370 LAND REFORMfeared the threat to political stability posed by a discontented landlord class? I
would prefer the latter. Had either Yu or Yi been alive, they certainly would not
have applauded King Yongjo for defending the interests of the landlord as the
harbinger of free market enterprise and the engine of greater production; rather
they would have grieved mightily over the lost opportunity for fair distribution.
Although Yi agreed with Yu's argument that the kyong-myo system of areal
measurement was more rational and better than the Korean kyol-hu system based
on a constant crop volume, he still remained convinced that if the Korean sys-
tem were well used, it would not obstruct attempts at land reform. He felt it was
more important to achieve complete registration of all land and readjust the grades
of tax to the fertility of the land, providing that any owner who disagreed with
the tax assessment should be allowed to petition the authorities for a reconsid-
eration of his tax. Since he felt that since the land tax was graded officially at a
4: I ratio of productivity between the most and least fertile land, there was lttle
to complain about.^45
For that matter, Yi Ik also argued that the tax rate was not the main problem
for the peasantry because the complex system of graded taxation of King Sejong
in the mid-fifteenth century had been so difficult to maintain that the authori-
ties had in fact abandoned the higher rates for a uniform tax of 4 mal of hulled
rice per kyol, closer to one-thirtieth the crop rather than one-tenth. Even though
the total taxes on land had been increased from 4 mal/kyol to about 20 mal/kyol
by the addition of T 2 mal/kyol for the taedongmi surtax to take the place of in-
kind tribute, and a little extra for the samsumi to pay for the support of the new
troops of the Military Training Directorate (Hullyon-dogam), that was still only
5 percent of his estimate of 400 mal of hulled rice (or T ,000 mal of unhulled
rice) per kyol.
If one were to calculate the land tax using a more liberal estimate of 40 mal/kyol,
the tax rate would still only be 10 percent of the crop, the classical ideal of the
perfect tax rate. The main problem for most peasants, therefore, was the 50 per-
cent sharecropping rent paid by tenants. Any reduction of the tax rate would only
benefit the landlord, and the landlords, in his estimation, only represented 10 or
20 percent of the rural population.
The real problem was the small size of peasant holdings, which were were
less than 1 kyol ofland, whatever its grade, and only 10 or 20 percent of peas-
ants owned or even rented that amount. Elsewhere he estimated the crop of a
tenant who cultivated I kyol at 360 mal (24 sam) on dry land and 320 mal (21.3
sam) on wet rice land, somewhat less than the 400 mal/kyol (26.7 som/kyol)
estimate he used in discussing the land tax, leaving him with after-rent income
of 160 to 180 mal. Since the average family consisted of five or six persons,
their consumption needs would require 230 mal of income a year, a monthly
consumption rate of approximately 3 mal per month - a fairly conservative esti-
mate since Yi's previous estimate for monthly subsistence for rank 7-9 offi-
cials was 6 mal. Yi's message, in short, was that tenancy had pushed the tenant
cultivator of even a relatively ample I kyol of land below the subsistence level.