382 LAND REFORMthe land by the government and appointed to that post. He presumed that such
individuals should be able to create colonies anywhere from 200 to 2,000 kyong
in size.
Presumably, the managers would thus not be the expert agriculturalists
recruited for agricultural managers on the colonies close to the capital, but rich
peasants or venture entrepreneurial farmers who invested their own capital in
reclamation. S6 naturally presumed that these rural entrepreneurs would have
been willing to give up their own wealth and independence to become a man-
agerial functionary on a state farm!
Thus, by capitalizing on the supposed desires of all rich peasants to attain
some kind of office, the state would be able to coopt the rich peasants into the
effort to put an end to the landlord-tenant system and work toward the collec-
tivization of agriculture, but it would be done by the adoption of a capitalist mode
of production and managerial management techniques worked out by capital-
istic farmers. Kim Yongs6p believed that even though S6Yugu shared the goals
of previous reformers in taking land away from large landlords and redistribut-
ing it to peasants in one fashion or another, the others all thought that the con-
fiscation of land could only be carried out by a revolution. So's formula differed
from all previous reformers because it was based on a realistic acceptance of
the world as it was, promotion of production, and absorption of the rich peas-
ants and landlords into the new system rather than their destruction.^68
CONCLUSION
It is difficult to see, however, how S6's plan was any more realistic than those
of previous reformers except that he was willing to recognize the supreme power
of private landownership but disarm it hy publicly announcing his capitulation
to it. Once the landlords were disarmcd he could then seek to undermine their
domination by working around the edges of the system. Continuing the tradi-
tion of attachment to the well-field model by most reformers, he proposed a sys-
tem of state farms run by enlightened bureaucratic managers who would be
devoted to the incorporation of the most advanced methods of cultivation. His
intention was to sUITound the landlords with examples of superior collective orga-
nization as a new strategy for the gradual but inevitable replacement of private
property.
What was significant about Tasan's second plan and S6 Yugu's military colony
plan was that both seem to be products of the failure of King Ch6ngjo and other
kings to even attempt a beginning of land reform led by the center, for without
royal support there were virtually no prospects for any plans based on confis-
cation of land from private landowners. Since all reformers were either schol-
ars or officials who had been educated in thc standards of bureaucratic organization
and were members of the yangban class themselves, they could envision no lead-
ership for reform coming from any other place but the pinnacle of the bureau-