Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

500 MILITARY REFORM

• despite his occasional defense of equality - except that he would not have
  approved of status (let alone inherited status) as a justification for discrimina-
  tion between yangban versus the lower social orders. For him, superiority had
  to be rewarded, but only in the case of the moral quality of those men who
  deserved to be officials or officials-in-training in the schools because they had
  proved themselves (under his reformed system of education and recruitment)
  hy a lifetime of observation by their peers or superiors. Once education and
  recruitment on the basis of moral behavior could be achieved, and hereditary
  transmission of both advantage and servile status eliminated, then an equitable
  system of service and taxation could be achieved, reinforced hy assignment of
  military service ohligations based on quotas of adult males per constant unit of
  acreage. Since, however, he was willing to consider arrangements for the tran-
  sition during which slavery and military service for slaves would remain in force,
  he probably was willing to tolerate yangban exemption from military service,
  but to require that their male relatives unemployed in state service serve in spe-
  cial guard units.
  Yu's plan was somewhat different from that of Yi Tanha, but equality of tax
  burden or equal distribution on all families without any distinction as to rank or
  status was not the essential task for him. As a result he had nothing to contribute
  in his writing to the main proposal for reform of military taxation that lasted
  into the next century, and beyond, for that matter, to 1870 - the household cloth
  tax and its imposition on yangban households. His unwillingness to compro-
  mise with the traditional formula for support taxpayers made him irrelevant to
  the small band of pragmatic reformers who continued to campaign for military
  taxes (or service) for the yangban.