LAND REFORM: COMPROMISES 291increased burdens only acted as a stimulus for more out-migration, leading to
another round of increased allocations on the remaining population. It was a
vicious cycle that could only end in the downfall of the dynasty itselfY The
only antidote to this problem was to use land units as the basis for calculating
and assessing taxes and military service.
Gcnerally speaking people can not live without land and land can not be culti-
vated without people. But land is something that is all fixed in place and does
not move from one place to another. People [on the contrary J may either move
or stay at rest, live or die; they do not always do the same thing. This is the rea-
son why if you base [taxation 1 on the land and clarify the shares of landholding,
then [provisions pertaining to] the people will be contained in it, and as a matter
of course everything will work out equitably ... .so
If taxation were based on land, then even though the harvc,t was bad and the
people abandoned the land and absconded. someone else would probably take
over the cultivation of the land in his place, so how could you have this kind of
problem (of taxing neighbors)? In general, if you do not levy taxes on land, then
you can not avoid the problem of shifting service requirements to neighhoring
families .... You must rectify the land boundaries and base taxation and military
service requirements on the land.5^3The establishment of physical boundaries around fixed units of land area and
the use of these units as the means of assessing tax and labor service were two
of the most important principles that Yu and others supposedly obtained from
the objective examination of the well-field system of antiquity, but in fact these
conclusions derived more from the perception of the weaknesses of the equal-
field system of the Chinese Northern and Southern dynasties and Tang than
from the deduction of principles from the well-field system in vacuo. Instead
of concluding that the failure of the equal-field system proved that egalitarian
distribution was unworkable because it was contrary to the acquisitive nature
of man or because it required too high a level of probity and honesty from ordi-
nary bureaucrats, people like Ma Tuan-lin andYu Hyongw6n prcferred to believe
that the equal-field system failed because it did not conform in every respect to
the well-field model. And since fixed land boundaries and the idea of recipro-
cal tax obligations in return for land grants appeared to be features of the well-
field system, they thus seized on these factors as the most important variables.
As a result Yu idealized them and turned them into immutable principles of land
organization, which he claimed could be discovered only by empirical investi-
gation of the facts, and not by a priori reasoning.
This is not just a matter of circumstance; it is also a principle or Heaven
[ch Iii Ii]. It is like the principle governing the transition from rest to movement.
The sages completely abided by Heaven's [i.e., natural] principles, and that is
why their institutions were all like this. They first had to begin with the form that