278 LAND REFORMfar greater number of smallholders, tenants, and landless hired laborers who were
burdened with heavy shares of taxes and service requirements (both labor and
military) and whose levels oflivelihood were reduced to a bare minimum at best.
Since the cconomy was overwhelmingly agrarian, the distribution of land and
the social relationships of people involved in agricultural production was cru-
cial to thc distribution of wealth throughout society.
Yu Hyongwon's initial chapter in his Pan'gye surok was a study of the sys-
tem of land tenure because he had concluded on the basis of his statecraft stud-
ies of Chinese and Korean institutional history that it was the key to the solution
of all problems of state and society. Land was the primary factor in determin-
ing income and wealth in a society in which agriculture was the dominant mode
of production, and land reform would rectify not only the problem of the mald-
istribution of land among the people, but the unfair levies of grain taxes and
labor and military service as well.PRIVATE PROPERTYYu concluded unequivocally that the primary cause of the maldistribution ofland
was the institution of private property. Whether he arrived at this conclusion from
his own observation of contemporary Korean circumstance or not cannot be con-
firmed, but he based most of his argument on earlier Chinese critics of private
property. The core argument of that literature, which Yu accepted without ques-
tion, was that the perfect system of land tenure had been the well-field system
of the Chou dynasty in which all peasant families were guaranteed equal plots
of land to cultivate with a minimum of taxation. That taxation consisted of shared
labor on the lord's plot. Since there was no private ownership under the Chou
feudal system, the peasant families retained only rights of use or cultivation of
their plots.^3
Whatever the ambiguities of the Chou or well-field system, most traditional
Chinese scholars agreed that Shang Yang (Lord Shang) of the Ch'in state abol-
ished the well-field system and opened the door to the evils of private property.4
There is a minor dispute in the Chinese literature over just what Lord Shang
did. The language ofthe Shih-chi states that "He opened up the ch 'On and maek,"
which most commentators have taken to mean that he destroyed the land bound-
aries around the well-fields. Tu Yu in the Tung-tien (early ninth century) dis-
agreed; he believed that Shang Yang had created a new system based on the ch 'On
and maek boundaries that resulted in temporary increases in production but also
led to inequitable distribution ofland. He conceded that afterthe fall of the Ch'in,
this ch'l5nmaek system was also abolished.s Chu Hsi (twelfth century, Sung
dynasty), however, argued that Shang Yang was only advocating fuller utiliza-
tion of land by opening it up to cultivation to maximize agricultural production.
Like Tu Yu he thought that the well-fields continued through the Ch' in dynasty
to the Han, but he did acknowledge that private property began under Lord Shang
in the pre unification Ch'in period.^6