Korean Land Reform Essay

The Foundation of a Modern Economy: Korean Land Reform and the Miracle on the Han The Republic of Korea emerged from Japanese colonialism as a Third World Country. Per capita income was under one hundred dollars, the little infrastructure the Japanese built was located in the North, and income inequality was staggeringly high. The future of the Republic of Korea (hereafter simply “Korea”) looked very bleak, even with United States foreign aid. Yet several decades later Korea had become one of the world’s largest, most modern economies run by a democratic government. The “Miracle on the Han,” the term for Korea’s stunning economic growth in such a short period of time, coincided with the lifting of millions of Koreans out of poverty and the

Redistribution reduces economic inequalities by giving the poor the freedom to grow their own crops or sell their land entirely without having to worry about rents or crop payments that must be sacrificed to a landowner. Land redistribution can give compensation to the rich who have lost land, but in most countries the rich simply have their land confiscated from them without any payment (Beehner). Governments also may carry out land reform for ideological reasons such as during a revolution when a government that comes to power that wants to destroy the previously feudalist economic system similar to the French Revolutionary government and its land reforms directed at the First Estate

In Korea, the American Military government and later the Korean government under Sygnman Rhee took a moderate approach towards land reform. The fairness with which Koreans and the Korean government treated wealthy landowners can be ascribed to the Confucian tradition where landowners commanded authority. Landowners who owned more than 7.35 acres received one and a half times what their confiscated property was worth in the form of bonds or grain from the government. (“Land Reform Revisited”) Korea’s approach to land reform also was very moderate because of the political consensus around the necessity of redistribution the nation’s farmland. Under three percent of the population owned almost two-thirds of Korean farmland, most families owned no land at all. Some of this can be attributed to the colonial period, when Japanese families who moved to Korea received huge tracts of land taken from Korean families, owning over fifteen percent of Korea’s farmland by 1945 (Mitchell). Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese were given large amounts of land taken from Koreans who had farmed the land for generations, but had no proof that the land was theirs (“Emergence of Modern