CENTRAL BUREAUCRACY 617Yu's plan was adopted to combine and reduce the numher of military garrisons
and small-scale watchtowers. Finally, the number of garrison commanders
(Yongjang) that had heen expanded since the Imjin War and Manchu invasions
would also be reduced to tolerable size.^23
Elimination of Irregular Posts and Concurrencies
In the Chason period kings had made increasing use of commissioners (Chejo)
to take charge of special agencies, and most of these posts were held by high
ranking ministers as concurrencies. This situation reminded Yu of Sung prac-
tice, and he instructed that all commissioners be abolished and all responsibil-
ity turned over to the minister (P'anso) or next highest Tangsang (rank Ia-3a)
official assigned to the ministry.
Yu was not even willing to make an exception for cer1ain offices, such as the
Bureau of Medicine (Oisa), the Court of Music (Chang'agwon), the Directorate
of Astronomy (K wansanggam), and the Court of Interpreters (Sayogwon), since
commissioners with special expertise in each of those specialties might be use-
fully employed in addition to the generalist officials appointed as formal heads
of those units. He refused to compromise with the principle of unified reponsi-
bility and command, and insisted that it was more important to appoint "the right
men" to office rather than to find the most skilled. If skill were needed, instruc-
tors (Kyosu) could be employed as underlings in those agencies for that pur-
pose. To usc specialist commissioners would only demoralize and weaken the
authority of the chief official, causing him to neglect his work, and if the com-
missioners turned out to be less skilled than expected, no advantage would be
gained at all. Yu, in other words, was still strongly committed to the priority of
the generalist over the specialist. 24
He also wanted to abolish concurrencies because 60 to 70 percent of the pOSh
listed in the dynastic law code were concurrencies, and many of them had begun
to neglect their duties. Each official, no matter how high or low his position,
had to be given exclusive charge of his responsibilities, just as had been done
in ancient times. To his knowledge there had never been any concurrent posts
in the two Han dynasties, nor even in the slack and shoddy bureaucracies of the
Wei and Chin states. Concurrencies had begun in the Tang and flourished in
the Sung, and the Chason government had reproduced that sorry situation. Fur-
thermore, concurrent officials paraded their titles in ostentatious display and their
namecards bore titles several lines long because of it.
In addition, the Directorates of Medicine and Astronomy and the Court of
Interpreters had irregular sinecures called Ch'ea that Yu defined as officials with-
out regular salaries tested four times a year and assigned salaries on the basis
of their test scores. Since these irregular officials occupied the seats of regular
officials of those agencies, Yu considered that it deprived them of respect and
dignity, resulted in haphazard recruitment of men of no talent, and robbed the
unit they worked in of proper organization and chain of command. He insisted