 | Proclamation of the Great Korean Empire |
| 1898 | Start of the nation-wide land survey |
| 1899 | Government shutdown of the Independence Club and The Independent newspaper |
| 1899 | May Operation of the first streetcars in Seoul |
| 1899 | September Opening of the Seoul-Inch’n Rail Line |
| 1904 | Opening of the Seoul-Pusan Rail Line |
| 1904 | Outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War |