ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between government agricultural strategies in Taiwan and South Korea and three of their broader settings—agrarian conditions, as well as the national and international situations. It identifies two major government strategies for agriculture during the postwar period in both Taiwan and South Korea, namely the land reforms in the early 1950s and the post-reform agriculture "squeezing" policies in the 1950s and 1960s. A reformist regime must not pursue an exhaustive range of reforms, but should minimize potential opposition by pursuing a very limited set of reforms. Land reform also became a major issue in the power struggles between landed and non-landed interests in the Assembly, as well as between the Assembly and the president to define who should be the ultimate decision-maker in Korean politics. Land reform in both Taiwan and South Korea created a mass of small landowner-farmers who had benefited from the land reform.
