Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910

6. Subverting Local Society: Ilchinhoe Legal Disputes, 1904– 1907

194 Landownership and its reform in agrarian society were burning issues that changed Korea’s historical course in the twentieth century. The cadastral survey of the Kwangmu government moved in the direction of clarifying the private ownership of landowners and streamlined complicated property rights in the lands affiliated with government agencies. This process accompanied the Korean emperor Kojong’s own endeavor to reinforce the financial power of the monarch and to concentrate all the public lands under the control of the Royal Treasury. As shown in the previous chapter, the Ilchinhoe’s movements addressed some popular reactions to Kojong’s financial reform and had critical social ramifications in local areas. The Ilchinhoe’s local disputes showed variations in the two regions, P’yongan and Ch’ungch’ong provinces, analyzed in this chapter. Despite their variations, the Ilchinhoe disputes in both areas exposed a populist orientation—the assertion of the people’s power and interests defined against the government’s authority and the social establishment. Simultaneously, the Ilchinhoe’s local strife could not avoid the common pitfalls found in other populist movements, namely, ambiguity in identifying “the people’s interests” and difficulty in creating a sustainable procedure for enforcing “the people’s power” among the broader population loaded with conflicting interests and values. Local responses to the movement in P’yongan Province differed in two primary areas of concern: public lands and miscellaneous taxes. On the one hand, Ilchinhoe protests concerning public lands produced many legal disputes over tenant rights, property rights, and tenant supervisor positions. These disputes 6 SUBVERTING LOCAL SOCIETY Ilchinhoe Legal Disputes, 1904–1907 SUBVERTING LOCAL SOCIETY 195 might be called the Ilchinhoe’s “new local strife.” Local Ilchinhoe members disrupted the nexus of economic interests and political privileges that the existing local elites and other regional actors had established on those lands. On the other hand, the Ilchinhoe’s movements to eliminate miscellaneous taxes exposed the discontent of local taxpayers and officials with the agents of the Royal Treasury. Cho Chong-yun, the treasury’s commissioner in P’yongan Province, observed that these conflicts in a few cases developed into a “local alliance against the Korean monarch” between Ilchinhoe members, the heads of local elite associations, and the local magistrates. This so-called local alliance implies that when the Korean emperor moved most of the revenue sources into the Royal Treasury and directly dispatched its tax-collecting officials, he unsettled the old state networks interconnecting the local magistrates, local clerks, and the officials of the local elite associations. Some of these magistrates and local elites used the Ilchinhoe’s tax resistance as an excuse to reclaim their control over the taxes. This “alliance” was, however, temporary and parochial because the hostility of local elites toward the Ilchinhoe members was deep, and the Japanese protectorate eventually forced the Ilchinhoe to discontinue its resistance. Pressed to expand its own revenue sources, the Japanese protectorate feared the Ilchinhoe’s interventions in the tax administration. According to a November 1904 Japanese army survey, more than 50 percent of Ilchinhoe leaders recorded their status as former officials or literati, and the remainder were from lower social groups. Hayashi Yusuke quotes that among the forty-nine Ilchinhoe officials (yowgon), twenty-one were recorded as being former officials, two were chinsa (advanced scholars), and twenty-six were literati . Among the 883 Chinbohoe officials, there were twenty-two former officials, four former chinsa (chon chinsa), 403 literati (sain), 316 peasants (nongin), and 138 merchants (sangin). It is unclear to which social status group exactly the category of literati belonged. Hayashi proposes that future research investigate the mechanism and process through which the high proportion of literati (sain) in the Ilchinhoe leadership coalesced with the Tonghak peasants. He speculates that the sain category may have corresponded to the sinhyang, or new local elite, who had experienced local strife vis-à-vis the old aristocrats since the eighteenth century. Hayashi suggests that the exploitative measures of the Choson state had alienated the new local elite (sinhyang) from state officials and caused them to ally themselves with discontented peasants.1 Kim Chong-jun also argues that local Ilchinhoe reignited this local strife over local power (hyangkwon), specifically 1. Hayashi Yusuke, “Undo dantai toshite no Isshinkai,” pp. 46–48. 196 CHAPTER 6 in terms of the rights over taxation and local administration...