558 MILITARY REFORM
It may he somewhat disconcerting, however, that Yu's intellectual disciple,
Kwon, should have argued against the most radical proposal for military taxa-
tion reform since Yu's own time, the household cash tax. Unfortunately, although
K won explained his opposition to the land cloth (kyoJp 0) proposal in some detail,
about the household cash tax he merely said that there was no need to repeat
arguments made hy others.27 One might presume that K won must have shared
the general hostility to the household tax because it would have been levied on
yangban households. But how could a disciple ofYu Hyongwon fail to support
an egalitarian and status-blind tax measure like the household cash tax? Even
though Yu was not totally egalitarian, he still advocated bringing most of the
yanghan back into a military service system in the manner of the elite units of
the Five Guard system.
The explanation must be sought elsewhere. Kwon shared with Yu a prejudice
in favor of retaining the system of support taxpayers and a bias against the sep-
aration of military finance from adult males deemed categorically appropriate
to perform national military service functions. Since he was proposing a cut of
the support tax rate to one p 'il, he worked out a scheme to raise other kinds of
revenue, something that Yu Hyongwon had not envisioned, but he must have
been heir to Yu's penchant for categorical thinking and his association between
a mode of taxation and an object of taxation, or between a mode of taxation and
a use for the revenue so obtained. He only departed from Yu on the matter of
the two-p 'il rate because it had been proved ineffective.
Kwon's opposition to both land and household taxes probably derived from
Yu Hyongwon's general respect for traditional categories of taxation and service.
Although his proposal for state-sponsored sharecropping grants to tenants would
in fact have used land rent to support soldiers, Kwon did not deem it a violation
of the militia ideal because he focused on the reciprocity involved between a
state grant and a return payment by the grantee. Men like Yu and Kwon ruled
out programs that did violence to a fundamental principle of taxation in a pre-
commercial economy, one that extolled the idea of service in the form of labor.
The Reform Debate of 1750In the summer of 1750 the governor of Kyonggi, Yu Pongmyong, wrote a lengthy
memorial on the reform of the system of military taxation, but he was deeply
pessimistic about the prospects of a successful reform because of the low state
of mores at the time. He recommended only the adoption of the precedent pre-
viously set in P'yong'an Province of cutting the two-p'if rate to one p 'if because
it removed the incentive for commanders to sign up adult males for low-rate,
one-p'il service. He felt that the experiment had worked in P'yong'an because
the people had never complained about rate reduction, and the proposal was fis-
cally feasihle as long as the government eliminated unnecessary expenditures
and imposed a one-p 'il tax on all the currently tax-exempt types like the extra-
quota students, district military officers, and banner and tally officers (kipaeg-