REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 317
mitted to family solidarity should have argued that state ownership and bureau-
cratic control, and not private ownership under the control of the paterfamilias,
was the best means of achieving the family unity? Is it not also anomalous that
the Confucian paragon of evil, Shang Yang, the early Legalist architect of the
all-powerful centralized state, should have been responsible not for the nation-
alization of private property but the creation of private property? In Yu's think-
ing, the centralized state may be good or bad depending on what it did; its proper
role was to be the agent for the achievement of familial good and village soli-
darity rather than either the maximization of state power (Chinese Legalism) or
the freedom of the individual (Western liberalism and capitalism), Yu's concept
of the state bears only slight resemblance to the modern welfare state insofar as
he approved of state intervention in society to achieve the moral goal of equi-
table economic distribution that individual men could not achieve on their own.
There is somc doubt, however, whether Yu's concern ahout keeping fathers
and sons in the same village community was simply a matter of village soli-
darity. In another section of the debate he raised the question again, hut in what
appears as a Freudian slip, he revealed that he was specifically concerned about
the scions of elite households.
[Under a kongjon or public landownership system). if a father is an official
[taebu] and his son a scholar [sa], then even though the rank [by which they
would be entitled to land grants of differcnt sizcs] might be different, there will
bc nothing to obstruct their rcceipt of land. But if a system of private land is in
operation and there is no way for them to receive land from the officials, their
families will have to purchase land for their sons in advance, and those sons of
officials who arc not yet officials thcmselves will be forccd to scll off thcir sur-
plus land [yiljiin).'7In other words, Yu was concerned about guaranteeing a stable income for the
families of the sadaehu in place of the insecurities posed by total reliance on
office holding (especially heeause of the limited numher of posts and the dan-
gers of factional politics) or the purchase of private land in the open market. By
no means were his sympathies confined to the lower orders of society.
Having disposed of the idea of limiting landownership, Yu turned his atten-
tion next to the possibility of limiting sharecropping and rent. His adversary sug-
gested that in place ofYu's public ownership plan, a law should be promulgated
requiring large landowners to rent out all land that they could not cultivate them-
selves to sharecroppers at a rental rate no higher than 20 percent of the crop,
with taxes to be paid by the landlord out of his share - a plan reminiscent of Lin
Hsiin's proposal. "If done like this, then peasants with labor [power] will be able
to support their lahor, and those who do not cultivate their land themselves will
have no way to profit from excess land, ... and the evil of accumulating sur-
plus land [kyiilllby()ng] will naturally die OUt.",8
Yu found the idea of government-controlled sharecropping no more congenial