CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT 35(even without office, san 'gwan), and academic degrees including the chinsa and
saengwon licentiate degrees as well as passers of the supreme literary and mil-
itary civil service examinations (munkwa, mukwa), students in school (kyosaeng),
and even soldiers (kul1sa) who were not officials but whom Han considered as
men eligible to rcceive an appointment to office. Other scholars like Yi Songmu
have acknowledged the existence of the yangban, but claimed that it only rep-
resented the elite section of the large mass of commoners, or the "men of good
[status]" (yang'in).25 Han argued that it was not until the sixteenth century that
yangban began to emerge as a status elite after the original program of the dynas-
tic founders broke down, and the yangban did not become a full-blown (ruling)
class until the seventeenth century.
One suspects that Han was influenced by the comments of Yu Suwon who
wrote extensively on social and economic problems of the Choson dynasty in
the I73os. One ofYu's chief complaints was that increasing discrimination in
favor of a hereditary aristocracy, which he referred to as either munbiJl, sajok,
or sadaebu, had created a new line of demarcation between them and the yang-
min that had not existed in the early Choson period. Although hereditary aris-
tocracy had been a feature of the T'ang, it had died out aftcr the Sung dynasty
and was not a feature of contemporary Chinese society. In post -T'ang China and
fifteenth-century Korea one was either good or base in status, and the category
of good people (yangmin) included everyone from commoners to the highest
ministers of state. Officeholding supposedly did not give anyone the right to feel
superior to others, but in the sixteenth century when the yangban or sajok became
distinguished as a separate, hereditary class, the yangmin or commoners became
a despised category, hardly different from base persons (ch 'On 'in) or slaves (l1obi)
in the eyes of the yangban. The cause of it all was thc inheritance of superior
status from relatives who held office in the state bureaucracy. If one could find
a distant officeholding relative of even fifth or sixth degree in one's family tree,
one could claim membership in the sajok aristocracy no matter what the level
of one's talent or virtue.or>
Yu Sungwon, another recent social historian, has taken the argument of Yu
Suwon and Han Yong'u to its most logical conclusion, that early Choson soci-
ety represented the epitome of equal opportunity for all but the slaves because
it allowed anyone of yang 'in status, defined as anyone not blemished by slav-
ery, to register as a student in official schools, take all levels of examinations,
and be appointed to the highest offices of the state. The same ability existed for
those who chose the military examinations and military office except that the
latter carried much less prestige than the civil degrees and offices.
In addition, Yu also argued that the broadening of opportunity was matched
by another process of expanding the number of people granted "good" or yang 'in
status by promoting people previously regarded as "base" in the Koryo period
into the ranks of "commoners" or yang 'in, and by creating a system of uniform
rights and obligations available to all yang 'in without discrimination. Yu argued
that in the early fifteenth century, the basis for social stratification had, in fact,