14 INTRODUCTIONTHE CONFUCIAN FRAMEWORK OF STATECRAFT DEBATES
Almost all the participants in the debate over institutional reform in late Choson
were card-carrying believers in Confucianism, just as Yu was. Despite the cur-
rent enthusiasm for Yu and other so-called sirhak scholars of practicalleaming
because of the misperception that they were leading the way out of traditional
Confucianism towards some form of "modernity," the dialogue was limited to
Confucian alternatives alone until Christian heterodoxy intruded on the Korean
scene in the late eighteenth century. And even then, the vigorous persecution of
Christianity in 1791 and 1801 drove the potential for ideological disruption at
the highest level of government underground, restoring the spectrum of accept-
able alternatives once again to the Confucian framework.
Nonetheless, working within the Confucian framework did not mean con-
formity only to a single ideal or a single solution of contemporary problems. At
the least, Yu's work represented a rejection of several aspects of the status quo
in Choson life, which most Confucian scholars and officials at the time defended
as proper or rationalized as legitimate. His statecraft scholarship also marked
both a resurgence of a reform movement that had begun in official circles in the
late sixteenth century, and a shift to matters of statecraft and institutional reform
by scholars outside the Korean capital and bureaucracy.
Whether the role of Confucian statecraft thought was to safeguard the sta-
tus quo or demand change depended on the circumstances involved. In crude
terms, Korean Confucian statecraft was most reformist at the beginning of the
Choson dynasty in the late fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries, again
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in response to the routinization of
government institutions and bureaucracy, and finally after the imsul peasant
rebellion of 1862. In between, the tide of Confucian statecraft thought reverted
to a conservative mentality dedicated to the preservation of the status quo and
stability.
EARLY CHOSON INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR DEGENERATION
Early Chason Institutions
Since Yu's thought represented that second wave of reform and his writings were
geared to the problems of the Choson dynasty at its midpoint, and not at its cre-
ation, it is essential that the reader should understand the reasons why his reform
program did not simply replicate all the proposals of the late Koryo reformers.
For that reason, Part I of this book will consist of a lengthy background section
consisting of three chapters devoted to the institutional makeup of the early
Choson dynasty (chap. I), the deterioration of those early Choson institutions
up to and including the devastating effects of Hideyoshi's invasion in the 1590S
(chap. 2), and the nature of the recovery and institutional reconstruction that