Introduction PART VI. FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
tribute tax and the impediment against the flow of goods created by the absence
of a light and convenient form of currency.
What Yu Hyongw6n contributed to this process was the detached opinion of
a scholar removed from direct concern with daily affairs who could derive larger
implications about the reforms that had been adopted and recommend exten-
sions and refinements of those reforms. As we will see. from reform of the trib-
ute tax he derived a theory of the rationalization of government finance, and
from the introduction of currency he proposed a theory for guaranteeing sta-
bility in the use of that currency and the stabilization of prices.
Did his ideas on the reform of tribute and currency then provide a basis for
continuous progress and development in the economic realm in subsequent cen-
turies? Many scholars would like to think so, especially those who have been
emphasizing the expansion of both agricultural and nonagricultural production
and the volume of trade and commerce in the next two centuries. The answer
to this qucstion requires a description of the debates ovcr the use of currency
and its relationship to industrial and commercial activity in the eighteenth cen-
tury as a means of determining the flexibility of Confucian statecraft thought in
the face of the economic changes underway.