The Tutelage Opens (2)

A few days later, every appointee of the First Tutelage Cabinet gathered in one place: my office.

"Ministers."

From the right of the room to the left, a host of government officials straightened their backs and set their postures at my summons.

Today was the day the new government's appointments would be announced — and the day the first Cabinet meeting would be held.

I looked at those still standing with taut faces and those already seated, and decided to make one thing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠unmistakably clear.

The reason I had put them in these chairs.

"The goal of our First Tutelage is unambiguous."

The moment I spoke, a thicket of gazes locked onto me.

Ugh. The pressure.

"From the stale politics of the medieval age to the politics of modernity — and beyond that, to the founding of a constitution that will realize the Kingly Way of governance, forgotten since antiquity. To complete the revolutionary task, we will crush the enemies of the revolution and every external threat without hesitation, and devote ourselves to the national defense of the Republic."

The revolutionary task meant laying, through a constitution, the foundation of a true republic worthy of the people. The national defense meant the thing they were all quietly dreading, whether they admitted it or not: an invasion by Qing.

Hypothetical Enemy Number One: the Great Qing Empire.

The people of Joseon, having watched revolutions succeed one after another and a tyrant go to the block, had danced themselves giddy on that heat. Then the fever broke, and they began to fear the bill that would come due.

The year was 1885.

Executing the tyrant and putting to death, with their own hands, the treacherous ministers and national traitors who had been eating the country alive — that much had been well done. But this was still an age in which Qing remained, unmistakably, the great power of the East.

"Heh. Everyone seems tense now that the talk has turned to war."

I deliberately took a sensitive problem — one that could easily become a liability for me — and turned it over in front of them with my own mouth.

"We must not be afraid. No matter what hardships blow down upon this government, or upon the people, the officers of this Tutelage must never entertain the cowardly thought of stepping back. If anyone does…"

I let the sentence hang. Several men swallowed hard. I met their eyes one by one, then finished it — so the warning would stick.

"…I will make them wish they had taken a bullet during the revolution instead."

Someone audibly gulped.

At that, a few ministers wiped the sweat from their brows; others took my gaze full-on, looking almost entertained.

The ones dabbing their foreheads and laughing awkwardly were mostly Sadaedang men, or bureaucrats out of the capital aristocracy. The ones wearing a look of all right, let's see what you've got were former Daewongun-faction officers and the younger bureaucrats from the Gaehwadang.

A motley crew, every time — and always a fresh set of faces.

Of course, from the beginning, the capable men assembled here had often come to me with deals, driven by ambitions that could hardly be called small.

And yet—

Just having Choe Ik-hyeon sitting here quietly makes the whole atmosphere better.

I glanced at Choe Ik-hyeon, who occupied a junior seat in the right-hand corner — a place utterly at odds with his standing in present-day Joseon — and was quietly nodding along.

Some of them were surely nursing private grievances about their posts and their departments. But they had been stunned by the fact that Choe Ik-hyeon — grand elder of the Confucian literati, and my most powerful patron — had accepted without a murmur the Ministry of Agriculture, a seat that, frankly, looked like a sinecure in the new cabinet.

That, however, was the sort of cheap reaction only small fry who did not know the inside story would have.

I turned my head for a moment, and the conversation I had had with Choe Ik-hyeon in days past rose up before me.

No point in telling that story yet. It would spoil the fun.

The result, in any case, was that the men who came to me with personnel requests, or with bargains dressed up as cooperation, had thinned out considerably.

The Vanguard Commander and Woo Beom-seon… hmm. Not a thought in their heads, as expected.

Confirming that Kim Gae-nam and Woo Beom-seon, wedged awkwardly among the rest, were completely vacant, I forced down the laugh that tried to break out of me and gave a solemn nod instead.

Well. An eleven-year-old brat setting the mood and rattling off the seemingly impossible ambitions of a newborn government — how could that fail to be interesting?

Most of them, though, were split evenly between tension and anticipation. Their faces were full of curiosity about the departments they had just been given, and about the work the Tutelage meant to drive forward.

I ran my tongue across my lips as I took a slow turn around those burning eyes.

The goal of the Tutelage.

The interviews had gone by like a thunderclap, so brief that I could never honestly claim to have vetted every appointment in the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠First Tutelage Cabinet with perfect thoroughness.

And the revolution just past was, to put it kindly, the fruit of a grand coalition — and to put it unkindly, a hodgepodge stew in which friend and foe were nearly impossible to tell apart.

Hard to sort them out.

A so-called big tent: the Dongmaenghoe; the radical Enlightenment faction that had come in later; the surrendered ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Sadaedang; the Daewongun faction that had been cooperating since the old days; the career bureaucrats who were too busy reading the room to do anything else. And that was not the end of it.

Even within the Dongmaenghoe, positions on Japan split as sharply as a blade. And being Gaehwadang did not mean they were all well-disposed toward Britain and America — far from it.

Qing? Those people were, without a shadow of a doubt, the enemy of the entire nation.

The point that mattered here was this:

…The people of Joseon still have no clear aversion to either the anti-Japanese or the pro-Japanese line.

That was the truth of it.

Among Joseon's scholar-officials, common people, and merchant classes, there was as yet no comprehensive sense of crisis that Japan would become a great threat to the country — save for a tiny handful of the well-informed. Of those, only a man like Choe Ik-hyeon, who had walked with me for so long, was even partly wary of economic plunder through the inflow of Japanese manufactures and yen.

It might actually be stranger if anyone here knew how far those Japanese bastards' greed would run.

Not a soul in that room had any inkling of the vast design by which Japan would one day make a colony of us, bisect us with a Line of Interest and a Line of Defense, and offer us up as the first sacrificial lamb of continental conquest.

On the question of Qing, however — anti-Qing or pro-Qing — each man's conviction was sharp and distinct.

And yet they fear Qing even as they react to it with such ferocity.

Of course, my own influence was the greatest part of that. The founding of the Dongmaenghoe and the convening of the Manmin Gongdonghoe had been for the express purpose of driving an anti-Qing movement. The great majority of Joseon's people, whipped on by the zealous propaganda of the Vanguard and the Youth Party, now regarded Qing as a hypothetical enemy — Enemy State Number One.

So how had the Joseon of 1885 come to be transformed like this?

A true irony of history, but… Japan is without sin.

Well — they could not be called entirely without sin, not after putting cannon-fire into Ganghwa Island. But at present Japan had failed to achieve any political intervention on the peninsula at all, thanks to the Imo Incident and the Gapsin Revolution, both of whose outcomes my intervention had turned completely on their heads.

The tentacles they had managed to extend amounted only to economic plunder — objectively, an import structure concentrated on rice.

And they are far too quiet. And far too friendly.

On the contrary, Japan was privately looking on the new government with favor, now that Qing — which had held overwhelming market share under the Joseon-Qing Land and Sea Trade Regulations — had begun to lose ground in the revolution's aftermath.

No: because the legation had come through the Imo Incident unharmed, and the students abroad had remained safe, Japan had lost every pretext under which it might have expanded its influence. Most likely because it had lost every chance to install the one thing that mattered most — armed force, a legation guard.

And so the people of Joseon in 1885, centered on Dongmaenghoe party members based in the open ports of Busan, Gunsan, and Incheon — landlords, rural gentry, merchants, and farmers alike — regarded Qing as detestable and Japan as a reasonably good trading partner.

Well. These were lunatics who paid three times the price for white rice, hauled it back to Japan, and still called it cheap and asked for more. How were the landlords supposed to look at them unkindly?

…I'll have to buy time by cutting off any pretext for intervention in advance.

Anyway.

In those days, most of Joseon's men of letters had a habit of judging foreign countries — and the foreigners who belonged to them — by whatever prejudices they had picked up along the path by which they had encountered Western learning, or through the newspapers and the rumors that ran through the open ports.

And so the sentiment of the Tutelage, and of Hanseong, was this:

And one thing, at least, was certain.

"Our Tutelage Cabinet, which has blossomed from the passionate clamor of the Joseon people, pledges that we shall never pursue a politics that runs against the people's support."

That the men gathered here, however hard the road became, would never do anything that amounted to selling the country.

Yun Chi-ho, attending the first Cabinet meeting of Joseon's first republican government — the Tutelage — in his dual capacity as Director of the Public Security Committee and secretary of the Joseon Youth Association, gazed upon the eleven-year-old child Tongnyeong with eyes full of emotion.

But who among those gathered here would dare take issue with his age?

The child Tongnyeong, armed with a burning passion and a cutting insight, was a man who did not flinch from looking reality's problems in the eye.

He rose from his seat and spoke as he slowly circled behind the ministers sitting in the chamber.

Yun Chi-ho found himself nodding along to the Tongnyeong's own questions and answers.

Unlike the previous tyrant's autocratic court, the agenda was clear and spare. He smiled, remembering how his father, Lord Yun Ung-ryeol, had lamented that royal government in his younger days.

Even hearing it secondhand was infuriating. Whose fault it was. Who didn't want to do it. Share out a little of the spoils. Aigoo — it deserved to fall…

And this was the Cabinet of a new government that had proclaimed, in the sternest terms, that it would punish concurrent posts and patronage without mercy. Not a soul dared to shove the work in front of him onto another ministry. On the contrary, they took it as an opportunity, and did not hesitate to put their views forward.

"The most urgent problem is diplomacy."

"Speak."

"Now then — first, this that I have prepared."

The first of the ministers to take the floor was Bak Jeong-yang, who had risen to Foreign Minister on the recommendation of the Gaehwadang and through an interview with the Tongnyeong himself.

Rising under the Tongnyeong's gaze, Bak Jeong-yang distributed a sheaf of prepared reports among the assembled elders and spoke.

"As you will see on the first page, three treaties with foreign nations were already ratified during the tyrant's reign. In addition, there are two more counterparties with whom negotiations are pending."

"The ratifications are with Britain, America, and France."

"Yes. Of those, America and France are the most important."

A gleam of interest crossed every face at Bak Jeong-yang's words.

America and France? Not Britain — privately regarded as the strongest of the Western powers?

Even Yun Chi-ho, who considered himself reasonably well-versed in foreign affairs, thought the same.

If we are going to ask for help, wouldn't the British Empire — which can take a hard line against the Qing Emperor — be the best choice?

The Foreign Minister resolved their curiosity in a single stroke.

"It is by the instruction of His Excellency the Tongnyeong."

"Ah."

Well. That explained it.

Everyone accepted it readily once they heard the Tongnyeong had ordered it, and Bak Jeong-yang went on.

"First: our new government, through His Excellency's grand design, and as the common aim of the coalition including the Dongmaenghoe, aspires to a people's republic that pursues the Kingly Way in its perfect and unblemished form."

"Indeed."

"And the America and France we have selected are, respectively, nations with a revolutionary tradition — one in Europe, one on the American continent — that established republics for the people."

"Oho."

At Bak Jeong-yang's account of how each had, much like themselves, cut off a king's head, and had even defeated Britain, the strongest nation of the age, the atmosphere in the chamber turned warm at a stroke.

Human relationships, after all, were not so different. Just as the men of twenty-first-century Korea bonded over the shared memories of the Marine Corps, the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force they had each served in, and became friends in civilian life — to grow close, you needed a common denominator. And if it was something other men could not easily follow, so much the better.

"That is why I directed that diplomatic relations with France and America be established with all haste. What the Republic needs at this moment is a powerful and trustworthy ally to stand against Qing's war of invasion."

At the Tongnyeong's words, several ministers showed signs of discomfort.

"An alliance, you say…?"

"Hmm."

"That's right. An alliance."

As if he had already known their concerns, the Tongnyeong nodded, making his will plain, and continued.

"Do you think the success of the revolution will end with us?"

"Eh?"

At that inscrutable question Yun Chi-ho let a stupid sound slip out before he could stop himself, felt the gazes turning toward him, and clapped a hand over his mouth.

At a meeting of this importance—!

The Tongnyeong looked at him with a mild gaze, then turned his head and spoke.

The majority of the ministers fell silent at a statement so hard to believe. To be more precise, it would be fairer to say that the older men could not get a handle on this prophetic talk, whose meaning they could not grasp.

But of course there were those among them who took the context exactly.

"…A chain of revolutions. Do you mean, perhaps, that you expect our Joseon, too, to achieve such enormous explosive power and growth as the French Revolutionary Wars produced?"

"France and America — two nations sharing a common ideology and a common political system — will look with goodwill upon the birth of our Republic."

"And furthermore, that the nation most befitting the standard of a civilized country which the Western powers put forward will be our future Republic, which will complete the revolution of its own accord."

Among them were several whose eyes had lit — faces Yun Chi-ho himself knew well. Bak Jeong-yang, Seo Gwang-beom, Park Yung-hyo, and the other men out of the Gaehwadang.

The Tongnyeong listened to each of their thoughts with a thoroughly humble air, then clapped his hands and answered.

"You are all correct. Entirely accurate. Excellent."

Then, thrusting a pointed pointer into the world map hanging on one wall — a vast world upon which their Republic was drawn smallest of all — the Tongnyeong opened his mouth.

"At present, France and Qing have been fighting a decisive war over Dai Viet, the Kingdom of Vietnam, for two years, neither side yielding an inch. After so long a war, both sides have reached a point where they desperately need a clever stroke to overturn the board."

The ministers' expressions shifted in every color. The clever stroke the Tongnyeong had in mind was, of course—

"And that clever stroke is our Republic?"

"Yes."

He said it in a voice that admitted no argument, tapping the pointer against his palm in a steady rhythm as he went on.

"The present situation between Qing and France, as we have it from the open ports and the Japanese newspapers, is a deadlock. The state of Dai Viet is such that even a small shock could flip it completely."

"Then, Your Excellency — does that mean our Republic has ample time to take neither side, watch the situation unfold, and build our strength?"

Yun Chi-ho could not help turning his head toward the voice.

The speaker was Minister of Agriculture Choe Ik-hyeon, opening his mouth for the first time at today's first Cabinet meeting.

Receiving every gaze in the room, the Minister of Agriculture folded his hands carefully before him and spoke in a quiet, measured tone.

"In this one's thinking, an alliance is, unlike what we might imagine, in many cases something that drags us — contrary to our intentions — into unforeseen strife and squabbling we might otherwise have avoided. I do not dare seek to diminish His Excellency the Tongnyeong's will, which champions the beautiful original meaning of the word. But while it is a natural course for a party in dire straits to seek an alliance, I believe our government's capabilities are as yet too meager to confirm whether they truly yearn for us."

Yun Chi-ho was filled with admiration as the grand elder of the Confucian literati continued.

"Moreover, this one submits that our Republican government, in executing the tyrant, has crossed a river from which we can never return to our former relationship with Qing. That being so, would it not be most urgent to use this precious, fleeting time rightly — to train an army that can answer a Qing invasion, and to put the northern fortresses in order?"

For a man he had expected would, at best, merely refrain from clutching at the new government's ankles by drowning in stale classics and crying out only for old glories — to possess such insight!

Yun Chi-ho deeply reproached himself at Choe Ik-hyeon's robust bearing, which, unlike a conservative Confucian scholar, called for hard measures.

How shameful.

He and most of the Gaehwadang had thought of nothing but borrowing the prestige of the Western powers outright, to slip Qing's wrath. Looking at it now, the Confucian literati and the scholar-officials had each steeled their resolve in their own way.

While Yun Chi-ho hid his flushed face toward the floor, newly able to look a little more closely at himself, the Tongnyeong — who had been quietly nodding through the Minister of Agriculture's opinion — answered.

"It may well be a sufficiently worrisome situation. However, the meaning of alliance as I have spoken of it comes with various constraints and conditions."

"Such as…?"

"For instance: when a particular nation invades another's borders. Or when we judge that a common ideology and a common moral justice have been violated."

"Oho. A line, then?"

"Yes. That's right."

The Tongnyeong then made it plain that alliance would never be discussed lightly, and that he had raised the matter before them today only to establish this: that the diplomatic line of the newborn Republic was anti-Qing, and self-reliance.

But the most shocking item on the agenda was what came next.

Returning to the seat of honor, the Tongnyeong declared it with resolute eyes, as if issuing a declaration of war.

That was the real bomb.