REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 35I
Status distinction, privilege, and discrimination was a different matter alto-
gether. While true that Yu sought to create an ideal soeiety to replace his own,
he did not seek to replace hierarchy with equality as the fundamental principle
of social organization; he sought rather to change the basis upon which social
hierarchy rested. He would replace birth, heredity. and private wealth with virtue,
learning. and achievement as the criteria for social distinction - but not alto-
gether, because the Confucian tradition allowed for fine marks of distinction on
the basis of age or blood relationship. In a sense, therefore, nothoi of yangban
and slaves were for him problems of degree, not kind; some of the grosser injus-
tices associated with these statuses should naturally be eliminated. Korean dis-
crimination might be worse than Chinese, but it could be ameliorated and made
acceptable.
Yu, however, did not simply tolerate social discrimination; he accepted it as
legitimate, justified by the classical division between the rulers and ruled, the
kunja and yain. For this reason he was excessively tolerant of some of its grosser
forms and blind to its potential consequences. Despite his talk of the abolition
of hereditary slavery or the eventual manumission of slaves, his excessively com-
plex set of rules precluded any form of extra support to the sadaebu elite but
the grant of extra land allotments, and there was no group of cultivators other
than the private slaves of the existing yangban available to work these lands.
Even if they were to be converted from slaves to hired laborers, as he suggested,
they would still be acting as fully obedient employees in the manner of social
inferiors. Since the prospects for the manumission of slaves was so far in the
future, for the immediate present he made slavery necessary for the cultivation
of his sadaebu ruling class, most of whom he presumed would be drawn from
the ranks of the current yangban.
Yu also proposed using hired labor to replace slaves, and some scholars have
indicated that this suggestion indicated that Yu was following the progressive
trend from forced to free labor that accompanied the expansion of the market
and commerce in the seventeenth century. But his land reform would have heen
diametrically opposed to this trend because it would have returned all landless
laborers and vagrants to the land and guaranteed them their subsistence by grant-
ing them a piece ofland to cultivate. Though he spoke of the advantages of free
choice or free contracts between the laborer and his employer, his land reform
program was so inclusive that it would have left little room for free labor to oper-
ate except in a very limited way.
The public ownership of land or a kongjon system was absolutely essential
to Yu as the means for the creation of a society in which two objectives would
be secured. The first was relative equality of income and fairness in taxation for
the peasant cultivator. The second was economic control by the state to free the
families of scholars and officials from the uncertainties of a market economy
or from the arbitrary aspects ofhureaucratic recmitment. Yu's animus was directed
against the existing yangban elite, composed of landlords who accumulated their
holdings out of a base desire for wealth and bureaucrats who gained office through