CHAPTER 17
Personnel Policy
Even a devotee of institutional solutions for the ills of government like Yu
Hyongwon could not ignore the fundamental Confucian premise that good gov-
ernment depended on men, not laws. He had paid close attention to this prob-
lem in outlining his method for improving the education of men to ensure the
cultivation of a superior ruling class (chaps. 4 and 5), but he had also to turn his
attention to the problem of ensuring that the best men in the country be retained
in office, given the chance to acquire experience in the exercise of bureaucratic
authority, and reviewed periodically to weed out the incompetent.
Since the Choson bureaucracy, including both regular officials and clerks, had
been the source of corruption, incompetence, favoritism, and obstruction of well-
intentioned decrees from the throne, it was obvious to him that he had to work
out solutions to eliminate these problems. He pointed out that officials working
in the Ministry of Personnel had no knowledge of the personnel records of offi-
cials nor of how much time they had spent in office, and the Ministry of War
lacked the information to judge the difficulty of service or the length of service
that individuals had performed. I
The method Yu chose to work out a reform plan, as usual, was to examine the
superior norms and examples of classical China, record the deterioriation of those
norms and the development of questionable methods in the evaluation of offi-
cials in the long history of the bureaucratic age in China and Korea, and attempt
to adapt those lessons to his own time. What informed his treatment of this ques-
tion throughout, however, was not simply the necessity to exhort his readers to
moral rectification, but to pick and choose from the institutional arrangements
and reform attempts that had heen proposed by a host of rulers, officials, and
scholars over the ages.