414 MILITARY REFORMinto the landscape with a border of ridges to provide a firm and unchanging basis
for land grants to the peasantry. He derived this idea from the well-field model,
and he was also convinced that his embossed square could become the basis for
his military system as well. He stated unequivocally that "In general, require-
ments of able-bodied adult males for service as soldiers will be based on land
[allotments]," and he referred to this principle of military service by the four-
character slogan, kyejon ch 'ulbyong, "furnishing soldiers by measuring [the
amount of] land."60 What Yu meant by this was that for each fixed area of land
a certain number of men would be required to meet military service obligations.
Yu clearly attributed the inspiration for his scheme to the standards of antiq-
uity, in which the recruitment of men for service was conducted in the village,
the strength of the militia system was based on the village community, and the
village community was in tum the lowest rung of a civil/military hierarchy of
residential communities units (the pi, yo, chok, and tang organization). Mem-
bers of these units protected and succored one another, shared both work and
leisure time, gave consolation at funerals, and shared in the joy of felicitous occa-
sions. Thus, on thc battlefield they could maintain order in the ranks day or night
simply by recognizing faces or the sounds of voices. It was this system that guar-
anteed that "they were always firm in defense and assured of victory in attack."
It was this system that enabled Duke Huan of Ch' i to become hegemon over all
his rivals in Chou China.
Conversely, the loss of solidarity in the ranks was intimately associated with
the destruction of the well-field land distribution scheme of antiquity, for once
thc well fields were destroyed, then the rulers oflater ages (huse) filled the ranks
of the army "only by conducting an investigation of individual adult men, and
enrolling them for service as they were found." In other words, dissociating mil-
itary service from land meant soldiers were treated as interchangeable individ-
uals, not members of tightly knit village communities. As Yu put it. "Within the
same district, men from the eastern subdistrict were mixed in with those from
the western; in a province, men from the south were mixcd in with those from
the north. Even though they were said to belong to the same squad or platoon,
the actual situation was that they did not support or recognize one another or
trust each other's thoughts and feelings."
It was the loss of community solidarity pursuant to the destruction of the well-
field system, therefore, that corrupted the military service system and induced
men to evade service by running away from their villages, hiding from the reg-
istrars, or paying bribes to evade registration. And it was the loss of community
solidarity that explains why their neighbors "covered the tracks of the runaways
and tolerated corruption. "hI
It was this hope to recapture the bond between community solidarity and mil-
itary organization that led him to emphasize the necessity of land reform as the
only way to eliminate the corruption that was a necessary consequence of the
process of investigation and registration of individual adult males for military