PART III
Land Reform: Conclusion
Yu's LEGACYThe most interesting aspect of Yu Hyongwon's discussion of land tenure was
his attempt to solve the problem of the maldistribution of land and wealth by
seeking to balance the conflicting demands of the various parties to the debate:
the commoner peasant's desire for land, the slave's desire for manumission, the
ruling elass's demand for a higher level of income than the commoners and the
maintenance of a labor force at their service, and the state's need for fiscal secu-
rity and adequate revenue. His solution was an attempt to adapt classical and
historical models to contemporary Korea by combining elements from both the
well-field and limited-land systems, but his radical and egalitarian propensities
toward confiscation, state ownership, and redistribution were restrained by his
dcsire to retain a special place for the ruling class, albeit a new class recruited
by principles of moral behavior rather than the contemporary yangban who rep-
resented a combination of inherited privilege and achievement in the civil-ser-
vice examinations. He grappled with the curse of hereditary slavery and
courageously called for an end to the inheritance of slave status, but in his more
sober moments he was forced to compromise and even accepted it and incor-
porated it into his calculations for the immediate future. Yet in many ways his
philosophical objection to slavery was more humane than those who followed
him in the eighteenth century, a period when the slave population even began
to decline. He also argued for a more rational adoption of standards of mea-
surement for a better system of cadastral survcy, tax reduction (the classical tithe),
and a fairer and more efficicnt tax system.
He never felt that he was creating anything new, simply adopting the meth-
ods of classical China and adaptations in later dynasties to eliminate some of
the anomalies that had developed in recent Korean history, and he perceived of
himself as a transmitter of Confucian wisdom, much the same role that Confu-
cius himself had played. His ideas became known by the early eighteenth cen-
tury and had an effcct on a number of scholars and officials, but even his