1950 — The New Landowners

Summer 1950. Within three months of the North coming down, most of South Korea was occupied.

One of the first things the communists did in the occupied areas was land reform.

Land was at the heart of the propaganda.

But in October of that year, the U.S. Embassy in Korea reported this to Washington.

There was a reason.

Those people were already becoming the owners of their own land.

Syngman Rhee came to power on the backs of the landlords.

So he carried out neither reform nor a reckoning with collaborators.

That is more or less how we remember it.

Look for where that account comes from —

and it is not a wiki, nor a later interpretation.

It is written, in those words, in a U.S. State Department document of December 1949.

So this film is not an argument that the received account has no basis.

At that moment it was correct.

But three months later, a different document comes out of the same place.

Today we follow those three months.

First you need to see what the land in this country looked like then.

In 1945, 73 percent of the cultivated land was farmed by tenants.

Seven out of every ten plots belonged to someone else.

Rent was around half the harvest.

These figures are not ours either.

They are in that same State Department document.

But there is one more thing in that document.

In June 1949, Rhee vetoed this law.

It is a scene that fits the received account exactly.

A president on the landlords' side blocking a reform bill —

but look at what he objected to, and the story changes.

The land reform law passed by the Assembly in 1949 had two numbers that did not line up.

What the government would pay landlords: 150 percent.

What farmers would repay the government: 125 percent.

The 25-point gap was to be carried by the state.

For the finances of a country twenty-two months old, that clause was impossible.

A word on how this was counted.

One unit is 10 percent. Fifteen units is 150 percent.

That is one and a half times what the land yields in a year.

The basis is not that year's harvest but an average year.

The farmer repays it over five years — 30 percent of the harvest each year.

Until then, rent had been around half the harvest.

In short: on land where you had handed over half the harvest for life, five years of paying 150 percent of an average year's crop made a tenant the owner of that land.

Back to the two numbers that did not line up.

What he objected to was not whether to distribute the land, but this financial clause.

The Assembly overrode him and the law was promulgated on 21 June.

And in March 1950, the law was amended.

The farmers' repayment was raised to 150 percent, matching the compensation.

The two numbers line up here.

What was actually carried out was this amended law.

It did not end with a veto. He vetoed it, it was fixed, and it was carried out.

Let us go back to that document of December 1949.

Three months later, on 29 March 1950, Ambassador Muccio cables Washington.

Within the same published State Department record, the account reverses in three months.

From "has done nothing" to "can be gotten underway this season."

Three things happened in between.

10 March 1950 — the amended law is promulgated.

25 March, the enforcement decree. 28 April, the enforcement rules.

And when the Assembly would not pass the budget for it, the president approved the expenditure and got it started.

One more thing has to be written down alongside this.

Muccio wrote this in the same cable.

The American pressure is a fact too.

This film does not tell the story with that left out.

So how much land actually changed hands?

The figures differ by source. We will give them as they are.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture report from 1961 puts it this way.

Korean statistics are more conservative: 613,000 hectares, 918,548 households.

The gap comes from what is counted. We erase neither.

What is clear is the tenancy rate.

From 73 percent in 1945, it falls to single digits once the reform is done.

But there is criticism here as well.

That a great deal of land was sold off by landlords before the law took effect.

That is true. Korean statistics record that more than half of the land subject to the reform left through landlords converting to self-cultivation or selling in advance.

Research in the 1980s criticized this sharply.

The scholarly summary is that from the 1990s, as local case studies accumulated, a reappraisal followed.

But whether sold in advance or divided by law, the result is the same: the landlords let the land go.

And that result did not come back.

What the landlords received was not cash but bonds.

Through the war and inflation, those bonds became waste paper.

The price of giving up the land effectively vanished.

Now the other half of the received account — that he rode in on the landlords.

If that is true, how did that class respond to this law?

Back to that State Department document.

More for the landlords, and longer for the farmers to pay.

A legislative pushback on the landlords' behalf — written down in a document.

That amendment did not pass.

One thing has to be corrected here.

It is said that the landlords who resisted founded the Korea Democratic Party, but the order is reversed.

The party was founded in September 1945, three years and nine months before the land reform law.

It did resist this law; that is not why it was founded.

Give a wrong reason, and the true part collapses along with it.

There is a story that always comes up at this point.

That the North confiscated and distributed land for free, while the South sold it.

Let us read the North's own statute as it stands.

5 March 1946 — the Law on Land Reform in North Korea.

Article 5.

And five articles later, Article 10.

Two articles in the same statute.

An eternal possession — that cannot be sold, lent, or pledged.

Take the right of disposal out of ownership, and what is left is the right to till.

American documents described that state of affairs this way.

And in place of rent there was a tax in kind.

This is a CIA information report dated 15 June 1950.

A U.S. Embassy cable records the same figure. Two agencies wrote it down independently.

27 percent. Set against rent of half the harvest before liberation, that is lower.

So we will not say that what the North took stayed the same.

But there is something the record notes alongside it.

On top of the statutory rate came semi-compulsory purchases and donation drives, the report says.

The difference between South and North was not whether it was free.

It was whether, once you received the land, you could make it your own.

On 25 June 1950, the North came down.

Within three months most of South Korea was occupied.

One of the first things the communists did in the occupied areas was land reform.

Land was at the heart of the propaganda.

On 28 October that year, the U.S. Embassy in Korea cabled Washington.

The subject line is land reform.

The tenant who planted rice in the spring of 1950 was becoming the owner of that paddy.

They were people who would make their first repayment from that summer's harvest.

To those people, what was the communists' land reform?

The embassy writes down one more reason.

And the redistribution in the occupied areas was in fact something else.

Three years later, a trial is held in the North.

Vice Premier Pak Hon-yong stands before the court.

One of the charges was that he had said the people of the South would rise up to greet the northern troops when war came.

Pak and his close allies were executed.

But scholars are divided on this point.

Some hold that he did give that assurance,

and others that Kim Il Sung trumped up the charge to pin the defeat on him.

Either way, one thing is clear.

The North was holding to the premise that South Korean farmers would respond, and it executed a vice premier over that premise.

And that the premise was empty had already been written down by the U.S. Embassy.

The people who made the land reform were not aiming at this.

The law was written in 1949, amended in March 1950, and the war came in June.

But on top of those few months of lag, a collision of systems decided this country's fate.

Whatever its authors intended, the land reform was the one-in-a-thousand variable on that battlefield.

Let us put it together.

In December 1949, an American document recorded that the Korean government had done nothing.

At that moment it was correct.

That June, Rhee had vetoed the law, and the Assembly overrode him.

What he objected to was not whether to distribute the land but the financial clause,

and the amended law of March 1950 brought that clause into line.

Three months later, the same American record says it can be gotten underway this season.

A country where 73 percent of the land was farmed by tenants came down to single digits.

The people who had been tenants on that land became its owners.

The bonds the landlords received carried no interest and no adjustment for inflation, and became waste paper.

In the North, land given away for free could not be sold, rented out, or pledged.

The received account calls him a president on the side of the landlords.

But that landlord class's economic base was dismantled under his government.

This is not to say he was the architect of the reform.

The Americans pushed, the Assembly overrode him, and the Ministry of Agriculture did the work.

Only that the story of riding in on the landlords and doing nothing

is a story that runs until December 1949.