352 LAND REFORMa misdirected examination system or by personal, familial, or factional connection
and patronage. Just as private land provided the economic foundation for a yang-
ban class devoted to its private interests, so would public land provide the eco-
nomic foundation for a sadaebu moral elite that would devote its efforts to the
public interest. Kim Yongsop's "managerial" or entrepreneurial rich peasant must
have been anathema to Yu, the representative of selfish greed rather than
progress.
What, in short, was the nature of the social structure to be after the adoption
ofYu's kongjon system, and how would it differ from contemporary Korean soci-
ety? In answering this question we will omit discussion of the nonagrarian, urban,
and commercial sectors of the economy and society, which will be treated in
subsequent chapters. In certain respects the new society would be similar to the
old. The ruling class would consist of a nobility of royal relatives and an elite
of officials and scholars supported either by salaries, prebends, or the labor power
of their slave cultivators. Certain hereditary rights for the descendants of merit
subjects and officials and certain types of discrimination against nothoi would
continue, although in the IIrst case generational limits on inheritance would be
tightened, and in the second case more opportunities would be allowed. Petty
officials would continue to function as an intermediary class or status group,
not members of the sadaebu elite and yet entitled to emoluments and privileges
in return for service to the state, an improvcment over their present condition
and reminiscent of the features of the chOnsihva system of early Koryo.
Peasants would be given economic security in terms of cultivation rights over
land but subjected to more thorough and rigorous methods of registration for
military service and support taxes. Slaves would not only continue to provide
labor for thcir princely or scholar-official masters by working on their large-sized
land grants, but they would be indispensable to the economic support of his new
sadaebll ruling class as the only available labor force to cultivate their land.
It is clcar that this social system would have been differentiated only partially
in ternlS of function or utility. Yu's program of land grants to the sadaebu were
designed to support a class of men for at least a couple of generations, not to
compensate functionaries for their scrvice. Limited hereditary privileges would
have been extended to royalty, and through the 11m privilege to descendants of
merit subjects and high officials; hereditary discrimination would continue to
function in terms of nothoi and slaves. In fine, the customary distinctions of social
status of contemporary Korean society would be carried over in large measure
to the new society.
Essentially there were two reasons for this. Because Yu sought a workable
formula, onc that would not cause rebellion and resistance, he obviously felt
that the outright abolition of slavery was politically impossible and the impor-
tance attached to status was too great to be challengcd directly. In the second
place, his conccption of the ideal well-field model justified a definition of the
ruling class in ascriptivc tenns, and Confucian social thought in general accepted
distinction and discrimination in principle as legitimate,