State Making under Imperialism

FRAGMENTATION AND CONSOLIDATION IN THE CENTRAL STATE

THE STATE IN KOREA UNDERWENT more major changes at the turn of the twentieth century than it had the previous three centuries. Following the devastating Hideyoshi invasions of the 1590s and the Manchu conquests a few decades later, the late Joseon state had settled into a stable form by the latter seventeenth century. For two hundred years thereafter, there were no major revisions in the governing form, which reflected the general stability of the internal order and the protracted peace in East Asia. This relative calm was shattered by domestic uprisings and the pressures from abroad in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in less than a decade following the Korean court's capitulation to Japanese demands for trade and diplomatic intercourse in 1876, the central administration substantially expanded to meet the functional needs of the new era. Another decade later, in the mid-1890s, a sweeping set of reforms altered forever the basic organization of the Korean state. Thereafter, a series of political dislocations hit the peninsula, resulting in the further dissolution of Korea's long-standing governing order through the force of Japanese imperialism. By the 1930s, the state structure, represented by an imposing colonial rule, appeared to have retained only a few traces of the Joseon era.

To be sure, the Joseon dynastic state was itself a formidable institution, comprising a highly systematic collection of hierarchically arranged organs responsible for deliberative, juridical, and managerial functions. These agencies extracted resources (both material and human), exercised policing and defense functions, and governed social interaction within the state's sovereign territory. The long history of such a centralized administration, in fact, firmly cemented durable, normative patterns of state authority. Nevertheless, the Joseon system was also rationalized toward definitively ancient ideals, and in committed conformity to the neo-Confucian social ethos.

The late nineteenth century, an era characterized by persistent contact with foreign influences beyond China, brought forth a re-rationalization of this state structure in accordance with a new set of guiding principles rooted in imperialism: first, an overriding concern to relieve external and, to an extent, resultant internal pressures through the creation of new governing functions and institutions, often in emulation of the Meiji Japanese state; then, soon after the turn of the twentieth century, the implementation, under Japanese control, of a more coercive and penetrative state that sought to maximize the interests of foreign rule. The increasing breadth of state responsibilities, which accompanied the diversification of society and economy, also necessitated an enormous expansion of the state itself, whether measured in personnel or material inputs, or in the degree of social presence and intervention. Over the colonial period (1910–45), the state grew fourfold in personnel, over twofold in personnel relative to population, and over twenty-fold in invested financial resources, establishing a regime that far exceeded the scope and mobilizational capacity of any Korean administration that had preceded it.

Much of this increase took place in the final decade or so of the colonial era, when military expansionism turned the state into a mechanism for wartime mobilization. As this chapter will show through its explorations of the wartime state as well as of systematic land surveys both before and after the annexation, the colonial state's remarkable growth was, in many ways, an extension of the trajectory, largely drawn by military imperatives, that had begun in the late nineteenth century. At another level, however, two features of the state's development belied notions of progressive rationalization and systematization: the fragmentary, oft en bifurcated structure of the central state from the late Joseon era through the reforms culminating in the establishment of the Government-General in 1910; and the organizational disjunctures of foreign rule itself, as the challenges of implanting and normalizing a conquest state resulted in multiple, oft en divergent demands tugging at the colonial regime.

The Joseon Central Administration and Tongni Amun Agencies of the 1880s

The reign of the monarch, Gojong (1864–1907), witnessed the emergence of a central state system in Korea that stood in stark contrast to the Joseon model that he had inherited (see appendix). Indeed, the comprehensive changes to the governing order during Gojong's forty-four years on the throne appear all the more extraordinary considering that the existing structure — notwithstanding the abuses associated with the dominance of royal in-law clans in the nineteenth century — was not a despotic tool but rather a systematic organization constructed in emulation of a definitive model found in classical sources. When the final Joseon revision to the dynastic legal code, the Daejeon hoetong, was promulgated in the second year of King Gojong's reign (1865), the central organization that it decreed differed little from the basic form inscribed in the original dynastic code, the Gyeongguk daejeon of 1471. However, by the 1880s, as demonstrated in the establishment of the Tongni amun agencies, new government organs were created to meet functional needs that the old Joseon system clearly could not have foreseen, much less accommodate.

The character of Joseon statecraft can be labeled as "Korean-Confucian," a mixture of Confucian ideals and aristocratic interests, which in turn stemmed from ancient Korean patterns of social hierarchy as well as immediate political considerations regarding political access. It reflected a conscious, deliberate emulation of the models of ancient China, as found in the Confucian canonical texts such as the Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), as well as both Chinese and Korean interpretations of this tradition. The enduring supremacy of such principles was ensured through the recruitment and promotion system, centered on the state examinations, which tested and reviewed potential appointees on their familiarity with these ideals. The abolition of the examinations by the...