SLAVER Y 243that the use of force would be counterproductive as well as unnecessary. In Korea,
where the reality of master/slave relations had been deplorable because of the
whipping and beating of slaves by their masters, the slaves not only failed to
learn obedience, but lost completely any feelings of loyalty for them, which is
why so many of them ran away. 136
Of course, Yu's willingness to use law and coercion to win conformity to social
norms was consistent with his belief in the utility of laws and institutions to con-
trol and guide human behavior, and his liberal use of punishment to maintain
discipline in the schools, a reflection of the amalgam between Confucian and
Legalist principles achieved in China at least as early as the Han dynasty.
Although Yu Hyongwon was one of the first and most vociferous critics of the
brutality of the Korean system of slavery, and his hope to see it abolished was
undoubtedly genuine, he was reluctant to advocate any sudden action that might
disrupt the sensibilities of the slaveholders or disturb the idea of social order
that he felt was so essential. For that reason he had to find a method to ensure
the gradual replacement of slavery, and he did so by settling on the matrilineal
succession law in mixed marriages and the gradual introduction of hired labor,
but he was so concerned lest hired labor weaken proper principles of social hier-
archy that he was willing to threaten the use of law, force, and punishment as
the ultimate guarantor of those social principles. This willingness to use the mailed
fist only underscored the force of social order even in the minds of the most rad-
ical critics of seventeenth-century Korean society. For Yu's objective was not
the destruction of social order itself, but the reconstitution of social order on the
basis of more valid principles derived from classical, Chou dynasty practices.
The Debate over Hired Labor in the 1kentieth CenturyRecent studies of hired labor in the Choson dynasty have become embroiled in
a major controversy. One group of scholars have seen hired labor as wage labor
in the Marxian sense, people who have lost their land, property, and the means
of production and have been forced to sell the only thing they have left, their
labor power. The leading proponent of this point of view was Kim Yongsop.
who argued that the development of agricultural production was stimulated by
a new class of peasant entrepreneurs who were able to accumulate a surplus
over subsistence, began to sell their agricultural products on the market rather
than consume them, accumulate a surplus for reinvestment, and use their capi-
tal to buy up the land of the impoverished smallholders. 137 Kim's student, Ch'oe
Chun'o, applied this schema to hired labor and argued that the annual (mosiim)
or seasonal hired labor of the early Choson period in which the worker received
room and board but no wages changcd in character and became a daily laborer
who received wages in the form of a grain ration. usually 3 toe per day (9 mal
a month) and I chon or. T yang per day of cash. The ranks of these hired labor-
ers increased in number as the enterpreneurial rich peasants took over the land
of impoverished small holders and drove them into vagrancy, where they