376 LAND REFORMin these useful scholarly pursuits would be entitled to adequate compensation
for their labors, and only the most able people were to be appointed to office,
but he defined ability as administrative talent, not moral superiority.57
When he relegated commerce and industry to secondary status under his yojon
system, he hardly differed from Yu Hyongwon, Yi Ik, or most other commenta-
tors save for Yu Suwon in the early eighteenth century, but in his later years when
he proposed the gradual adoption of elements of the well-field system to Korea,
he provided for a larger role for at least commercial agricultural production and
the use of the market,58
Yu Hyongwon had derogated the threat of a possible rebellion by the land-
lords against confiscation of land by contending that a courageous king could
overcome all opposition by displaying resolution and determination. Tasan also
maintained, like Yi Ik, that all land belonged to the king anyway, and that the
emergence of private ownership of land after the Chou dynasty had deprived
the emperor of his ability to improve the income of the common people, but he
failed to provide a method by which the government of the time could confis-
cate private land from the landlords and yangban without risking serious resis-
tance. In any case, Kim Yongsop was right when he wrote that there was no
political support to defend confiscation or to support the interests of the dis-
possessed peasants, but it is difficult to say that Tasan's thinking on land reform
represented either a more radical or more developed mode of thought than Yu,
since both based their plans on national ownership without dealing adequately
with the problem of confiscation. Tasan's major contribution was his willing-
ness in his early plan to allow individuals to pursue commerce and industry at
will to reduce the farming population, and to reduce the status and prestige of
scholars and intellectuals to the equivalent of c1erks.^59
The Later Land Reform PlanNonetheless, during his almost twenty years in exile, Tasan modified his ani-
mus against private property and shifted to a piecemeal and gradual adoption
of well-field principles on the grounds that the well-field system had not been
adopted in all parts of the realm, even in Chou times. He recommended that the
state use cash in its treasuries to purchase land from private owners and convert
it to publicly held land. The fund for this purpose could be expanded by dona-
tions from officials or wealthy landowners, entrepreneurial activities run by offi-
cials, government takeover of mines, and public reclamation of unused land and
the use of one-ninth of it as public land (kongjon) in emulation of the Chou well-
field model.
Since it was a violation of propriety for a king to buy land, recruit cultivators,
and then demand that they pay half the crop under a sharecropping system, Tasan
also suggested that the state take over land already under its control, like the
palace estates granted to princes and princesses (kungbangjon) or the colony