CHAPTER 18
Provincial and Local Administration
"Let the pcople and gcntry of the village manage the granary publicly but only
allow the official yamen to give aid and encouragcment.'"Four major problems related to Yu Hyongwon's reform plans for provincial and
local administration will be discussed in this and the following two chapters.
The first two are related to the method of organizing bureaucracy at the provin-
cial and local levels. The third is the problem of corruption within the bureau-
cracy, particularly among the clerks, and the fourth was the very difficult question
of defining the limits of centralized bureaucratic control. On this last point, many
scholars have noted that the Sinitic system of pre-modern bureaucracy contained
an endemic weakness at the lowest level-the distance between the district mag-
istrate and the local population, which weakened the ability of the magistrate
to control the villages. The proposition will be asserted here, however, that this
situation was not caused by laxity and inattention, but an endemic preference
for local autonomy that derived from Confucian statecraft thought.
Yu's study of bureaucratic history in China convinced him that the appearance
of anomalies in local administration developed as a consequence of growing com-
plexity in the age of bureaucracy after the Ch'in and Han dynasties. Complex-
ity introduced anomalies in administration, particularly variations in the size of
local districts, that introduced imbalances into the distribution of tax and labor
service burdens. It also created the equivalent of rotten boroughs - small dis-
tricts with magistrates and their staff of clerks for areas too small to support them.
These problems also existed in Korea as well, not because Korea had conquered
large territories, created a vast empire, or expanded the numbers ofbureauerats
beyond all reason, but because centralized bureaucratic districts had a history of
over a thousand years and during that time numerous changes in the size and
status of those districts and the telTitory they controlled destroyed the chance of
uniformity and introduced anomalies into the system of organization.
A second problem in local government was the role of the provincial author-
ities, both the civil governors and the military provincial military commanders
and their subordinates. The post of eivil governor as a permanent position firmly
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