Roy AL DIVISION MODEL 417destroyed. This will be an inevitable result of the situation. and the pros and
cons can clearly be seen [in China's experience] from the Tang and Sung
dynasties on^66The military system ofYu's time in the Chason dynasty only had a small con-
tingent of permanent, professional, and salaried soldiers in it. primarily the Mil-
itary Training Agency first established in 1593 during the lmjin War ,md a few
other units. Otherwise, adult males were divided into rotating duty soldiers and
support taxpayers. The soldiers did not serve permanently on duty as profes-
sionals, but rotated on and off duty according to the number of shifts or groups
of men (pon) assigned to a given unit by law. Since they returned to their farms
during the long, off-duty intervals, they were true militiamen, but the support-
taxpayers were not because they had no regular duty shifts.
A unit's quota might be defined as consisting of 1,000 men of which only 100
had to he on duty at anyone time. Since there would be 10 shifts (plin) of TOO
men each, and their term of service might be set at 2 months, each soldier and
each shift would only bc called up for duty every 20 months. The government
could and did vary the number of men per shift, the number of shifts in a given
unit, and the length of a tour of duty, lengthening or contracting the tour of ser-
vice and the interval between tours. In addition, each duty soldier would he
assigned support taxpayers whose tax payments would cover the uniforms and
rations of the soldier while on duty. If a soldier were assigned by law 3 support
taxpayers, a unit of 1,000 soldiers would thus have an additional 3,000 support
personnel associated with it, and the total military service quota for that unit
would be defined as 4,000 men.^67
Despite Yu's crit~cism of the corruptions of this system, he did not bother to
justify his choice, but one might surmise that he did not regard the Choson divi-
sion between duty soldiers and support taxpayers as a transgression of the nor-
mative admonition against creating separate categories of peasants and
(professional) soldiers probably because the duty soldiers in the Chason sys-
tem were not paid salaries by the state. Since duty soldiers were supported by
their support taxpayers (poin), theoretically the whole system was self-supporting
and not a burden on the state treasury. Of course, from the standpoint of the sup-
port taxpayer, the tax he paid for the upkeep of the soldier was imposed by the
state according to rates set by the state, and if he paid that tax to a garrison com-
mander or the Ministry of War instead of the soldier himself, the tax certainly
looked like a state tax. In other words, the notion that the whole system was
self-supporting was a fiction, but an important fiction that justified the system
in moral terms.
Another surprising feature of his essay on military service reform is that he
provided no theoretical justification for retaining the current system. There was
nothing in his historical coverage of the Chinese experience that resembled the
current Korean system, and even his brief treatment of military service in the
Koryo period emphasized the superiori ty of the Ju-ping modificalion of the miIi-