416 MILITARY REFORM
tified without it. Thus, he provided that "Once the land system is carried out,
organize all soldiers - regular cavalry and infantry and the sago (slave) soldiers
- into squads and platoons on the basis of villages. "64
According to Yu's basic plan for military service, each man (of good status;
for slaves and others see following section) would receive TOO myo, equivalent
to I k.reing, of land: each unit of 4 kyeing (defined as a chrin) would furnish I
adult male for service as either a cavalryman (kibyong), infantryman (pobyong),
or marine (sugun).6^5 In light ofYu's admiration for the ideal of militia service
associated with the well-field system and his stipulation that squads and pla-
toons of all types of soldiers should be organized on the basis of village com-
munities, it seems strange that he would have hothered to set a quota, or even a
limit, of a certain number of men for each four-kyeing unit of land to be liable
for military service. Why did he not simply state that all adult males would serve
in the army, rotating on and off duty in fulfillment of the principles of farmer-
soldier service?
The answer is simple hut disconcerting, for it turns out that he was not propos-
ing a militia system in strict terms at all, but a continuation and modification of
the system adopted at the beginning of the Choson dynasty and still in use for
most soldiers in the seventeenth century. In short, he fused two different princi-
ples of recruitment and service in his reform proposal, one based on the selec-
tion of a specified number of men per basic unit of land area, the other a division
of servicemen between rotating duty soldiers and support taxpayers based on cur-
rent Chason dynasty practice. As in current practice, not all men liable for mil-
itary service would be duty soldiers, and for that maUer, the method of recruiting
soldiers according to a quota per unit of land area had also been tried in the early
Choson dynasty in the fifteenth century. It did not necessarily signify a perfect
militia system, but Yu claimed that it was derived from the militia model. But
why would Yu have chosen to use the system of rotating duty soldiers and sup-
port taxpayers when by his own admission it had become thoroughly corrupted?
The Royal Division Model
One of the most important lessons Yu learned from his study of the history of mil-
itary systems in China was that the abandonment of the militia system led to what
was called the separation of soldiers from farmers. What this meant was that the
economical benefits of the militia system by which the peasant paid for his own
costs by the produce of his agricultural labor was lost, and the costs of the pro-
fessional, salaried soldiers became a heavy burden on the state and the taxpay-
ing peasants, with dire consequences:
I note that the greatest harm that there is is to divide [the people] into soldiers
and peasants. If you have too little to provide for the soldiers, they will not have
enough to be of any usc. And if you give them too much, then the first thing that
will happen is that the people will be oppressed, after which the state will be