PART IV
Military Reform: Conclusion
Kang Man'gil has written recently that there were two types of reform plans
advocated by scholars of so-called Practical Learning in the seventeenth and
eighteenth century for the reform of the military service system. The first involved
the farmer/soldier militia ideal and the other a per capita cash tax based on a
system of tax support for soldiers that was not tied to a land grant system. Kim
Yongsop also called attention to the difference between a corvee or labor tax
and taxation of goods, production, or money, arguing that labor service was a
medieval feature of Korean society rendered obsolete by the development of
commerce and currency and the household cloth tax. He also pointed out that
discrimination based on status and the exemption of yangban from military ser-
vice and taxation was another of the medieval categories of taxation as well. I
Both Kang and Kim have thus drawn attention to an important distinction in
the way men conceived of military service and its role in a taxation system in
this period. Although they held that there were two approaches to military ser-
vice reform. neither was the product of traditional scholars alone, but of a cross-
fertilization of ideas between active officials and scholars. This can easily be
seen in Yu Hyongwon's borrowing ofthe ideas ofYulgok (Yi I) and Yu Songnyong
on military affairs in particular. Yet it was also Yu Hyongw6n who in the mid-
seventeenth century derived his main inspiration for the reform of military ser-
vice from the classical and archaic militia model of antiquity in which men were
obligated to perform service for the state. And it was a number of active offi-
cials rather than Practical Learning scholars who accepted the transformation
of the earlier military service obligation into a system of taxation and sought to
reform it as such instead of returning to a personal service or militia system.
What then took place in the eighteenth century was that the reform proposals
of the active officials of the seventeenth century worked their way into the con-
sciousness of the statecraft scholars so that classical models and archaic con-
cepts of physical labor service competed side-by-side with more contemporary
ideas about taxation and expansion of the tax base (rather than service) into the
protected realm of the yangban.
569