340 LAND REFORMplaces and assigned to thousands of individuals."87 Prebends would cause
administrative difficulties in keeping track of changes in allotments and in main-
taining control over peasant requests for tax alleviation or exemption because
of yearly variations in crop damage from natural causes. This would result in
inequities in the real assessment of tax burdens and a de facto increase in the tax
levies on the commoner peasant. "This is the greatest harm that could befall the
country; it would be better not to carry out a land reform at all,"Yu concluded.^88
Thus the adaptation of a limited-field method of graded allotments to the schol-
ars and officials was the best possible adjustment to an age of centralized bureau-
cracy, for "the gist of the well-field system is all contained within it."89
It is almost impossible to avoid a certain cynicism in jUdging Yu's arguments.
IfYu feared that prebends to men of status would end up as their private prop-
erty, how could he be so sanguine that granting extra allotments to sadaebu and
allowing them to retain their slaves as their private cultivators would not also
result in the creation of private estates cultivated by slave labor?
Yu's self-perception of his overall plan was that it was an eclectic combina-
tion of two models: the kongjon system based on the principles of public own-
ership and equal distribution ofland and service contained in the well-field model,
and the han jon (limited-field) system of allowing larger holdings of land for the
ruling class than for the commoner peasant. As in earlier limited-field schemes,
there was a system of graded quotas corresponding to rank or office. Yu's eclec-
ticism, however, meant that his type of limited-field scheme was different from
the proposals of the Han or Sung scholars and statesmen. He did not propose
his graded quotas as a compromise with private property or as a transitional means
to the achievement of a system of relatively equivalent private plots or an equal-
field sytem of public ownership. On the contrary, he envisioned an immediate
nationalization of private property followed by redistribution to peasants and
sadaebu.
What he meant by a limited-field system was that the sadaebu, as opposed
to the peasantry, would have larger allotments of returnable, non private land
and could bequeath them to heirs only if they qualified under the law as schol-
ars or officials, and according to strict generational limits according to rank.
His limited fields were not a compromise with private property as in the plan
of Lin Hstin; they were a compromise with elite status.
Princes and Merit Subjects
No sooner had Yu finished his criticism of the use of prebends to support the
sadaebu elite, than he turned around and justified their use for members of the
royal family and merit subjects. He stipulated that princes and princesses of both
queens and royal concubines were to receive two modes of support. In the first
instance they would be granted a basic land allotment of twelve or ten kyong
that was not to become private property but would be "land to be occupied and
received [by them]" temporarily just like the basic land grant to the peasants.