— Overview
The notes stay with a book of late-Joseon utopias, and with Jeong Yak-yong’s communal-field plan as the theory the book sets at the start of that hope.
— Contents and key concepts
Late Joseon, and a guidebook of hoped-for worlds
The notes stay with Joseon’s Brave New World. They begin with the ordinary wish for a better place than the life one has, and then turn to late Joseon, when, they write, commoners under heavy pressure, and also poor or fallen yangban, reached for a new world. Immediate hunger, they add, made new thought a spark.
The book, they say, can be read as a guide to those utopias, written so that specialists’ accounts of the new worlds led by the Hwalbindang, Donghak, Catholicism, and the Jeonggamnok are not hard to follow. Those who held power, they add, found the present itself already a utopia, and tried to put the spark out, even leaning on foreign force. The resistances were separate events, but set in a line they can be seen to have influenced one another.
Jeong Yak-yong, recast as a starting point
In school, the writer had known Jeong Yak-yong mainly as the man who, in exile, left many writings, among them The Admonitions for Governing the People. In this book, they write, he is drawn as the starting point of a revolution, the man who laid down the basic theory of the utopia ordinary people wanted. They do not add a second figure, though they had planned to look closely at one or two people from the book.
A harvest shared by the labour put in
According to the yeojeonje as Jeong Yak-yong wrote it, they record, the people of a village harvest in common, but the share follows the family labour put into production. That, they write, differs from an older view that favoured those who already held land. More striking still, the yeojeonje denies feudal ownership of land, treats land as social property, and calls for common ownership and common cultivation.
Jeong Yak-yong also opposed landholding by scholars, artisans, and merchants who did not farm, because he set a high value on people remaining professional in their own work, apart from the communal field. The notes stop at that plan.
The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.
Sources
- The notes, a student reading of Joseon’s Brave New World: late-Joseon utopias around the Hwalbindang, Donghak, Catholicism, and the Jeonggamnok, Jeong Yak-yong recast as a starting theory, and the yeojeonje, in which a village harvests in common according to family labour and feudal ownership of land is denied.
Last updated: 15 November 2026
Frequently asked questions
What kind of book is Joseon’s Brave New World?
The notes are a student reading of Joseon’s Brave New World. They begin with the ordinary wish for a better place than the life one has, and then turn to late Joseon, when, they write, commoners under heavy pressure, and also poor or fallen yangban, reached for a new world. The book, they say, can be read as a guide to those utopias, written so that specialists’ accounts of the new worlds led by the Hwalbindang, Donghak, Catholicism, and the Jeonggamnok are not hard to follow. Those who held power, they add, found the present itself already a utopia, and tried to put the spark out, even leaning on foreign force.
How does the book recast Jeong Yak-yong?
In school, the writer had known Jeong Yak-yong mainly as the man who, in exile, left many writings, among them The Admonitions for Governing the People. In this book, they write, he is drawn as the starting point of a revolution, the man who laid down the basic theory of the utopia ordinary people wanted. They do not add a second figure, though they had planned to look closely at one or two people from the book.
What is the yeojeonje, as the notes record it?
According to the yeojeonje as Jeong Yak-yong wrote it, they record, the people of a village harvest in common, but the share follows the family labour put into production. That, they write, differs from an older view that favoured those who already held land. More striking still, the yeojeonje denies feudal ownership of land, treats land as social property, and calls for common ownership and common cultivation. Jeong Yak-yong also opposed landholding by scholars, artisans, and merchants who did not farm, because he set a high value on people remaining professional in their own work, apart from the communal field. The notes stop at that plan, and do not carry the story on into later failure or exile.
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