A year ago on Round and Square (15 July 2011)—Le Tour de la France: Clouds on the Mountain
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The first three entries (each in several segments) for the Round and Square
series "Asian Ethnicities" deal with the majority ethnic groups in
China, Japan, and Korea. We are starting with these groups precisely
because they permeate all of the nooks and crannies of their respective
histories. Indeed, the history of China is often taught (and this is
especially true in Chinese schools) as the history of the Han ethnicity.
As we shall see, this is particularly problematic in China, since the
history of China can better—this is my opinion—be taught as a constant
set of interactions with ethnic groups to the west, south, and
especially north. It is no less important in Japan and Korea, however.
The relative homgeneity of those populations exacerbate the problems,
and engagement with various ethnic groups tends to be even further
marginalized. I hope to give, in these introductory posts, a way of
thinking about majority ethnicity in China, Japan, and Korea. These are
by no means my last word on the subject(s). As you can see from the
introduction to this series, these are works in process and are meant to
be essays in every sense of the term.
Profound social and economic changes shaped life on the
Korean peninsula during the five centuries of the Yi, or Choson, Dynasty
(1398-1910). Not the least of these was the structuring of economic success and
prestige—for individuals and families—according to the rules of an examination
system that was borrowed from China and adapted to Korean social and economic
conditions. The Chinese examination system had been used to some extent by
Koryo in selecting its bureaucracy, but under the Yi dynasty it became, as it
was in China, the chief route to high government office and the key
differentiation between members of a relatively homogeneous ethnic group.
Most villages in Korea developed their own little private
schools to start promising students on the path to education. The end result of
the literary examination—after many years of study— led to the highly prized chinsa
degree, which was a stable predictor of social and economic success. A sequence
of military examinations paralleled the civil service examinations. There were
also government schools and special examinations for candidates for positions
in such technical fields as medicine, law, astronomy, and foreign languages.
Although the wholesale adoption of the examination system
made Choson Korea more fully Sinicized than earlier Korean states had been, one
fundamental difference with China still remained. There were not just education, and therefore
economic, limitations to those who could hope to succeed; there were also class
barriers. In fact, Korean society
retained its clear hereditary class divisions, which all along had contrasted
sharply with the greater openness of Chinese society during the same period.
China’s ethnic blending was far more fluid at this time, even as Korea’s class
distinctions within a homogeneous ethnic grouping become more rigid.
Successful candidates in the examinations were limited
for the most part to the hereditary ruling class, which came to be known as the
yangban, a term meaning literally "the two groups"—that is, the civil
and military branches of government. By dominating the exams, the yangban
families were able to monopolize political leadership and high government
office. They also came to own most of the land. Although in theory all of the
land was state-owned, in reality private landholdings became enormously
influential stakes in yangban-government relations. As a result, social status, land ownership,
and political leadership were all concentrated in the hands of the yangban
class. Again, with ethnic similarity, class distinctions were exacerbated.
While a wide gulf separated the yangban from the lower
classes, there was no corresponding gulf between them and the king, who was
regarded as little more than a "first among equals." As with their
predecessors, Choson kings lacked the semi-religious aura and unique status of
the Chinese Son of Heaven or the concept of an unbroken line of emperors tied
to the figure of the Sun Goddess, as in Japan.
Below the yangban was a relatively small and legally
undefined class that has been called the chungin or "middle
people." These served as petty
government functionaries and performed various specialized roles in
government. Though absolutely essential
in the whole operation of government, they had little opportunity to rise to
high policy posts. This essentially
hereditary group predated the founding of the Yi, but received new
"recruits" from among the large numbers of "illegitimate"
offspring of the yangban. It is telling that this dynamic—aristocratic “extras”
being relegated to a lower status—took place as a class, and not ethnic, process.
The vast bulk of the population was made up of commoners,
or yangmin, who were for the most part tax-paying, corvée-serving occupiers of
government lands or semi-serfs on yangban holdings. They were more closely bound to the soil than
in earlier times, but still basically controlled their own day-to-day
existences. Rents were often assessed at
fifty percent of the yield, so opportunities for them to rise to new statuses
were severely curtailed.
As in Koryo times, the lowest class was called ch'onmin,
or "base people." These were
government or private slaves, workers in industries, and professional
categories, such as butchers (originally despised because of the Buddhist
prohibition against the taking of animal life), actors, and kisaeng female
entertainers comparable to the Japanese geisha of a later date. The ch’onmin
came the closest to being treated as though they were ethnically separate from
other Koreans. This was not, of course, the case, and it represented rather a
particularly severe form of class differentiation based on occupation rather
than ethnicity.
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