The New Dissscusion On Qiu Jun’s Currency Thoughts

Qiu Jun was a famous minister in the middle period of the Ming Dynasty, he, together with Hai Rui, is the iconic figure of the Ming Dynasty cliff (now Hainan province). Qiu Jun had reached the highest rank in the Ming Dynasty; he was very knowledgeable, and wrote lots of books in his life. His book Supplementation to the Explanations of the Great Learning, was one of his most revered works. It is a book focused on his economic thinking for a variety of perspectives and discusses, including his ideas and discussions on issues associated with currency.Great changes took place in the traditional monetary system in our country in the middle period of the Ming Dynasty. The accelerated process of the silver monetization had very significant and far-reaching impact on social economy. As a person with breadth of vision in the middle period of Ming Dynasty, Qiu Jun had deep feeling for the changes in the field of currency, so he spent two volumes to explore and discuss the issues related to currency in this book. His discussion on currency was very comprehensive, which not only benefited from the research achievements in ancient China since the publication of Kuan Tzu, but also from his own observation results in economic field. Based upon modern monetary and banking theory, this article aims to summarize and expound Qiu Jun’s currency thought. I think that Qiu Jun’s thought on the currency issue has a lot of flash points. Involving the discussion on a number of modern western monetary theory problems, his theories even show some characteristics of modern monetary theory, such as the simple labor theory of value.Qiu Jun’s discussion on currency involves a wide range of topics, such as the function of money, the origin of money, the nature of money, the money system, interest, and so on. Qiu Jun did more in-depth study on the function of money, he explored and discussed all the other four functions of money except its world currency function; he also showed Monetary metal idealism tendencies in his expressions of the origin and nature of money; meanwhile, he expressed his own views in the process of evaluating some previous well-known opinions on the origin and nature of money. Notes began to circulate in currency area in our country since a new kind of currency "huizi" showed up in the Song Dynasty; with the development of social economy, notes gradually gained legal status; but due to a lack of right understanding of the nature of the note, the issue of notes often leaded to chaos in economic domain, which always affected all every field in society. Qiu Jun paid high attention to notes because the order of notes was barely maintained by law force in the middle period of the Ming Dynasty and a series of adverse consequences were caused due to the circulation of notes. As feudal literati, Qiu Jun did not approve the issue of paper money; in the meanwhile, he was unable to directly challenge the policies of issuing notes because of his identity. As a result, he adopted a compromise-proposed his opinions on monetary system-the "three coins" scheme. In the" three coins" scheme, Qiu Jun advocated using silver as the basic form of currency in circulation; this also made his monetary scheme show a certain degree of modern color. The "Three coins "scheme was the focus of Qiu Jun’s monetary thought, this paper also discussed this scheme in detail. In terms of his discussion on the stabilization system Qiu Jun made a relatively simple statement about the essence of interest; he connected interest with national finance, and financial management views of the country and its people. He disproved the existence of interest; this is Qiu Jun’s extreme view in the issue of interest, which was determined by his class stand, his education, and the background of his times. According to the modern theory of money and banking, the monetary theory should also research the content of interest, so this article also discusses Qiu Jun’s views on interest.Overall, in the course of the study on China’s Monetary Thought history, Qiu Jun can not be bypassed. Experts on China’s Monetary Thought history hold a relatively positive attitude to Qiu Jun’s monetary thought; they believe that he developed the monetary thought on the basis of previous currency thought before his times. Though there are some paradoxical theories in his expressions due to the class limitations, Qiu Jun is truly a great thinker in the field of China’s Monetary Thought. Except for some biased theories, which reflected the limitations of his subjective views, Qiu Jun’s monetary research is very detailed and valuable. Using the modern theory of money and banking, and the knowledge of the studies of historical literature.