844 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
tion of land, it would produce sufficient revenue for the government to pay full
salaries for all officials and all office expenses, and still leave an adequate income
for the livelihood of the peasants.
According to Kim Yongsop's figures, which may underestimate the amount
of land in his sample villages, since large landowners seemed to be absent from
his examples, 10 to 15 percent of registered cultivators might have owned 40 to
70 percent of the land in a village. Therefore, it might not have been so far fetched
for Yu to have assumed that his plan for nationalization and redistribution would
have uncovered a sufficient amount of unregistered or "hidden" land to enable
a grant of 100 myo (16.7 acres) of land to each peasant family. On the other
hand, since the adoption of the taedong land surtax alone took the whole sev-
enteenth century to implement, the total nationalization and redistribution of
land would have been impossible without a revolutionary struggle. That kind of
radical reform had not become part of the accepted language of discourse among
active officials in the previous century.
In addition to commoners of good status, many official slaves occupied posts
as clerks and runners in the seventeenth century. Yu would have preferred to
abolish slavery altogether, except for those under criminal punishment, but he
conceded that the times were not ripe for this kind of reform. Nonetheless, he
hoped to provide salaries for official slaves because they were equivalent to the
salaried clerks and runners of ancient China. Contrary to the popular opinion
that the ancient Chinese used slaves to serve as runners, Yu pointed out that these
runners (Tu) were enslaved specifically as punishment for crimes they had com-
mitted, or were barbarian prisoners-of-war who had violated norms of proper
behavior. Even if they did perform service for the state, they were also provided
with clothing and food all the way through the Tang dynasty. Ancient laws also
provided three steps of "exemption" from slave status to eventual manumission,
and even if a criminal remained a slave for life, there had never been any decree
ordering the hereditary transmission of slave status to descendants. By contrast
Korean law required state service from hereditary slaves and even included them
in the quotas of clerks and runners for government offices.
"How are these responsibilities not those of people who are slaves in name
but runners in fact? Since their responsibilities are like this, we have no choice
but to grant them salaries given the runners in ancient times."66
Furthermore, by keeping slaves on service as runners, he would alleviate the
pressure on magistrates to carry out forcible conscription of peasants or assess-
ment of labor service from the neighbors and relatives of peasants who had run
away. Those men who had been enslaved as punishment for their crimes might
be penalized by reducing their salaries lower than the standard for official slaves
who inherited their status.^67
The treatment of female slaves in government service offered similar diffi-
culties. Yu noted that even though it was improper to require women to per-
form government service, since the government had already been doing so, their
salaries ought to be the same as men - an astounding proposal for equal pay