Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 319

incentive to produce than the sharecropper who had no sense of attachment to
the land at all. The concept of the family plot was essentially different from mod-
em Communist systems of collectives or state farms, which more ruthlessly dis-
sociated the peasant cultivators from the land. Nonetheless, Yu's position was
fundamentally contradictory because he supposed that public ownership ofland
would both eliminate greed and stimulate labor and other inputs. Most modem
economists would assume that the advantage of private ownership of land was
based on the incentive provided by the opportunity to maximize wealth, which
to a Confucian or any other kind of moralist should be tantamount to greed.
Yu obviously did not think through the logical implications of his argument.
He must have assumed that by some mystical mechanism the incentive to pro-
duce engendered by granting a plot to a family would reach its natural limit once
subsistence had been achieved and that the desire for greater wealth would be
satiated and assuaged, or that it would stimulate greater production but prevent
endless maximization of wealth by forbidding purchase of surplus land.

Economic Security for the Sadaebu Elite

Yu's final reason for opposing sharecropping or tenancy was that it could not

ensure economic security for an ideal sudaebu elite because it would require

their nonofficial members to engage in agricultural labor as the only way to earn

a living.

If you do not restore regulations for the nurturing of scholars and just want to

do it like this [i.e., just have a system of regulated tenancy], then the t(lehu [offi-

cials], those eligihlc for office who do not have posts, and their sons and descen-

dants who are local Confucian scholars. down to the clerks who work for the

officials, and their orphaned children amI widows will all lose what they rely on

for support. These are the people who do not want to accumulate large amounts

of land and who do not want to seek profit, but this method [tenancy regulation]

would destroy altogether the purpose hehind making distinctions between the

superior man of virtue Ikunja] and the man of the fields [yailli. It will only allow

those who carry their rakes and hoes in their hands [i.e., peasants I to obtain

food, while the officials and scholars [rile/m.lal will have no way to take care of

themselves. Indeed, this is not the way things ought to he done in the world.'!

Lest his reader miss the locus classicus of the reference to the kunja/yuin dIS-

tinction, Yu referred him in a footnote to Confucius and Mencius, the latter of

whom distinguished between those who worked with their minds and those who

worked with their hands. In fact, Yu chose this spot as the place to issue his clear-

est statement about the necessity for a class of officials and scholars set apart

from the common herd: "For truly if the court has no hereditary officials [sesin]

and the country is poor in itinerant scholars, how would this be of any henefit

to the people or the state?,,22