334 LAND REFORMSince the matrilineal slave succession law was designed only to reduce the num-
ber of slave offspring of mixed commoner/slave marriages, at best a small frac-
tion of total slave marriages, Yu could not have expected that private slaves would
benefit too soon from his land reform plan.
Even though slavery was, of course, not part of the well-field system, and
hereditary slavery in particular was not justified by either classical or histori-
cal models, or for that matter by logic or moral precept, Yu could not bring
himself to insist on total manumission because he ostensibly was sympathetic
to the yangban's need for a labor force. He may also have been intimidated by
the potential resistance of the slaveowning class to any attempt by the state to
deprive them of a major component of its work force. Although Yu's sentiments
for eventual manumission probably represented a minority, liberal, and human-
itarian position for his time, the details of his land reform plan indicate that in
the long transition to manumission he sought to allow the state to gain a mea-
sure of control over private slaves by legitimizing a double burden on private
slaves in particular, their enrollment for military service or military support taxes
while they continued to pay personal tribute or rent to their masters. Further-
more, household slaves would evidently not have been affected at all by the
proposed regulations.
The only curious point is why he would have felt that manumission of all slaves
would have posed a lesser threat to stability than the abolition of all private landed
property, especially since almost all his Chinese sources save for Chang Tsai,
Ch'en Fu, and perhaps Ch'eng I of the Sung dynasty (see chap. 7) argued to the
contrary. Perhaps because Korea in the seventeenth century was still a slave soci-
ety and the Korean penchant for the hereditary transmission of status in the
Chason period was more powerful than anything in Chinese life since the end
of the Tang dynasty, Yu was far more reluctant to challenge slavery than the
concept of private property in land.
Kang Chinch'al, the historian of Koryaland relations, once suggested that the
milestones of historical development in Korea should be judged by shifts in the
mode of labor relations, from personal SUbjugation to contractual obligation,
more than by the development of the modern, Western notion of private prop-
erty.68 If so, then even though landlord/tenant relations had already undergone
significant development for a period of at least a thousand years and slavery in
the seventeenth century was not quite the main or dominant mode of produc-
tive labor, still it played a greater role in Korea than in the rest of East Asia at
the time.
On the other hand, the contradiction between Yu's boldness toward landlords
and pusillanimity towards slaveowners cannot be so easily explained as a weak-
ness in Korean consciousness toward landed property. The general trend in recent
scholarship on the land question in Korea has been to push back the origins of
private property and emphasize its strength in land tenure relations. The Korean
landlords of the seventeenth century wanted to keep their property and Yu knew
it, but his moral outrage against private ownership as a stimulus to greed and