REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 353
Nonetheless the new system would have differed from the old in certain impor-
tant ways. The sadaebu elite of the new system would have permitted greater
mobility both downward and upward on the basis of scholarship and performance.
The abolition of private landownership would have eliminated the landed base
of the contemporary hereditary yangban aristocracy and transformed the com-
moner peasant into a limited proprietor, holding only the right of possession or
cultivation over a family plot. This would have entailed the disappearance of
the private smallholder, the sharecropper, and the landless laborer - except for
the slaves whom he suggested might be converted to hired laborers. This sug-
gestion, of course, contradicted his basic provisions to provide a land allotment
to slaves as well, so if they were to be manumitted by making them hired labor-
ers, they would have to give up the land allotment they would have received as
slaves. In any case, by granting the slave a plot to cultivate (and legitimizing his
duty of performing military service for the state), Yu would have weakened the
slaveholder's control (but not necessarily improved the slave's lot).
Yu obviously yielded a great deal to the customary Korean respeet for social
status, particularly with regard to slavery, but this caution did not carry over to
his treatment of private landownership, which he insisted had to be abolished
totally. If he thought that private ownership was less important to the yangban
than slaveholding or that its abolition would not result in political opposition
and rebellion, he was sadly mistaken. Private property was maintained intact
until the decade after Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule in I945.