MILITARY FINANCE 499segment of the high officials were willing to take action that would cause pain
to their fellow yangban. That King Sukchong was eventually persuaded by the
conservative defenders of the status quo to postpone a decision - which meant
permanent abandonment of the idea during his lifetime - was a disappointing
display of leadership. but it also indicates that he was at least willing to con-
sider a more flexible response to the institutional problem of military finances
than Yu Hyongwon.
It was not that Yu was not capable of radical thought. for he ostensibly sought
to eliminate all forms of illicit exemption from military service by requiring most
men - except for a limited number defined as officeholders. students in good
standing. and a limited number of royal relatives and noblemen - to serve in the
military in some form, but his main justification for this solution was that it was
based on his idealized vision of military service when the Choson dynasty was
founded. The principles by which it had been organized had been corrupted. but
it should be retained and restored to its original, pristine purity by which all ser-
vice evaders. yangban or otherwise, would be returned to some form of mili-
tary duty no matter what the political repercussions might be.
Practical statesmen like Yi Samyong, who realized that demanding military
service or support taxes from yangban and others who had for so long held that
duty as demeaning to their status and prestige would be virtually impossible, or
might even provoke rebellion, concluded that the yangban and other service
evaders could be brought into the system simply as taxpayers, particularly since
no stigma had ever been attached to the payment of land taxes by yangban
landowners. This was a solution that Yu abjured, on the grounds that using land
taxes to support the military was a violation of principle, by which he probably
meant the traditional precedent of treating military service separately from other
modes of taxation and requiring the registration of adult males to serve as sup-
port taxpayers if not rotating duty soldiers.
The curious thing about Yu's attitude on the question of military taxation was
that his views were so similar to the leading opponent of the household cloth
tax in 168 I, the inspector-general. Yi Tanha. Like Yu, Yi also wanted to restore
the early Choson system to its original purity by requiring yangban without
office to serve in elite guard units, and by retaining rotating duty soldiers in
combination with support taxpayers as the only legitimate mode of military
finance. But he justified his view by appealing to the overriding principle of
difference, not equality, in the operation of nature as a whole, not just human
life, and the legitimacy of discrimination in the determination of tax burdens.
It was appalling to him that yang ban could be subjected to the same tax as com-
moners (even though he was not disturbed by the imposition of the land tax on
them as well as commoners or slaves) or slaves because yangban were obvi-
ously superior to either of them.
Was this, therefore, just a case of anomalous coincidence, where two men of
completely different philosophies end up advocating the same position in prac-
tice? No, because Yu believed essentially in the legitimacy of difference as well