LATE CHOSON PROPOSALS 357
China, simply abolished private ownership and began by distributing the land
to peasant families, but after 1955 it began to reorganize petty proprietors into
collective farms. The South, pressured by its challenge from the North, preserved
private property but set limits on landownership during the Korean War in a land
refoml program somewhat similar to that carried out in Japan after the end of
World War iI. Landlord domination of Korea simply came to an end in both
North and South Korea.
Whether that momentous conclusion to a centuries-old system of economic
control was produced by extraneous factors such as the influence of the Com-
munist victory in China, the United States's defeat of Japan, or the Cold War
confrontation on a world-wide level, inside Korea the discontent over the mald-
istribution of land and wealth was crucial to the political fate of the two Koreas.
What, then, occurred in thought and action on land reform in the Choson
dynasty, particularly in the period after Yu's death in 1672'! Was thcre a contin-
uation of his vision for thc redistribution of land and wealth, or a rejection of
it, and if the latter, did it mean development of any kind, toward more radical
egalitarianism among statecraft scholars and officials, greater development of
private ownership and productive forces, or continued deterioration of land own-
ership and distribution')
LAND TENURE CONDITION S: PROGRESS OR DETERIORATION?
Fragmentation and TenancyConditions in the nature ofland tenure changed gradually in the late seventeenth
century, and in many ways for the better, but by the mid-nineteenth century an
agrarian crisis founded on maldistribution of landownership, wealth, and taxa-
tion had reached epic proportions. Kim Yongsop, on the other hand, has
attempted to show the beginning of a long-term increase in productivity gained
from the spread of irrigation, transplantation, and the use of fertilizer, the growth
of markets, and the development of commercial agriculture. These developments
enabled enterprising peasants to use more rational and profit-driven manage-
ment techniques to accumulate wealth, lend out grain and cash to others, and
increase their holdings through purchase or foreclosure on mortgages. Unfor-
tunately, the denouement of this story of progress did not lead to a transition to
commercial agriculture for the whole economy, let alone the creation of a dom-
inant industrial and commercial sector. instead, it ended with the entrepreneurs
in the lower status orders using their wealth to buy office titles in return for con-
tributions to the government (napsok), or if they were slaves, to purchase "good"
or commoner status (i.c., manumission from slavery) by the same means.
Although social climbing was not unusual for bourgeois entrepreneurs who
sought to buy their way into the English or Spanish aristocracies or the Japan-
ese samurai class, one might have expected capitalistic fanners to have utilized
their wealth to reinvest their profits either in commercial agriculture, or better