PART II
Social Reform: Yangban and Slaves:
Conclusion
One of the major goals of Yu Hyongwon's work was to rectify the distortion
of his vision of an ideal Confucian society wrought by the effects of inherited
status. By the time he reached adulthood in the mid-seventeenth century he real-
ized that he was living in the midst of a slave society dominated by a hereditary
yangban ruling class, particularly disheartening to him since both those phe-
nomena were foreign both to the ideal society of ancient China and the reality
of contemporary Chinese social life in which hereditary aristocrats had long since
been replaced by a relatively mobile class of gentry or literati, merchant fami-
lies had access to the civil service examinations, and slaves represented only a
marginal fraction of the population.
He lived at a time when an important transformation in Korean society was
taking place along several fronts. In the economic sector private commercial
activity was expanding and knocking on the door of the system of state control
and licensed monopolies. The system of taxation was shifting away from trib-
ute and forced labor service to an expanded land tax that financed market pur-
chases of goods by the king and government and the hiring of workers to perform
government services. The rigid separation of social status groups was showing
signs of weakness, particularly at the lower levels as slaves began to abscond
from their home villages to escape the exactions of their private and official mas-
ters, and commoners sought to evade taxes and service by moving up the social
ladder by purchasing titles and cheapened status. These processes had an effect
on Yu by stimulating his concern for the reform of the adverse consequences of
inherited status in Korean society. He could not help but realize that the yang-
ban of his own time had failed to protect Choson Korea from foreign invasion
and the deterioration of domestic institutions, and that hereditary slavery had
robbed the state of its control over manpower and the slaves of their dignity as
human beings.
While he showed important signs of adaptability to current changes, partic-
ularly in advocating the use of hired labor and praising the advantages of free
choice over coercion in the labor process, he did not seek to extend the logic of