482 MILITARY REFORM
Sokchu, soon to become the dominant figure at court at the end of the decade,
expressed negative views. Minister of Taxation Min Yujung proposed carrying
out the usual thorough investigation of tax evaders among school students, mil-
itary officers (kun'gwan) attached to various yamen, and other types ofunreg-
istered idlers, and Kim Suhung supported him. He also recommended binding
men to the village by the five-family mutual responsibility system (ogat'ong)
according to which the chief of each five-family group (the t'ongjang) would
be responsible for paying the cloth taxes due from the group as a whole.^23
Even though the mourning ritual debate was at its height at the time, the defeat
of this measure cannot be attributed to factionalism. The 1674 debate followed
the same lines as the discussion fifteen years before except that the initial pro-
posal to tax only the yuhak was far less ambitious than Yu Kye's. The handful
of reformers willing to intrude on yangban and scholar interests were simply
overwhelmed by the defenders of privilege, and it was obvious from the testi-
mony of Kim Suhung that the officials at court must have been besieged by com-
plaints from the scholar class around the country. As he remarked, every poor
family with a single student, no matter how poor and how thin the line of descent
from yangban ancestors, identified with the most exalted yangban families when
it camc to defending the exemption from military registration, service, and tax-
ation. Kim Suhung's watered-down version of a yangban tax would have merely
imposed a one-p 'illevy on only a restricted category of students, the yuhak, with-
out requiring them to register as soldiers or support taxpayers. All the illicit stu-
dents in state schools or private academies, the idle degree-holders, and hosts
of other types would have been untouched by the provision, and yet the oppo-
sition was so stout that even this proposal was abandoned. The prospects for
squeezing an extra farthing from the yangban-scholar tax evaders for military
costs appeared to be receding. A scant two years after Yu Hyongwon's death,
the debate over the one-p 'if scholar tax made Yu's proposal for a return to yang-
ban military service appear both radical and anachronistic.
In the last twenty years of Yu Hyongwon's life, four active officials - Kim
Yuk. Yu Kye, Pak Scdang, and Ho Chok - all made proposals that would have
imposed taxes on some or all of the yangban class. Their purpose was similar
to that ofYu Hyongwon only in that they all sought to expand the tax base, but
they differed from him in two ways: they wanted a one-p'i!, not a two-p'i!, tax
rate on all support taxpayers of good status, and they wanted to impose a tax on
yangban or unqualified students and the like without bringing them back into
the system of military service itself. On the tax rate, they had a far better idea
of what was needed to reduce the burden on the commoner peasantry, and in
proposing an expanded tax base rather than a reversion to labor service, they
were more in tune with the times.
Furthermore, their plans were not informed by his, nor his by theirs, and it
was some combination of their ideas rather than his that formed the basis for
the protracted debate that lasted from this time into the next century, even past
the equal service reform of 1750. In other words, reform-minded officials did