368 LAND REFORM
major causes of rebellion as the absence of adequate credit, usurious interest
rates, and the regressive and oppressive cloth support tax for duty soldiers as
well as improprieties in the registration and taxation of land.
There is no doubt, however, that the skewing of landownership patterns and
the deterioration of landlord/tenant relations had contributed to an agrarian cri-
sis that resulted in a major peasant rebellion. That denouement would tend to
place the Korean agrarian economy in the same boat with Ch' ing dynasty China,
which despite a greater degree of commercialization and monetization of the
economy than in Choson Korea, ended up with the massive T'aip'ing Rebellion
in the mid-nineteenth century that reflected the income distribution crisis of that
society. While it is certainly possible that nineteenth-century rebellion in Korea
could have been the consequence of the frustration of higher expectations from
a more prosperous peasantry rather than lower levels of income, it is far more
likely that the growth oflandlordism, tenancy, usury, and indebtedness were prod-
ucts of the deterioration of the system of distribution of both wealth and land.
Having described the history of the Korean economy to the end of the nine-
teenth century, let us turn back to the response of the statecraft successors to Yu
Hyongwon to the problems of the agrarian economy and their proposals for
reform. Did they perceive a better or more progressive route out of the agrarian
crisis; did they transcend or surpass the solutions that Yu had to offer?
Yr IK (SONGHO)Yi Ik, one ofYu Hyongwon's leading early eighteenth-century admirers, was
particularly sensitive to Yu's discussion of land reform because he himself was
a landlord and slaveowner who by the 1740S was losing most of his land and
slaves.^40 Yi was certainly not one to admire the adverse results of concentrated
landownership, nor portray it as the signs of economic development. On the con-
trary, he shared Yu\ view that in principle land ought to be owned by the state,
and that all land was public land (kongjon) or the king's land (,vangjrJn) as Wang
Mang had declared at the end of the Former Han dynasty. Both men recognized
the existence of private property in land but not anything like a natural right to
its ownership by private parties. Yi was far more interested in fair distribution
than in maximization of profits. He criticized the large landlords who were caus-
ing the bankruptcy of small peasants through debt, and he argued that the state
had every right to take over their land and redistribute it to poor peasants, since
the landlord was really only borrowing the use of land from the king. He repeated
Yu's call for "setting the land boundaries straight," by which he meant the neces-
sity for full and accurate registration of all arable land.^4!
Although Yi sympathized with poor peasants, he also agreed with Yu that
the kunja or men of virtue were entitled to support from the .win, the small
men, or ordinary peasantry. He parted company from Yu, however, on the ques-
tion of attempting an approximation of the well-field ideal in land relations
because the method of agriculture had changed too much since late Chou times.