454 MILITARY REFORM
tal intention, which was not to eliminate the agency through attrition, but sim-
ply to begin a slow conversion of its method of finance to support taxpayers.
Song also complained that official registrars were also supposed to be weed-
ing out all men falsely registered as support taxpayers and signing them up for
service in the special unit, but corrupt clerks were taking bribes from the wealthy
and prominent families and exempting them from service, leaving only the poor
and unfit to be registered for duty. Song claimed he had personally witnessed
what was going on because he was then living at his country home. The whole
process of finding and registering men for the special unit had created "more
angry cursing" by the people than before. Finally, he uttered the same plaint that
Yi Wan had the year before about the shortage of men available for a new unit.
"You only have a limited number of adult males in the country, but at present
not only have we selected quite a few for the special unit, we have also contin-
ued to fill the original quota [of the Military Training Agency 1 as well. And in
addition to this, we have recruited more men for the regular cavalry, infantry and
other categories. How is it possible for the provinces to fill these quotas?"26 The
basic problem, in his view, was not that the special unit was such a bad idea, it
was just that the government was too quick to implement it. Deliberation in the
adoption of reform was essential to its success, a lesson learned from Sung China.
Chu Hsi's village granary system for cheap relief loans to peasants had proved
successful when in fact it was nothing more than a copy of Wang An-shih's "green
shoots" system. But where Wang had put his plan into effect with undue haste,
Chu Hsi had done so with due attention to the advantages. People in charge of
implementing the special unit recruitment, however, handled it in slipshod fash-
ion and ignored the resentment of the common people simply because they felt
it had not been their idea in the first place.^27 Yet despite Song's complaints about
the corruption of the registrars, the real point of his critique was that the system
of finance by support taxpayers made necessary the recruitment of more men
than those currently on the rolls as permanent, salaried soldiers.
1671: Fiscal Crisis: Demandfor Troop Reduction
The effort to expand the number of troops in the capital and support taxpayers
in the countryside was made more difficult by famine conditions. It only
increased the burdens on the starving peasantry. In the late spring of 167 r, the
Office of the Censor-General criticized the poor administration of relief and
the drain on resources caused by the unnecessarily large number of the king's
personal guards. They noted that even though the addition of more than 4,000
new rotating service cavalrymen to the military service rosters when the Crack
Select Agency was established in 1668 had not increased the total number of
duty soldiers since these had been taken from the existing pool of available
troops, the collection of cloth payments by magistrates caused no end of diffi-
culty for peasant support taxpayers. Despite the extraction of additional rev-
enue, there was not enough to provide for the new duty soldiers, so that the