566 MILITARY REFORM
bly dissipated any good will the king had earned from the yangban class by pass-
ing over the household tax. The contradiction in his policy was produced by the
balance bet ween his own inner respect for the dignity of yangban-scholar fam-
ilies and fear of yangban discontent and his desperate need for substitute rev-
enues to maintain hasic military costs. He really appears to have convinced
himself that a fine on school dropouts was not really a tax on yangban, and since
only 24,000 men were involved, he did not expect the protest that soon emerged.
He had also ruled out a land surtax because he was opposed to levying "addi-
tional" taxes on land in principle, but he ended up doing so anyway because of
the fiscal crisis produced by the tax cut. Thus, a portion of the tax relief pro-
vided to the peasant of good status by the service tax cut was taken away by the
surcharge on land.
Pak Kwangsong in his recent study concluded, as had some officials at the
time, that the whole equal service reform merely involved moving tax revenues
and resources around from one source to another without solving the fundamental
problem of the military service and tax system. Of course, that problem was the
narrowness of the tax hase caused by exemptions based on status and evasion.^40
AFTERMATH OF THE EQUAL SERVICE REFORMThe equal service reform of 1750 did, after all, cut the tax rate on men of good
status in half, and for that reason provided an immediate benefit to that class.
By the end of 1753, a small surplus in the revenues ofthe Equal Service Bureau
even permitted a small reduction in the land cash surtax. But by 1754 corrup-
tion was beginning again in a number of areas. In 1764 Chief State Councilor
Hong Ponghan complained that in the last decade the financial situation had
become progressively worse, and by the 1780s fish, salt, and boat taxes were
becoming onerous and forcing coastal residents into bankruptcy. Despite pro-
visions for review and reassessment of taxes on boats, fishing weirs, and salt
flats, quotas were not changed and became permanent charges imposed on the
descendants of seventeenth-century producers, or their neighbors and relatives,
right through the I850s. The substitute taxes established to compensate for the
tax cut of 1750 became themselves new sources of corruption in taxation.
There was some alleviation of the evils associated with yangyok service and
taxation but only until the late 1750s. Not only did the equal-service reform of
I 750 fail to extend the tax basc to include yangban and quasi-yangban tax evaders
in any serious way, it did not deal dircctly with the problem of administrative
corruption and inefficiency in the registration of commoners of good status for
military taxes. Even the fines levied on the specially select military officers did
not succeed in expanding the tax base to yangban hecause ordinary common-
ers began to use this as a route for evading service itself, fulfilling the predic-
tion of Pak Munsu in J 752. There was thus no reason to expect that the evils of
commendation, false registration, and evasion would be solved in the long run.
In fact, a numbcr of new problems were added to the old ones. By King