276 LAND REFORMand peasants in general might have been the exploitation of commercial taxes,
but this would have required a fundamental shift in the physiocratic bent of Con-
fucian economic thought that emphasized the primacy of agricultural produc-
tion and the necessity to begin any meaningful institutional reform with the
redistribution of land. Would Yu Hyongwon have enough flexibility and fore-
sight to appreciate the capacity of the nonagricultural commercial and indus-
trial sector of the economy to generate greater wealth and to tax that wealth to
reduce the burden on the peasants?
Traditional Confucian thought did stress the need to encourage agricultural
production, but not for the purpose of promoting surpluses above and beyond
the requirements of reproduction and the payment of a tithe to the state. The
goal was to provide subsistence for the common peasant and taxes for the sup-
port of the ruling class. On the other hand, idealistic Confucian reform also
entailed the redistribution of wealth through the redistribution of land or its use.
Land redistribution was, therefore, regarded by Confucian statecraft reformers
as a powerful tool in the hands of reformers for the modification, if not radical
reorganization, of the structure of society.
There was no doubt in Yu's mind that some kind ofland reform was an absolute
necessity to restore the dynasty to health, but it was one thing to discuss reform
in the abstract, and another to contemplate the reaction that might ensue from
any radical plan to shift landed property from the rich to the poor, especially
when a plan for land reform risked the possibility of antagonizing the ruling
yangban whose support and leadership might be needed to maintain order and
stability in society.
Since redistributive land reform had been discussed for almost two millennia
in both China and Korea with a general record of failure since the equal-field
system of the T'ang dynasty and the chOnsikwa system of the early Koryo dynasty
(which was erroneously perceived by Koreans in the seventeenth century as a
copy of the T'ang equal-field system), how would Yu avoid the charges of his
more pragmatic critics that radical reform was chimerical and unfeasible? Since
we have seen that Yu intended to reform society by transforming the basis for
the recruitment of officials and the ruling class in general through educational
and school reform, did he also plan to reinforce this goal by restructuring the
distribution of wealth to favor his new ruling class?
He had expressed hope that hereditary slavery could be abolished in the next
generation and existing slaves reduced in number by replacing them with hired
labor, so did he also plan to take those slaves into account in his plan for land
reform, and if so, could he do it without creating serious contradictions?
In short, did Yu consider the distribution of wealth and property as seriously
as he did the moral goals of recruiting a more ethical ruling class and abolish-
ing hereditary slavery? What method did he use to reconcile the distJ;ibution of
wealth with his moral goals? And did that method represent a departure from
Confucian dogma to a more rational and practical selection of policy alterna-
tives?