In 1401, King Taejong, the third monarch of Korea's Joseon Dynasty, hung a drum at the gate tower of the royal palace. Commoners who could not obtain redress from local offices could beat the drum and have their grievances reach the king's ears. The drum was modeled on the "dengwengu," a drum said to have been installed by the founding emperor of China's Song Dynasty to hear the voices of his people. It was initially called by the same name before settling on "sinmungo." In later years, its role was sometimes taken over by "gyeokjaeng," in which petitioners struck gongs or small hand gongs before a royal procession to press their appeals.
In the West, the right to petition is traced to the Magna Carta, which English nobles forced the king to sign in 1215. The Petition of Right of 1628 curbed the crown's arbitrary taxation and arrests, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 declared that petitioning the king must not be punished. The United States wrote the principle directly into its constitution. The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, guaranteed the right to petition the government alongside the freedoms of religion, speech, the press and assembly.
In 2019, under then-Governor Lee Jae-myung, Gyeonggi Province set up a channel for public communication modeled on the presidential office's national petition site. Under the system, a director-general or the governor would respond once 50,000 residents endorsed a petition. But over four years, only one of the roughly 20,000 petitions filed drew a response, because no other petition met the threshold. Kim Dong-yeon, the next governor, lowered the bar to 10,000 signatures in 2023.
On the 11th of this month, a petition calling for Governor Choo Mi-ae to step down was posted on the Gyeonggi Province petition board. The petitioner argued that the governor had declared a fiscal emergency and cut the budget, yet moved into an official residence with a 1.2 billion won ($860,000) deposit. Within three days the petition passed the 10,000-signature threshold for a response, leaving Choo obliged to reply officially. Once the count topped 30,000, the province marked the petition "answered" on the morning of the 15th, five days after it went up. Critics call it a maneuver to stop the signature count from climbing, given that petitions normally run for 30 days. The reply also came as a written briefing from a spokesperson rather than from the governor. The petition site was left open while the answers were shut off. At this point, would it not be better to simply close the site altogether?
