878 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMYThe disappearance of cash and the reversion to a more primitive economy
based on either barter or the use of grain and cloth (silk or ramie) as media of
exchange provided historical material for a comparison between cash and non-
cash economies in Chinese history. Not surprisingly, there were two points of
view on this question: that the Chinese cash experience had been either disad-
vantageous or downright evil, or that the use of grain and cloth as media of
exchange presented even more problems than the use of metallic cash, proving
that with all its drawbacks it was far better than grain and cloth as a medium of
exchange and indispensable to the free circulation of goods if not the growth of
production and wealth.
As things turned out, the reunification of China under the Sui and T'ang dynas-
ties after the late sixth century was accompanied by an economic resurgence
and the remonetization of the Chinese economy as a whole. In the subsequent
period covered by Yu from the Sui to the late Ming, the problems that emerged
in a Chinese economy that was far more developed than seventeenth-century
Korea provided a textbook account of methods of money management. Many
of the problems associated with currency in the later Chinese dynasties were
only repetitions of those that had occurred in the Han.
The effort to reintroduce cash into Korea in the seventeenth century after a
hiatus of a half-century or more resembled most closely that period in Chinese
history when metallic cash disappeared from Chinese markets particularly in
the north, during the Northern and Southern dynasties from the early fourth
through the late sixth centuries. What this meant was that the problems associ-
ated with the Chinese economy during the periods of its greatest advancement
and monetization, like the T'ang, Sung, and Ming, was less relevant to Korean
needs than the situation of north China in the late fifth century. What Yu wanted
to find out primarily was whether a country was better off with or without metal-
lic cash. What would happen after cash was fully incorporated into the econ-
omy was still interesting from an intellectual standpoint, but it was a problem
that was not that relevant to the situation in Yu's own time.
Kim Yuk's attitudes toward cash discussed in the last chapter provide a useful
illustration to this question. Since Kim was the leading agent of the movement
to introduce cash in the face of inertia and opposition, he ignored what could
have been the serious consequences of unrestrained minting, debasement, coun-
terfeiting, fluctuations in the value of rice and cloth as well as money itself, and
the oversupply of money in the economy. Yu H yongwon also had to face the ques-
tion of whether Korea would be better off with metallic cash, but he was also a
scholar who had the advantage of detachment and perspective that Kim lacked.
He could therefore work out a policy to deal not only with the introduction of
cash, but the creation of stable prices and equitable taxes once that cash had
become a medium of exchange, albeit not the only medium of exchange.