356 LAND REFORMby nonprogressive landlords who exploited their landholdings and peasant ten-
ants and laborers for their own consumption rather than for investment in com-
mercial and industrial ventures. They were backed up by rigid bureaucratic
governments, either native or colonial, that supported them with the coercive
powers of the state, exacerbated the crisis of the peasantry, and drove their nations
toward peasant-based revolutions.^4 Whether Moore's schematic explanation suf-
fers too much from reductionist oversimplification or not, it retains immense
importance as an illustration of what momentous political consequences can result
from the failure of agrarian regimes, particularly those with a centralized
bureaucratic tradition, to solve the problem of the maldistribution of wealth. Many
of these peasant-based revolutions began with promises for land reform guar-
anteeing a plot ofland for every peasant family, but the purpose of these promises
was not only to redistribute wealth to the impoverished peasantry, but to attract
support for a political revolution. And after a political revolution was carried
out, promises of proprietorship for peasants often ended up as a program of con-
fiscation and collective ownership, as in Stalin's and Mao's collectivization cam-
paigns after 1928 and 1955, respectively. In other words, neglect of the problem
of distribution in a rural economy has political consequences, and political lead-
ers who are able to take the lead in advocating a program for land redistribu-
tion can succeed in overthrowing the political order by appealing to a desperate
peasantry in a period of crisis.
How is this relevant to the Korean experience? It is important to know what
the direction of change in the rural sector was. Was it toward the creation of cap-
italist commercial agriculture in accompaniment with the expansion of trade and
industry that tended toward a solution of rural immiseration by increased pro-
duction and a shift of population from rural to urban areas. Or was it the con-
tinuation of a fundamental nonprogressive domination by a small class of
landlords of a fragmented class of minute petty proprietors, tenants, and hired
laborers pushed to the margins of subsistence?
It is my contention that although certain aspects of capitalism in a nascent
stage were present in the rural economy, the latter view is the best way to under-
stand what took place. Not only was this deterioration of distribution charac-
teristic of the Choson dynasty, but the severity of landlord/tenant relations in
particular was maintained by the policies of the Japanese colonial regime after
1920 and even exacerbated by the world depression in the decade after 1929.
In his massive and penetrating study of the origins of the Korean War, Bruce
Cumings has shown how the distributive problem was left hanging in mid-air
even after Korea's liheration from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, but the amaz-
ing denouement of centuries of difficulty was that within a few years a solution
was achieved.s Divided by the physical, ideological, and political split between
the Korean Communists in the north and the anti-Communist landlords in the
south, and supported on each side by the Soviet Union and China and the United
States and its allies, both North and South Korea adopted solutions that
restrained private property rights. The North, in emulation of precedents set in