Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

308 LAND REFORM

When Emperor Shen-tsung died and Wang fell from power in J085, the suc-

ceeding administration abolished the system and destroyed both the land survey

records and land boundary markers. The system was devoured by the fury of the

northern landlords who were the main target of the system -it had not been applied

to south China or Ssu-ch'tian. In its reincarnation under Ts'ai Ching from 1104

to 1120, the system ceased to benefit the smallholders for whom it was designed

because of irregular and inaccurate assessments. 102

The Southern Sung Limited-Field System

An attempt was also made in the Southern Sung period to adopt a version of the
limited-field system. As early as 1022 in the Northern Sung an imperial decree
had limited the estates of officials to thirty ky6ng and of clerks to fifteen, but
the order was abandoned almost immediately afterward.lo, In 1172 under
Emperor Hsiao-tsung of the Southern Sung there was a revision of the laws gov-
erning the exemption of officials from labor service. Prior to this time officials
were exempted from labor service (and land taxes?) levied on units of land area
from a high of IOO ky6ng for first rank officials to TO ky6ng for ninth rank offi-
cials. Land held in excess of those limits were to be subject to ordinary taxes
and service required of commoner households; it was not to be confiscated by
the state as called for by some advocates of a limited-field system. The reform
of 1172 only reduced the limits to a range of 50 to 5 ky6ng. A century later Sun
Meng-kuan complained that the Sung statutes limiting the tax exemptions of
families of officials had lapsed; if they were only enforced, it would be possi-
ble to curtail the accumulation of landholdings even without forcing members
of these official families to perform labor service.
In 1263 Emperor Li-tsung responded by ordering a land limitation scheme to
be tried out in six districts in the province surrounding the capital. Families of
officials were limited to a theoretical maximum of 50 to 5 ky6ng ofland depend-
ing on rank, and commoners were limited to 5 ky6ng. The law, however, did not
call for the state to confiscate all amounts over the limit and no provision was
made for distribution of land to the poor. Instead the authorities were empow-
ered to purchase only one-third the surplus, which was then converted to pub-
lic land (kung-fien, kongj6n in Korean) cultivated by tenancy or subcontracting.
The income from this public land was then used to pay for military provisions
so that the previous system of forced requisitions could be eliminated. In sub-
sequent revisions of the law, the limit for commoners was reduced to 200 and
100 m.Vo. As Sud6 Yoshiyuki pointed out, however, this late Southern Sung kung-
t'ien system was but a pale shadow of Shih Tan's proposal in the late Former
Han dynasty, which called for a limit of 30 ky6ng and confiscation of all sur-
plus land.I04
What the history of reform in the Northern and Southern Sung reveals is that
the power of the landlords precluded any possibility of a centralized, imperial
bureaucracy nationalizing all land, confiscating surpluses over fixed limits, or