ROYAL DIVISION MODEL 429legally or illegally, for lower-rate service. Although Yu's plan is to be admired
for its intent, his rate was still too high and his toleration of differential rates of
service failed to establish a uniform standard for either service or tax.^98
Furthermore, he had to face the question of a revenue shortage that would be
produced by reducing the per capita tax rate on support taxpayers. He did this
by increasing the number of support personnel for each duty soldier. Again, as
subsequent experience would show, this tactic merely shifted tax burdens, it did
not reduce them. The tactic was also based on the presumption of an available
supply of untaxed or idle males to fill expanded quotas, but that presumption
was unjustified. Increasing the number of support taxpayers only increased the
pressure on magistrates to sign up more people for taxes.
Yu can be defended on this point, however, since his whole scheme of service
was based on the nationalization of land and distribution of plots to all peasants,
guaranteeing sufficient livelihoods to all. But without major land reform, the most
difficult of all programs to implement, his remedies were not likely to produce
either uniformity or true reduction of tax burdens on the male population.
Rejection of the Land Tax to Finance the Military
Since Yu argued elsewhere that all state finances should preferably be paid for
from general state funds for expenses (kukka kyongbi), he raised the question
whether it might not make more sense to use the land tax as a basis for provid-
ing funds to soldiers rather than the support taxpayer system, especially since
the recruitment system was based on units of land. In fact, one might have
expected Yu to adopt this idea for several reasons. He was an admirer of Kim
Yuk's taedong reform that had converted the whole system of in-kind tribute
payments to a surtax on land. He had already argued that land or land area should
be the basis for assessing military service, and he had suggested having one of
the support taxpayers pay a rice tax directly to the soldier's base or duty station
to make sure each soldier actually received his food ration instead of squan-
dering his support payments in advance of service. Furthermore, in the three-
quarters of a century from his death to the adoption of the equal service reform
of '750, a number of reform advocates were to propose the complete conver-
sion of military support taxes to a levy on land because they felt it would rep-
resent a fairer distribution of tax burdens than the highly regressive military
support cloth tax system.
Nevertheless, his response to this proposition was that the land tax revenues
were already fully committed to paying official salaries and could be decimated
by a bad crop year or famine. Thus it was essential to keep the financing of the
army separate from general revenue and assign support taxpayers to a specific
duty soldier. He did not explain, however, how peasants suffering from famine
would be any more able to pay military support taxes than the land tax. As a
creature of the mid-seventeenth century, he was tied to the tradition of a support
system of finance for soldiers and still confident that it could be run without cor-