Impeachments in Korea's history

Lately, I’ve been asked the precedents for impeachments in Korean history. It's a hot topic as the Constitutional Court on Friday impeached the country's second president in less than 10 years. And indeed, there is a history of removing a king in the 1392-1910 Joseon Dynasty and the 918-1392 Goryeo Dynasty as well.

There is, of course, the removal from office through legal and non-violent means of impeachment. But there is also what you might call impeachment by assassination — the removal from office by violence. Korea has seen both methods in historic times and modern times. In that regard, I'm reminded of something I’ve written elsewhere — that while we often think the highest form of democracy is voting, it's actually when a tense, even potentially violent, political situation is resolved peacefully through impeachment. That's democracy at its most powerful.

The issue is made more complicated for non-parliamentary democracies like Korea and the United States, because there is no established method for removal through a no-confidence vote in parliament. Most European democracies, Canada, Israel and many other countries have an easier way to change national leaders without the trauma of an impeachment process. But the United States, and South Korea, in their wisdom (as they say), have chosen the more difficult process of impeachment.

Historically, the Joseon Dynasty had a kind of impeachment process as part of what I see as one of several forms of proto-democratic processes and institutions built into the dynastic government. The most prevalent aspect of that proto-democratic government was the “censorate” — a set of three government bodies tasked with oversight. One monitored the king, another the government (considered distinct since the king stood above it) and the third was responsible for directly advising or even lecturing the king. In practice, all three agencies had the freedom to do all three functions. In modern governments, this kind of practice is in the office of the inspector general.

The Korean king, unlike his more autocratic counterpart in China, had to listen to criticism (We use the archaic word “remonstrance.”) This was the heart of Confucian government. A moral king was required to listen to lectures on Confucian morality during three daily sessions. Yes — not once a month, not once a week, not once a day, but three times a day. They would often skip a session or two — or in the case of an outing to visit the ancestors’ graves, skip two or three days — but during routine daily affairs, the king would have to listen to the criticism — the “remonstrance” — of the censorate.

The censorate was not a bunch of long-in-the-tooth, seasoned and reasonable old men — they were often young firebrands who had just passed the exams and were given the duties of lecturing to the king and remonstrating with him on the decisions he made. And the kings, since they were to be ideal, moral sovereigns, had to listen. They had the option of rejecting the remonstrance, and they often did, but if one organ of the censorate took up the issue one day and found themselves rejected, the other organ, if they felt it important, might bring the issue up the next day. Even after rejecting the criticism two or three times, the king would often relent, and change course. These cases often had to do with appointments to offices.

So, you ask, if a king didn’t like this constant nipping at his heels, couldn’t he just fire the member of the censorate? Yes, he would at times do that, but the moral indignation of the censorate would often carry over to another censor who would take up the issue. Then you ask, could the king ever accuse his critics of "crimes" and have them killed? No — though, like most things, there was an exception. The king in question was Yeonsangun (r. 1495-1506), who killed many of his court, a tactic that led to his removal from office. The government, as a whole, had the authority to “impeach” the king and remove him from the throne. It happened with the violent, and mentally unbalanced Yeonsangun.

This removal happened one more time with Gwanghaegun (r. 1608-1623). But here, the evidence of malpractice was not as severe, causing some scholars to say that his removal from office was for “political” reasons, not for crimes in office. That’s the way I learned it. But lately, Korean scholars have reversed that view, saying that the perspective was born in the Japanese era and was propagated to denigrate the Joseon government as corrupt and political in intent. The prevailing wisdom today rejects that view, arguing instead that there were legitimate grounds for removal, and the government was indeed moral, upright and acting in a proper role — not corrupt and self-serving.

So, there you have it, two cases from the Joseon period of “impeachment” — a pattern of correcting errors in governing by removing the man at the top. And we see it, painful as it is, again today.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.