SLAVERY 269in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries weakened the boundaries between
slaves and commoners and permitted more opportunities for escape from slav-
ery. These changing circumstances also produced a new awareness on the part
ofYu Hy6ngw(m, who called into question traditionally accepted views about
slavery, and proposed methods for the gradual reduction of slave inheritance,
eventual elimination of the hereditary principle, and ultimately, the ending of
slavery for all save criminals. Even though he did articulate a theory of human
equality and perspicaciously intuited the possibility of the replacement of slave
with hired labor, he was reluctant to call for immediate abolition because of his
commitment to the economic needs of the ruling class, and he understood hired
labor in the context of Confucian subordination and hierarchical respect rela-
tions between inferiors and superiors.
He laid the groundwork for open challenges to traditionally accepted attitudes
toward slavery in the eighteenth century and the abolition of most official slaves
in 1801. The leading eighteenth-century scholarly theoreticians of slavery
shared Yu's ambivalence: they sought an alleviation of the burdens and injus-
tices imposed on slaves without, by so doing, causing the destruction of the basis
of status and hierarchy in Korean society. Nevertheless, they contributed to an
atmosphere in which the virtual abolition of official slavery became possible.
The reduction of the private slave population also occurred at the same time,
but it was less the product of the transformation of the attitudes of the private
and official slaveowners than the inability of those parties to stem the flight of
the slaves from their villages and the slave rosters. When indirect methods were
adopted to alleviate the burdens on the slaves by reducing their tax burdens to
the level of commoners, the possession and upkeep of slaves no longer became
economical, and slaves were replaced by commoners.212
Despite the significant reduction of both official and private slaves, total abo-
lition was not possible until after the opening of Korea to the outside world in
1876 because many yangban families continued to possess one or two slaves in
domestic service and enslavement as a form of punishment was still acceptable
to even the most "liberal" Confucian reformers. Hereditary slavery was not abol-
ished until 1886, and slavery itself not until the kabo reforms of a Japanese-
sponsored cabinet in 1894. Even when Kojong abolished hereditary slavery in
1886, he went no further because he was obliged to maintain the standards of
proper status discrimination (myongbun).^213 Yu Hyongwon had relied on the wis-
dom of classical China and Confucian statecraft and the practical example of
hired labor to help open the door to new attitudes toward slavery, but the social
milieu was too restricted to allow for legislated abolition of private slaves.
Nonetheless, he made a significant contribution to a severe reduction in the per-
centage of slaves in the population to around 5 percent by providing a moral
basis for manumission of the innocent and the end of an 8oo-year era of slave
society in Korean history.
Did the reduction of slavery to negligible limits mean either an improvement
in the fortunes of the peasantry or a sign that Korea was progressing to a higher