Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT 59

sixteenth century. By ISIS some of the rough cotton cloth (ch 'up '0) used for
currency had been debased so far below the 3-sae level that it had to be unwound
to salvage the thread.^89

Currency Failure: An Aspect of Overall Economic Policy

The monetary history of the fifteenth century reveals that the failure of paper
and copper currency to become permanent media of exchange was not the result
of a plank in the Neo-Confucian statecraft platform from the beginning of the
dynasty because a number of kings and many of their high officials supported
the attempt to promote those currencies even with the use of coercive legisla-
tion. Government officials contributed to the failure to circulate cash or paper
money by refusing to accept it even though it was legal tender; their actions were
not motivated by any ideological commitment, but by their reluctance to accept
any medium of exchange that had no prospect of retaining its value.
Most twentieth-century scholars have felt that the ultimate reason for fail-
ure was the public's disinterest and the reluctance of both ordinary people and
merchants to accept and trust the value of paper and copper currency in exchange
for what they regarded as objects of value. The fundamental problem, however,
was that the currency policy could not be disassociated from economic policy
in general. Market activities and the use of cash or paper money that would be
stimulated by its expansion were limited by the government's restrictive poli-
cies, and none of the early kings had a plan to expand industrial and commer-
cial activity. It was unrealistic to expect that the attempt to introduce paper money
and copper cash could have succeeded in those circumstances, and the rever-
sion to cloth and grain as media of exchange by the beginning of the sixteenth
century was but symbolic of the conservatism of overall economic policy. The
kings may only have paid lip service to the Confucian notion that industry and
commerce were uneconomic as well as immoral, but in devising a restrictive
economic policy they fell captive to the dominant Confucian attitude that by
limiting private industrial and commercial activity they ensured the maxi-
mization of the production of food and the necessities of life rather than baubles
and luxuries.

Conclusion

The basic structure of early Choson institutions had been established by the first

half of the fifteenth century, but not completely in accordance with the desires

of the radical Neo-Confucian ideologues of the dynastic transition. The desire

of the Neo-Confucians to eliminate Buddhism and its land and slaves, weaken

the political and economic autonomy of some of the Koryo yangban and

hyangni, strengthen the monarchy, the state, and the bureaucracy both militar-

ily and financially, use the civil service examinations as the main means of recruit-

ment' and establish Neo-Confucian texts as the standard curriculum for education