ROYAL DIVISION MODEL 413was not necessary to go into too much detail in describing inadequate military
systems. As in so many other categories, he was more interested in deriving
wisdom and models from the Chinese experience because so many Korean insti-
tutions had been borrowed from China. The wisdom of China on military affairs
was already clearly established in the Chinese literature; it was not something
that had to be derived by arduous empirical investigation of raw data or by imag-
inative deduction from a body of evidence.
PRACTICAL REFORM
What possible remedies could there be to a system of military service that left
the state short of soldiers, oppressed the commoner peasants with impossible
taxes, and exploited slaves by adding military service to their normal duties?
Reducing the size of the army could alleviate the tax burden on the support tax-
payers, but it also would have weakened national defense. Lowering the tax rate
might also benefit the taxpayers, but it would reduce income for the armed forces.
If, on the contrary, it were decided to increase the number of duty soldiers, the
additional troops would increase the tax burden. In either case, it was impossi-
ble to tolerate the substitution of active duty troops for cloth payments or the
imposition of illegal or unauthorized charges on the support taxpayers.
What about the conventional wisdom in the Chinese literature on professional,
long-term duty soldiers? After all, was there anything intrinsically wrong with
a system of trained and paid professional soldiers supported by tax revenues
paid into a general fund? It might even be regarded as superior to a militia of
part-time soldiers who would have to be mobilized and given additional train-
ing whenever an emergency arose, and it would certainly be better than the
Choson system in which even the duty soldiers served only a fraction of the year
on duty. if duty soldiers existed at all. But to advocate this position. it would
require the courage of a man willing to repudiate the teachings of men he acknowl-
edged as his masters.
Or maybe there was something wrong with the way the current system had
been operated that allowed it to be corrupted. Was there a key to the success of
thc system that had been neglected or ignored? Was it Confucianism itself and
its disdain for the military ethic, military education, and the martial figure?
If remedies to these problems were not acceptable, there was always the clas-
sical ideal of a farmer/soldier militia system based on the well-field or equal-
field models. Since Yu had already insisted on reinstituting an approximation
of the well-and equal-field systems, why not advocate the institution of its mil-
itary counterpart as well, the militia system, and recreate the vaunted village
solidarity that underlay it?
Recruit/nent by Land Area and Village SolidarityYu had placed great emphasis on the need for a fixed square of land embossed