GROUP COMMUNICATION THROUGH CIRCULAR LETTERS (T’ONGMUN)

The rise of local academies as the central educational institutions across the country increased the social interactions among scholar groups in different areas. Therefore, the use of circular letters proliferated. This letter form facilitated exchanging information among members of a group and between groups. Although it is unknown when Korean people began to use these letters, they became popular among scholars starting in the mid-sixteenth century, when local academies became the center of the literati’s interactions. One of the main functions of this utilitarian epistolary genre was to inform group members of the time and place of an upcoming meeting, the agenda to be discussed, and other details including penalties for tardiness or absence.⁵ Academy scholars also used circular letters to cover a variety of subjects, including local rituals, publication of scholarly writing or genealogies, and exemplary moral cases.⁶ Because state government offices did not use circular letters, this form allowed literary elites to build horizontal communications in a separate discursive space.

With no official postal system in Chosŏn, circular letters were usually delivered by slaves owned by academies, state schools, or local elites.⁷ Considering that most remaining circular letters are preserved in the academies or kinship organizations that received them, we could assume that the members of recipient institutions read the circular letters communally, either through reading aloud or posting them in public. It is also possible that the academies or kinship organizations passed around the circular letters that they had received to their respective members. After making a full round, the original circular letters could have been returned to the institutions and filed there. The members also transcribed the letters into multiple copies for easier and faster circulation.⁸

Most importantly, local literati frequently utilized circular letters to publicize their opinions about certain political issues in the regional or national scholarly communities.⁹ They used circular letters extensively to coordinate collective activism against state authorities.¹⁰ When they decided to rally together as a group to protest state policies, they normally elected drafters (chet’ong), copiers (sat’ong), and dispatchers (palt’ong) of circular letters to facilitate their group communication.¹¹ The systematic production and circulation of circular letters enabled nonofficial regional scholars to orchestrate their opinions while reinforcing their solidarity with one another. This new communicative mode encouraged academy scholars from different regions to join together and raise their collective voice on national issues at the political center. Moreover, the political usage of this genre connected them to capital scholars enrolled in the Royal Academy. In late Chosŏn political culture, it became the custom for these capital scholars to pass around circular letters to local academies across the country when they presented memorials to the throne on certain political issues. This was not simply to spread the news about their political activism but to urge scholars nationwide to join in.¹² In this way, the political use of circular letters fostered collaboration among diverse groups through the diffusion of information, which subsequently sparked “new coordination.”¹³ This new coordination could prompt nationwide campaigns to press the king and court ministers on political claims. The effective spread of political opinions and coordination of local scholarly communities through circular letters shifted the scale of rural scholars’ political activism from local and regional grievances to national mobilization.

It was not just Chosŏn scholars who utilized this efficient group communication for political changes. Circular letters played a crucial role in the American Revolution, as American Patriots emerged as an influential counterweight to the Loyalists and British government. For instance, Samuel Adams, in his essays published in the Boston Gazette in 1771, foregrounded Massachusetts’s initiative in sending “circular letters” to assemblies of other colonies as the decisive means to successfully resist increasingly oppressive colonizers. One year later, he proposed and made the first motion to institutionalize the Boston Committee of Correspondence, which all the other colonies emulated soon after. Not only did the committee sustain two-way correspondence with all towns across Massachusetts, but it also extended the same correspondence to the political centers of other colonies. The Committees of Correspondence across the thirteen colonies rallied opposition on common causes and coordinated collective actions, which fueled the spirit of revolution.¹⁴ In both the late Chosŏn and colonial America, the effective group communication circulating political voices tied the people together so that they acted collectively to shatter the existing power structures.

Circular letters were also frequently used as main references in the decision-making process. The letter in figure 5.1, which had been kept in Yongsan Academy in Kyŏngju, was sent out by Andong scholars in 1807 to scholar groups of twenty prefectures in the Yŏngnam area. It calls upon scholars to present a memorial to the throne in order to refute the joint memorial presented in 1801 by 490 other Yŏngnam scholars. This joint memorial claimed that the de facto instigator of a failed rebellion in 1800 was Ch’ae Hongwŏn (1762–?).¹⁵ Ch’ae was an adopted son of Ch’ae Chegong (1720–1799), the central political figure of the Namin faction supported by the Yŏngnam T’oegye school. Although the sources do not indicate what the main issues were, it seems that the Andong scholars considered that this joint memorial, defaming a political dignitary connected to their group, significantly undermined their reputation on the national political stage.

The textual and material traces left on this circular letter reveal how scholars actually engaged in this particular case. At least three different pieces of information indicate that this letter was retrieved and referred to as a decision document after its initial function as a communicative tool. First, the note in pale ink at the upper center, added right below the prefectures to which the letter was addressed, lists one scholar as the drafter of the memorial (cheso) and three others as its dispatchers to the royal court (paeso). Considering the contents of this circular letter, which simply called for a meeting, the names of these four scholars elected to draft and deliver the memorial must have been put down during the meeting held as the result of its circulation. The document indicates that the participants brought this particular circular letter along and revisited its contents during their discussion. The slanted text added to the bottom offers the second piece of information.¹⁶ This note jotted down in cursive writing urges the participating scholars to disregard the routine process of commenting on and annotating the memorial drafts to save time. It warns that the circulation of drafts via circular letters might substantially delay their plan, if each prefecture held on to them even briefly. This delay would bog down their political mobilization as a whole.¹⁷ The note ends by pointing out that they have to complete drafting the memorial during the meeting, no matter what. Lastly, a small piece of paper attached later to the left side of the original letter lists two Kyŏngju scholars elected as money collectors (sujŏn yusa) for the funds that would be used to travel to Seoul to present the memorial to the throne. It also lists four prefectures and the amount of money that they donated. The cursive note below them states that money collectors in each prefecture should solicit as many donations in each prefecture as they could and bring them to the meeting called for in the original circular letter. This small addendum must have been written between the delivery of the circular letter to Kyŏngju and the meeting on the twenty-seventh day of the eleventh month of 1807 at Andong Local School. The scholars in Yongsan Academy could have glued this piece to the original circular letter to provide comprehensive information about this particular political mobilization. These traces left on the original circular letters testify that nonofficial rural scholars retrieved, deliberated on, and filed letters originally used for communicative purposes for their collective actions. Moreover, the contents added in various stages of collaboration among local literati show that the serious political messages were interwoven with the administrative and logistical planning to make them materialize. Chosŏn circular letters not only disseminated and exchanged scholar groups’ radical ideas but also morphed them into actual political actions by facilitating the deliberation process for political coordination.

DIFFUSION OF POLITICAL INFORMATION THROUGH COURT NEWSLETTERS (CHOBO)

The exchanges of political opinions among rural scholars through circular letters hinged upon the availability of reliable political information. In Chosŏn society, educated male elites mostly collected information about court politics from court newsletters. It remains unknown when such newsletters came into use. However, records of them began to appear in the early fifteenth century. The Office of the Royal Secretariat made various political facts available in news sources every day, including royal edicts, court debates, personnel changes in the government, local news reported to the court, and the contents of the memorials submitted to the king along with his responses to them. Clerks dispatched from discrete government ministries and offices of provincial governors or local magistrates (kibyŏl sŏri) transcribed this information into the form of newsletters. In principle, these were distributed only to government offices.¹⁸ According to many sillok records, court ministers frequently referred to the information that they collected from the newsletters in debating political issues with the king and other officials. In this respect, the court newsletters seem to have been designed to keep incumbent officials updated on major political and administrative issues. However, much evidence shows that officials forwarded them to their family members and friends as well as ex-officials. The details about state politics trickled down to the society through personal connections among male elites and scholarly social networks.

The court newsletters outside of official sectors were widely circulated, quite often copied, and frequently read in turn among male elites. With no systematic mechanism for the distribution of news, the Chosŏn literati took advantage of existing epistolary networks to circulate newsletters. Male elites frequently sent them as attached documents along with their letters to family members, friends, and colleagues.¹⁹ Such a delivery amounted to a kind of gift, as news marked the most pursued commodity in communication before the age of mass media. Letters with newsletters included thus helped cement the relationship between sender and addressee.²⁰ The delivery of letters to the intended recipients frequently did not mean the end of their functions. The demand for news among educated elites made the recipients of letters that came with court gazettes the local sources from which political information diffused. In the epistolary culture of eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia, the recipient of letters with diverse news was “one of the principal threads in the information fabric of the region.”²¹ Letter writing thus provided a service like modern newspapers by reporting on and gathering various events happening at a distance. This accords with the pattern of news circulation in early America, where “the very concept of newspaper was rooted in letter writing.”²² The detailed accounts in the letters were considered much more reliable than the oral news because they would not be corrupted over long distances.²³ The news conveyed through correspondence, however, frequently carried over to the oral network. The integration of the preexisting epistolary network and the distribution routes of news easily engendered elaborate debates on contemporary political issues in correspondence among male elites. The circulation of political news thus commonly accompanied the metadiscourse about it.²⁴

In the Chosŏn political communicative system, the king was expected to respond to all memorials presented to him. Hence, summaries of the memorials submitted by both court ministers and nonofficial scholars appeared in court newsletters along with the royal responses. Nonofficial scholarly communities thus found court newsletters extremely useful, because access to them allowed rural scholars to keep abreast of the current court debates as well as how scholarly communities across the country reacted to them. By reading these newsletters, rural scholars were no longer excluded from the national political discourse. Moreover, they knew that if they joined the political debates, their voices, expressed in their memorials to the king, could reach the literati nationwide via court gazettes. Likewise, the Patriots before the American Revolution recognized that what they said, did, and wrote would be reprinted in the newspapers and circulated across the colonies. This understanding also shaped what they actually said, did, and wrote.²⁵ Their opinions attained political validity when they were published on a mass scale through new printing technologies. People formed a reading public who used these printed materials, which subsequently brought about the rise of public discourse and the formation of a republican polity in eighteenth-century America.²⁶ Because the dissemination of political news in the Chosŏn period relied on private epistolary networks, the appearance of scholar groups’ memorials in court newsletters did not reach the whole society in the same way. Nevertheless, male elites were able to form a single political community as they came to know that other scholar groups in different regions were deliberating on the same problems and often making similar claims.

The wide dissemination of political news also led the kings and court ministers to reconsider the relationship between court politics and social discourses. Most important, some ministers began to regard the court debates and state policies as public information. One sillok record from 1706 shows that scholar-officials in the Office of the Royal Secretariat claimed that no information should be excluded from the contents of court newsletters.²⁷ This starkly contrasted with the idea of politics as the exclusive triangular interaction among the monarch, court ministers, and censorial officials, which had been dominant during the early Chosŏn period. This new idea was reconfirmed in 1724, when Yi Kwangjwa (1674–1740) raised concern about not including the details of court decisions in court newsletters. Although Kim Tongp’il (1678–1737) attempted to refute Yi by arguing that it was unprecedented to include all state policies in court newsletters, Yi, in tandem with Sim Tan (1645–1730), made it clear that every single piece of information about court discussions should be made available. In responding to this issue, King Yŏngjo (r. 1724–1776) revealed a somewhat ambivalent stance. He stated that even if it could be problematic not to make all information available in court newsletters, this was still a decision to be made by the officials in the Office of the Royal Secretariat. Then, he implicitly deemphasized the newsletters’ significance as central news media by ordering the summaries of court decisions to be posted there while all details were recorded in the Daily Record of the Office of the Royal Secretariat (Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi).²⁸ Yŏngjo could have considered the unfiltered flow of political information into society as a potential threat to national security. In fact, many kings sometimes ordered certain court discussions not to be included in the newsletters for fear of leaking national secrets to foreigners.²⁹ His emphasis on the government record-keeping system over court gazettes, moreover, suggests that he intended to put the state authority at the center of information management. Some Chosŏn kings were also concerned about their own images appearing in these newsletters. Many sillok records contain the king’s requests not to include in court newsletters certain remarks made by him, which we can find by dint of court historians’ meticulous recording habits.³⁰ These examples show that court newsletters were effective in spreading political news to the broader society to the extent that political actors in the royal court had to take readers’ responses into account.

There had always existed a demand for political news among the intellectuals, and in 1577, some Seoul residents began to sell printed versions of the court newsletters.³¹ Both government officials and nonofficial intellectuals welcomed these due to their timely supply of political news as well as their readability compared to the often-illegible existing newsletters in extremely cursive writing. After three months, however, King Sŏnjo punished those involved and prohibited the selling of news, fearing the privatization of history writing and the leakage of state secrets.³² The state regulation of printed gazettes, instrumental in initiating political debates, shows that the political elites were wary of the uncontrolled dissemination of news.

There were clear differences between hand-copied and printed newsletters in terms of their political implications. First, the practice of hand-copying court newsletters in the Chosŏn dynasty left the political news open to editing, paraphrasing, truncating, and restructuring by multiple hands. As explained above, the Office of the Royal Secretariat provided only news sources, with no finalized language to be used in newsletters. It was the responsibility of each clerk dispatched from discrete ministries and regional governors’ offices to select news that would be of interest to their superior officials, edit it and paraphrase the language of news sources, then copy it into the form of newsletters. Final versions produced from the same news sources could take multiple forms depending on the different interests of government offices and the personal discretion of each clerk.³³ Repackaging and restructuring news took place again in the process of disseminating gazettes through personal epistolary networks.³⁴ It is possible that these newsletters were copied for second and third rounds while being circulated, which could have involved secondary and tertiary editing processes. The dissemination of news in handwritten forms thus produced myriad different narratives on the same political information.

In contrast, printed newsletters would circulate uniform political news to the general public, which left little leeway for people to edit or manipulate it.³⁵ In addition to the widespread dissemination of news through mass production and enhanced legibility, printed newsletters could have bound the reading public together as a single community sharing the same political information. Moreover, they could reach an anonymous readership including nonelites, political dissidents, and even foreigners, as King Sŏnjo feared. From the perspective of the state authorities, this could have created quite alarming social conditions. In early modern Europe, the anonymity of the purchasers of printed newsletters starkly differed from “scribal journalism,” which served only select and known clients. This is why the English Crown in the 1620s and 1630s did not censor handwritten newsletters, whose elite readership reassured the state authorities.³⁶ Some recent studies, however, claim that handwritten newsletters and printed newspapers had more in common, in terms of content, clientele, and circulation, than has commonly been assumed. The rise of the news media was not necessarily a print phenomenon.³⁷ We can also observe this connection between printed newsletters and hand-copied versions in late Qing China. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Chinese Capital Gazette (Jingbao), a daily report of court business, was printed by several different publishers. The report was mostly consumed by officials and provincial readers who could afford the regular subscription. However, it was also common for readers with less means to rent the printed copies at a reduced price. More importantly, many people continued to read abridged versions hand-copied from printed gazettes. Instead of separate news networks formed through imprints and manuscripts, both the contents and the material conditions of newsletters remained interconnected in nineteenth-century China. Contrary to the case of early modern England, moreover, the hand-copied gazettes were consumed by the readers at the margins of political power.³⁸

Top-echelon political elites in Korea persisted in reading handwritten newsletters until the collapse of the Chosŏn dynasty, in spite of the availability of various printed newspapers since the late nineteenth century.³⁹ The emergence of print media in Korea was more complicated than in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, in that they functioned as the primary means to disseminate new Western ideas aiming to level social stratification. The choice between handwritten and printed newspapers thus corresponded to the division between the ruling class and the ruled. The elite class could have wanted a version of news customized only for them, unlike modern newspapers consumed by the anonymous masses.⁴⁰ Their monopoly on certain kinds of news distinguished traditional political elites from the mass readership of modern newspapers, manifesting and reinforcing the premodern social divisions. The disappearance of handwritten newsletters roughly coincided with the beginning of Japanese colonial rule, under which the Chosŏn social hierarchy was no longer relevant.

COLLECTIVE ACTIVISM THROUGH THE MEMORIAL SYSTEM

The diffusion of political news through court newsletters heightened rural scholars’ political consciousness. However, the availability of this information did not automatically prompt them to engage in meaningful political action. They needed to deliberate on the issues that concerned them to coordinate collective responses. This transition from knowing to acting required structured mobilization based upon organizational resources. In fact, the new scholarly identities and social interactions developing in academy networks shaped both the scholars’ political claims and the modes of collective action they took. They were well aware that their political voices could reach nationwide literati if they submitted memorials, the news of which would spread through court newsletters. Rural scholars realized that their political imaginaries were not simply daydreams. Sharing and confirming them with other academy scholars through the new networking process and communicative methods allowed them to materialize these ambitions as a feasible political agenda. Motivated by the new political environment demanding the Confucian moral norm, rural scholars ventured onto the national stage starting in the mid-sixteenth century. The result was an exponential increase in collective political protests by nonofficial literati through joint memorials and the nationwide dissemination of news about this kind of political activism, which incited other scholar groups in different regions to get involved. This pattern of collective activism characterized the political culture of late Chosŏn Korea.

Memorials to the throne (sangso), which were institutionalized during the Koryŏ dynasty, constituted a major channel of written communication between the ruler and Confucian elites.⁴¹ Memorials discussed national policies, presented moral admonitions, or offered advice on perfecting royal virtue. At the beginning of the Chosŏn dynasty, the memorials presented by nonofficial scholars were not generally accepted by the court. In the midst of the power struggle between the monarch and the court ministers, however, the window for political participation opened for nonofficial literati. Some early Chosŏn monarchs tried to counter strong court ministers by embracing the political views of nonofficial scholars.⁴² In 1492, King Sŏngjong (r. 1467–1494) officially permitted the participation of nonofficial scholars in state politics through the memorial system.⁴³ In most cases, however, only scholars affiliated with the Royal Academy, who had passed the preliminary state examinations and thus were considered potential officials, used this new political avenue. Ever since King Injong (r. 1544–1545) had encouraged these Royal Academy scholars to express their opinions about political issues, their memorials had attained political authority equal to that of memorials presented by censorial officials.⁴⁴ With the rise of Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, these scholars felt it their obligation to criticize court decisions or comment on the social morale through memorials based upon Confucian ethical norms.

This new channel for political participation, however, did not immediately empower the scholars in the Royal Academy. Many established scholar-officials disapproved of their political role. For instance, T’oegye declared that passing around circular letters to present memorials was not what sensible Confucian scholars would do.⁴⁵ In order to elude this sort of opprobrium, these scholars innovated a mechanism for collective activism to maximize their political influence. When they found some political issues against their interests or the Confucian ethical norms, they held meetings to decide on collective action. Once they agreed that they needed to act against the court decisions, they first refused to sign the dining hall roster (kwŏndang). Because this roster was used to make sure the scholars met the attendance requirement to sit in the civil service exams, their refusal to sign it signaled their relentlessness, even to the point of risking their future careers.⁴⁶ When this happened, the officials of the Royal Academy attempted to persuade the scholars to return to their studies. If the scholars persisted, the situation was reported to the headmaster (taesasŏng) and the assistant director (tongjisa) of the Royal Academy. These high-ranking officials met with the scholars and asked them to submit reports about the causes of their protests. The headmaster drafted his own draft report (ch’ogi) to the king based upon the scholars’ testimonies. Upon the receipt of the royal response, the headmaster forwarded it to the scholars and urged them to return to their normal activities. If the scholars were not satisfied with the royal response, they sometimes even withdrew from the dorms (kongjae) in further protest.⁴⁷ Other means of protest included retreating to the village adjacent to the Royal Academy after paying homage to the Confucian Shrine (paesa) and retreating to their hometowns (hwanhyang).⁴⁸ These performative protests, however, received persistent criticism that these scholars habitually submitted memorials and staged demonstrations whenever their opinions were not counted in court decisions.⁴⁹ Throughout the Chosŏn dynasty, the Royal Academy scholars continued to deploy these ritualized performances along with circular letters and the submission of memorials.⁵⁰ These systematic political performances, which required well-organized group actions, attest that successful collective mobilization was never easy.

The news about collective political mobilization by Royal Academy scholars was readily available to scholars across the country via court newsletters and word of mouth. The protesters in Seoul also publicized their political contentions across the country through circular letters. Considering that it took more than a century for Royal Academy scholars to legitimize their political participation, however, it must have been even more difficult for nonofficial rural scholars to join in. Therefore, it was not enough for them just to have access to political news and imitate others’ political triumphs. Their success on the national stage relied on well-organized cooperation, which was intended to culminate in an impressive vision of the stunning number of participants and their solidarity as a group, their moral worthiness, and their awe-inspiring commitment to their political cause.

When a group of rural scholars agreed that they should submit a joint memorial on a certain issue, they first sent out circular letters to other scholar groups in the region to publicize their opinions while calling for a meeting to plan collective actions. The circular letters traveled through local academies, local schools, and clan organizations that rural scholars frequented. In the meeting that followed, the participants elected members to the committee that would manage various issues concerning the production and submission of joint memorials. The committee members also set up a headquarters (soch’ŏng) in either a local academy or a local school. In most cases, the members drafted the memorial and collected signatures from regional scholars. However, in some cases that demanded profound understanding of Confucian theories or writing skills, they solicited various drafts from leading scholars of the region. After all the signatures were collected,⁵¹ a group of scholars (paeso) delivered the memorial to Seoul in order to present it to the throne. The travel expenses were generally donated voluntarily, but regional scholars were sometimes compelled to share the cost. When the paeso scholars arrived in Seoul, they submitted their memorial to the Office of the Royal Secretariat. The officials reviewed the memorial, and upon their approval, the summary was presented to the king (tŭngch’ŏl). If they deemed the contents of joint memorials inappropriate for royal review, they often refused to forward the memorials to the throne. In some other cases, the consideration of factional interests also influenced their decisions. It always had been an onerous task for rural scholars to pass this administrative hurdle and make their opinions heard by both the king and the scholarly community across the country. Although the court ministers initially inspected the contents of memorials, the king actually decided whether or not certain memorials would be accepted. If he responded positively, the petitioners were informed of it and sometimes given royal prizes to be used to travel back home. If the king considered the contents of the memorial a challenge to royal authority or believed it would incite political turmoil with ungrounded or seditious rumors, however, the memorial presenters could be interrogated and punished. The leaders of petitioning scholar groups were quite often suspended from the civil service examinations, and at worst, they were sent into exile. Finally, the summaries of the memorials and the royal responses appeared in the court newsletters. Rural scholars could make their political voices heard across the country by presenting joint memorials, regardless of the results. They had good reasons to take the trouble to organize diverse scholar groups and risk the punishments.⁵²

In the late sixteenth century, when rural scholars began to express their political opinions, joint memorials unanimously called for the dissemination of Confucian moral values and the honoring of past Confucian worthies consistently across the country. The scholarly identity newly emerged around local academies dominated the discursive repertoire of collective political activism in this period. The rise of diverse scholarly groups in different localities and the subsequent division of their political voices beginning in the seventeenth century, however, undercut the political effects of their collective textual practices. Some local academies forged close ties with the political factions in the central government on the basis of academic, regional, or kinship connections. The factions took advantage of the nationwide proliferation of academies by embracing academy scholars as their supporting group. Likewise, local elites pursued opportunities via this new political avenue. These alliances subsequently affected the court’s decisions on granting official charters to local academies.⁵³ The connection with metropolitan elites also entailed changes in academy organization. Many academies appointed high-ranking court ministers or local magistrates as their headmasters.⁵⁴ As a result, massive amounts of political information traveled back and forth between the capital and the countryside; various regional scholarly communities participated in multilateral political communication across the country. Through their involvement in local academies, rural scholars could create a vertical connection to political elites in the royal court while building and reinforcing the horizontal networks in their regional bases.⁵⁵ This political identity forged through the connection to government factions began to overshadow the scholarly identity bolstered by Neo-Confucian moral philosophy. The changed political topography also shaped the contents of rural scholars’ joint memorials. Whereas remonstrating memorials decreased, requesting and impeaching memorials skyrocketed in this period.⁵⁶ The divisive voices in rural scholars’ memorials made their collective activism no longer effective, as the kings spurned the memorials as malicious products of factional strife. The factional alliances between the political elites in the court and their local cohorts melted away the moral authority of their collective voices.

At the height of factionalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, therefore, some court ministers condemned the uncontrolled increase of local academies. For example, Im Tam (1596–1652) proposed that the establishment of new academies be approved by the Ministry of Rites in his memorial presented in 1644.⁵⁷ In 1657, Sŏ P’irwŏn (1614–1671) echoed Im’s claim, and the royal court ordered the immediate implementation of this proposal.⁵⁸ Sŏ, in this memorial, specifically brought up four drawbacks of local academies. First, the popularity of academies made the state schools even more neglected. Second, academy scholars routinely dodged military duties. Third, the selection of past worthies for academy rituals frequently created controversies and hassles in the local communities. Last, the state support for academy rituals imposed too much financial burden upon local magistrates.⁵⁹ In short, the academies encroached upon the sites where the state was supposed to take control—“hegemony over orthodox education,” “appropriation of taxable manpower,” and “the selection of worthy individuals for enshrinement.”⁶⁰ The uncontrolled proliferation of local academies, which was possible due to the tight connection between rural elites and political factions in the capital, significantly undermined state authority across the society. Starting in the eighteenth century, the Chosŏn court aspired to restore state control. In 1714, the court again decreed that the local academies established without the government’s approval should be abolished.⁶¹ The Chosŏn court reconfirmed this regulation in 1741 by abolishing about 180 academies founded after 1714 without its approval.⁶² Despite the continued efforts at regulation, rural scholars doggedly appropriated academy networks to buttress their sway in both local societies and the national political arena. The state policy thus culminated in the abolition of all but forty-seven major academies in 1873.⁶³

Although nonofficial literati learned and restaged the repertoires of political performance developed in the mid-sixteenth century throughout the late Chosŏn period, these methods no longer yielded the desired political effects due to all these state efforts to curb their political empowerment. The rural scholarly communities had to figure out how to rejuvenate their collective political participation through joint memorials, the subject of the next chapter.