238 Part IV: East Asia
American and Asian Values Compared
In this deeply embedded philosophy, it is the group rather than the individ-
ual that is the center of the philosophical system. Cooperation and harmony
are valued over open conflict. The family’s deep commitment to the well-being
of the group is reproduced in communities, in organizations, and in corpora-
tions. Individuals owe loyalty to the company they work for, which owes loy-
alty and security in return. This has been particularly marked in modern
Japanese and Korean corporations, where lifetime employment and weak or
nonexistent unions have family-like characteristics.
Where does the individual come in? The individual should have deep loy-
alty to the groups of which he or she is a part, and the individual should also
cultivate him- or herself through the pursuit of knowledge. Education is one of
the greatest of Confucian values that is still conspicuous in East Asian coun-
tries; “Exam Hell,” on which one’s future success or failure depends, is a mod-
ern version. The Chinese state was run for almost two millennia by an
educated elite recruited by a rigorous examination system that kept young men
bent over their pens and books for most of their youth and often long into mid-
dle age. The Confucian value of self-cultivation through formal education can
hardly be overemphasized.
The Romans gave Western nations the concept of the rule of law; Confu-
cianism gave East Asians the concept of governance by wise fathers and culti-
vated men. As a result, in East Asia, legal systems have been weakly developed
(especially in China where it became a real problem in the rapid growth of the
economy in recent decades), as society followed its accustomed pattern of put-
ting its future in the judgment of superior men. In China, these powerful men
and educated elites created the large-scale bureaucracy that runs the country
today. The administrative empire was an unintended consequence of Confu-
cian philosophy. The three chapters of part IV focus on these three core princi-
ples of East Asian civilization: Confucian philosophy as it has shaped societies
over two and a half millennia; the administrative state as it emerged in this con-
text; and Buddhism as a shared religion borrowed from the west.REFERENCES
Barnes, Gina L. 2015. Archaeology of East Asia: The Rise of Civilization in China, Korea, and
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Jelonek, Adam. 2005. Political Culture and Its Impact on the Contemporary Regimes
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Rawski, Evelyn S. 2012. Beyond National History: Seeking the Ethnic in China’s His-
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