Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

552 MILITARY REFORM

land and reduce both acreage under cultivation and tax revenue, forcing the gov-
ernment to increase the tax rate in the future to make up for revenue shortages,
K won also betrayed a rather conservative fear of a cash economy because peas-
ants would suffer additional burdens if they had to exchange rice for cloth or
cash on the open market to meet their tax obligations, He also believed that the
time was not ripe for any innovative laws becausc of the low state of morals and
the easily excitable nature of the people of the time, hardly an attitude one would
expect from a follower ofYu Hyongwon.
Since he did share Yu's belief in the legitimacy of support-taxpayer financing
of the military and the need for a balanced budget based on a calculation of rev-
enue and expenditure, he attempted to work out a solution based on a careful
calculation of tax rates, revenues, and expenditures. He pointed out that annual
expenditures of cloth tax revenues had increased over the past, from 604,000
p'il prior to the service tax reform of imsul year (1682), to 633,708 p'i! at the
present time. Of this total, 456,543 p 'il was paid in by SUpp0l1 taxpayers attached
to the Five Military Divisions of the capital region, and another 46, I 16 p'il by
the taxpayers attached to the civilian capital bureaus (subtotal, 502,659 p'il), all
of which was tax revenue at the two-p'il rate. In addition, the taxpayers paid.5
p'il as transport fcc, and this total levy of 2.5 p 'il was in fact the heaviest rate
then in use.
His estimate of provincial expenditures (i.e., income as wcll) is shown in
table 7.

TABLE 7

KWON CHOK'S ESTIMATE

OF PROVINCIAL MILITARY

Province

Kyongsang

ChOlla

Ch'ungch 'ong

Kyonggi

Hwanghae

TOTAL

EXPENDITURES

Amount (in p 'il)

43,012

46 ,^207

15,95^2

3,664

22,2 14

131 ,049

SOURCE: SJW 58:l4ra-143a; YOngjo sillok71:24b-2sa. same date.

He noted that these provincial taxes consisted of the one-p 'il-rate tax that was

also exempted from transportation fees, the lightest type of yanRyok in the coun-

try. The combined total of capital and provincial expenditures of 633,708 p'il

was 29,708 p'i/, or about 5 percent, higher than the pre-I682 figure. Although

the size of the increase appeared small, it was in fact large because it had been

expected that expenditures would decrease after the reform of that year.

He believed there were only two sources of supplemental revenue: (I) prof-

its from special nonagricultural production such as fishing and salt production