672 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONYulgok and others had noticed this in the late sixteenth century and sought to
cure it by holding censors to their responsibility of honest surveillance of pro-
posed candidates for office. The pressures on them had become so great, how-
ever, that they preferred to seck transfers rather than do their duty and ruin their
own prospects, and the censorate developed institutionalized procedures for
coercing conformity to majority opinion and silencing the remaining men of
conscience. This situation was also related to the growth of hereditary factional
politics, which made it even more difficult for individual officials to act con-
trary to the interests of their own faction.
Yu Hyongwon's solution to the censorate's role was even more drastic because
he wanted to reduce the two censorate offices to the single Office of lnspector-
General and then abolish its right to sign off on all candidates recommended for
office because it had violated its mandate for objective evaluation by favoring
the yangban of pedigreed families, not to mention the members of factions. He
preferred to confine responsibility to the Ministries of Personnel and War for
review and promotion even though that formula had been subjected to attack in
China for overly routine evaluation of candidates in impersonal, if not inhuman,
terms. He believed that nine-year terms of office and periodic triennial reviews
would suffice to eliminate bias from the evaluation of performance.
Yu learned from Chinese experience and the advice of recent Korean scholar-
officials that moral education and behavior not only had to become the basis for
recruitment, but that it had to be tested and observed constantly in the actions of
officials themselves. Since the written examination had provided no guarantee
of the individual's adherence to moral norms, the whole process of selection
and promotion had to be shifted to techniques of observation and recommen-
dation. Yu sought to achieve this by grafting thc characteristics of small com-
munity life (i.e., the basis of classical Chou feudalism), where everyone knew
everyone else and could vouch for someone's reliability, onto the apparently
impersonal and mechanistic universe of bureaucratic practice. In practical
terms, he accepted the advice of the Sung period to expand the system of rec-
ommendation to all officials and to enforce the system by severe penalties for
any failure to recommend candidates. Recommendation would supplement the
work of thc Ministries of Personnel and War, if not really rcplace them. And the
capstone of the system was to be Ch'eng Hao's Hall for Inviting the Brave, a
kind of think-tank of prospective candidates to give advice and be obscrved in
the capital. But how could sponsorship and recommendation in the promotion
process have been that successful for seventeenth-century Korea when it had
not helped to maintain the purity of Sung officialdom nor staved off the
encroachments of foreign aggressors in the twelfth century'? It may have been
nonetheless tremendously appealing as a method for recruiting men of talent
from all classes and regions because in contemporary Korea the road to advance-
ment had been so narrowly circumscribed by criteria of inherited social status.