474 MILITARY REFORMof evading service. The inability of Injo to enforce his will in 1626 shows that
the system of the fifteenth century had already moved off the stage of history. 13
The "cloth tax on men of leisure," or "Confucian scholar cloth tax" (yup'o),
represcnted an attempt to place a permanent tax on the class of scholars with-
out requiring that thcy perform military service, either as duty soldiers or a sup-
port taxpayers. By eliminating the stigma attached to military service, it was hoped
that the yangban would consent to the new tax. At the same time, the idea of tax-
ing scholars or yangban without requiring military service represented an
acknowledgment that the military service system had already gone a long way
toward becoming more of a tax than a service system.
Yu Hyongwon, on the other hand, wanted to return to the early Chason Five
Guards system according to which most of the scions of the yangban -more
narrowly defined as a class of scholars, officials, and those with limited hered-
itary privileges - would be brought back into the military service system itself.
In that respect he wanted to turn the clock back, while the other proposals -
taxes on persons, households, or land - were all based on unequivocal accep-
tance of the need to finance the military by any revenue source available, not
just the formula of rotating duty soldiers and specific support taxpayers assigned
theoretically to each duty soldier. Yu was still partially bound to the mentality
of the Tang dynasty by which adult men were expected to perform actual labor
service for the state in addition to the payment of a land tax and tribute in what-
ever unique local products were produced. As we will see later, Yu was willing
to abandon the traditional fonnula for tribute taxes, but he was unwilling to show
equal flexibility in dealing with military finance. Although some officials
attempted to justify the use of per capita, household, and land taxes for raising
revenues for military purposes by citing (or twisting) historical precedent, they
really were adapting to a new trend in national finance that involved breaking
away from thc old rigid category of labor service toward a more f1exible use of
availahle rcvenues.
Kim Yilk and a Tax on Yangban, 1653
Kim Yuk, Third State Councilor in 1653, had his own ideas about how to solve
the problems of military defense and financial shortage. He also endorsed the
idea that the quality of troops took precedence over numbers, and proposed that
the royal guard (Military Training Agency?) quota be set at 5,000 men and that
all old and ill troops be eliminated from the unit and replaced with able men.
To sol ve the prohlem of the large number of peasants who had run away from
their villages to escape the burdens of military service and support taxes, he pro-
posed that vagrants or illegal migrants be rounded up and scttled permanently
on state colonies (11I11)6n); the taxes they would pay would then be used for mil-
itary food rations.
He also identified thc special exemption privileges of the elite as the major