548 MILITARY REFORM
and rescinded six months later. Quotas were also set for students of private acad-
emies as well as government schools.
The legislation of '7 T I was not a bold and comprehensive new program of
military taxation, it was designed to remedy administrative defects at the point
of contact with the population, a problem that was of no less consequence than
the mode of taxation itself. But if this approach were to fail, what alternatives
would be left?13
Sukchong shut the door on visionary reforms and for the remainder of his
reign trod a declining path to more mundane solutions - first to quota and tax
rate reductions and fines on students who failed qualifying examinations in T 704,
and then to the village responsibility system and enrollment of failed students
for military service in I 7 I I. These reforms were by no means unimportant or
shoddy in conception. All the problems of evasion and corruption of the tax sys-
tem were laid out in great detail in the context of the debates, and the combi-
nation of solutions certainly represented the best administrative thinking possible.
But the true test of these reforms would be in their effects.
Fortunately, this question has been studied, to some extent in the earlier work
of Ch'a Munsop, but more recently by Chong Y6nsik. Their evidence convinc-
ingly demonstrates that the reforms hardly slowed the decline of the military
service system, its corruption by officials and tax evaders alike, and the redis-
tribution of taxes to an ever narrower base of poor taxpayers. The authorities
had to continue with periodic investigations to find and register adult males to
fill vacancies on the rolls caused by death, desertion, and evasion.
THE FAILURE OF MILITARY REFORM, q04-50
Failure oj the Uniform Two-p' il Rate and the Land SurtaxThe government was not able to establish a uniform two-p'i! rate except for
yangyok service in the capital because unit commanders continued to offer illicit
low one-p 'il rate service on their own, and where illicit rate reduction did occur,
it reduced revenue that had to be made up in some other fashion. Even in 1704,
substitute payments from other revenue sources like grain loan interest were
authorized to compensate for the loss of revenue from rate reduction on support
taxpayers for marines. In short, the failure to produce a uniform two-p'il rate
for all support taxpayers meant the continuation of an unequal and unfair tax
system, declining revenues, and total evasion.^14
In 17 T 4 Inspector-General Song Sanggi made a suggestion that indicated that
King Sukchong's order in 1704 to enroll all failed students for military service
had proved totally ineffective in filling the military registers. He argued that
because the adult male population was far less than the military service and tax
quota in many districts, the government should revive the old formula of com-
bining a tax cut to one p 'il with an additional one-p 'il tax on all "leisured house-
holds," including families of court officials, local inftuentials of rank (t'op 'urn),