CHAPTER 9
Late Choson Land Reform Proposals
WAS THERE A LEGACY TO Yu's LAND REFORM PLAN?Most students of the Practical Learning movement (Sirhak) of the late Choson
dynasty have assumed a continuous development of radical and progressive
reform ideas stimulated in part by the writings ofYu Hyongwon, but that kind
of assumption may be unwarranted unless verified by a consideration of the lead-
ing proposals for land reform that were put forward after Yu's death. The record
we have considered thus far on attitudes toward education, recruitment, and slav-
ery in previous chapters by no means demonstrates that statecraft thought after
Yu's death was necessarily more radical or progressive than his.
Yet what is meant by radical or progressive in the area of land reform, and
does radicalism indicate progressivism? In East Asian statecraft thought the most
radical solution to land distribution was already defined by the well-field sys-
tem of the Chou dynasty, the essence of which was public ownership and fair,
if not equal. division of property to the peasantry. Since the ideal model was in
remote antiquity, radical reformers had no need to base their vision for Utopia
on an unremittent process of progressive development.
Yu conceded, as the majority of Chinese statecraft writers had over the cen-
turies, that the well-field system could not be restored in its pristine state, but
how much of the original vision did he sacrifice? Not much, because his notion
of a limited-land system did not mean abandoning the principle of public own-
ership and fairly equivalent land grants to the peasantry, only establishing lim-
its on land grants to the new sadaebu. Where then was the possibility of a more
radical goal of reform if it were not a ruthless determination to strip the current
ruling class of its land? And since Yu had already specified that if all else failed,
a bold and willful ruler should use force to carry out the confiscation of pri-
vately owned land, one could even say that Yu came within a hair's breadth of
coopting the most radical program possible, leaving spacc only for a still more
radical egalitarianism in which the ruling class would be stripped completely
of any aspects of ascription and hereditary status.
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