318 LAND REFORM
than limited ownership because it was still based on private property and unre-
stricted private transactions. Magistrates would not be able to control such a sys-
tem, and the landowners would rely on deceit and fraud to get around the
restrictions. He, therefore, insisted that regulated tenancy would not be as good
as a land limitation system. 19
Yu also argued that sharecropping was intrinsically flawed because it inhib-
ited productivity - at the present time the large landowners had excessive amounts
of land and insufficient labor to cultivate it, while the landless peasants were
vagrants who did not engage in cultivation. The result was that there was much
uncultivated wasteland around the country. This problem had been solved by
sharecropping by which the landless vagrants exchanged their labor for land that
they rented from the large landowners, but sharecropping was faulty because
those who have no land and who temporarily cultivate the land of others every
year find it difficult to regard as regular the possession of that which is not their
own. Therefore, they also do not give a thought to proper fertilization, and that is
why a lot of land is not fertilized. If my method is adopted, there will be no
wasteland and all the lam! will be diligently worked. If you calculate all the pro-
duction from the land [under my system], then compared to the present not only
will it be doubled, but year after year, forever, you will have constant production
that is double [what it is at present]. How then would it be that foodstuff would
not be [as plentiful and common] as water and fire?20Yu conceded here that sharecropping was not an illogical way to share land
and labor, but that tenants had less incentive to make labor and fertilizer inputs
on rented land than on their own private holdings. It would seem that logical
consistcncy would have required Yu to advocate the retention of private prop-
erty in a land reform program to increase the incentives for maximizing pro-
duction. But as we have seen, Yu rejected private property in any form because
he was much more interested in achieving the moral goal of an equitable dis-
tribution of wealth in society (i.e., a decent income for the peasantry if not equal-
ity with the ruling class) than in maximizing production. Yet to persuade his
opponents, he argued that public ownership was a better means to stimulate incen-
tive than private ownership because tenancy had robbed the tenants of any real
hope of maximizing their income.
This contradiction can be explained, but not fully resolved, by considering
Yu's understanding of the nature of his one-kyong family plot in his kongjon or
public field system and its roots in the so-called private fields of the well-field
system. In the well-field system peasants were supposed to have had their own
private fields that they cultivated in addition to the lord's public field. Although
these private fields were not privately "owned," they wcrc private enough to guar-
antee a sense of attachment on the part of the peasants so that they would be
motivated to devote time and effort in cultivation.
Yu probably felt that the recipient of a state-granted plot would have a greater