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

330 LAND REFORM

How much the more so [should a righteous king be able to enforce confiscation

and enactment of a kongjiJn system] when you consider that our people are the

type that when you give them orders, they do it, and when you give them guid-

ance, they follow, [let alone the fact that] both great and small, the noble and

the base will each obtain his proper share and should [be as happy] as someone

plucked out of a state of abject destitution and put in the lap of luxury. The only

thing I am concerned about is that the king might not be able to cast off his own

private [desires] and keep bright the virtue of his single mind. As for the possi-

bility that rich men might stir up rebellion, it is not something that I worry

aboutY'

STATE OWNERSHIP AND DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS AND STATUS

Since Yu Hyongwon intended to use land reform as the means for the creation
of a new society, his ideas can be analyzed in terms of the social class and sta-
tus groups to be affected by institutional reform. These include the two major
components of the lower class of agricultural producers, the commoner or free
peasant cultivators and slaves, and the elements of the ruling class such as schol-
ars, officials, members of the royal family, descendants of merit subjects and
high officials, nothoi of the upper class, and petty functionaries (an intermedi-
ate group that belonged to the upper class in function and to the lower class in
status). A third group of merchants, artisans, shamans, actors and performers,
and other occupational groups of the nonagrarian and urban economy will be
discussed in later chapters. Here we will confine our attention to the agricul-
tural producers and the members of the ruling class.

Commoner Peasant Cultivators

As far as the commoner peasant cultivator was concerned, Yu's reform program
constituted a subtle compromise. While he accepted the view that the reproduction
of the well-field system was impossible in the age of centralized bureaucracy,
he rejected the pessimistic and pragmatic wing of the Chinese land reformers
from Tung Chung-shu and Hsiin Yiieh of the Han through Lin Hsiin and Chu
Hsi of the Sung, who claimed that expropriation of land from landlords in the
middle of a dynasty was a virtual impossibility and that some compromise with
private ownership in the form of a limited-field system had to be made. Accord-
ing to Yu's plan, the state would nationalize all land and issue a plot of one kyong
(or 100 myo) to each farmer (pu) or farm family. The land tax would be assessed
on the land with adjustments for fertility and productivity to achieve a rate close
to the ideal tax of 10 percent of the crop. These one-kyong land units would
form the basis for military service requirements for the peasant cultivators. The
farmer would not own the land that he received; he would simply "occupy and
receive [chOmsu]" one kyong as a basic allotment.5^7