I want to say that as an East Asian I love whenever Richard has a take on East Asians. He’s one of the few smart writers out there that tries to understand East Asians and from a relatively sympathetic angle.

I think Richard’s right that the whole deal with East Asians is basically that they have high conformity.

Whether it’s due to Confucianism or genetic traits, I think it’s hard to untangle. I think it’s true that East Asians have genetic traits associated with Confucianism culture. For example, I think East Asians genetically are less interpersonally aggressive, have more self-control, and are more self-critical/humble than other races, which makes the restrictions of Confucian culture not chafe so much, i.e. respect your elders, seek collective harmony, focus on self-cultivation, etc. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if the long history of Confucian culture naturally selected for genetic traits that would thrive under such a system. Confucianism has been institutionalized since 500 BC, a very very long time.

I think you also underappreciate the extent to which Confucian culture permeates throughout East Asia. It might sound weird now because Westerners see China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam as separate sovereign states, but East Asia was basically the Sinosphere for most of history rather than individual sovereign states. East Asia was not so evenly broken up into different states as Europe where you might have more of a balance of power. East Asian history was China and then everybody else on the periphery, which is why China called themselves the Middle Kingdom.

To illustrate, the Sinosphere is generally agreed to include China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan. To show the magnitude of difference, today China’s population is 1.4B, North Korea is 25M, South Korea is 50M, Japan is 125M, Vietnam is 100M, and Taiwan is 25M. If you combine all the other countries in the Sinosphere, they only total 325M compared to China’s 1,400M, China is still 4x larger than the collective, and completely dwarfs any particular individual country.

Today, Westerners love Japan and think it's superior to China in culture, in its people, etc., but for most of East Asian history, Japan was a backwater that looked to China for high civilization, ideas, culture, etc. There was waxing and waning when Japan was open or closed off to China, but with such a behemoth on its door step, Japan couldn’t help but be heavily influenced by Chinese civilization, ideas, culture, etc. A rough analogy would be Britain (a backwater on the outskirts) during the time of the Roman Empire (the fount of civilization). This relationship only reversed with the Opium Wars in the 1800’s when Japan was shocked to see their elder brother, the great Chinese empire, defeated by European barbarians, and Japan consequently modernized through the Meiji Restoration to avoid the same fate. For other countries in the Sinosphere, the influence of China was even greater. For most of Korea’s history it has been directly ruled by China or as a tributary state. Vietnam was under direct Chinese rule for a 1000 years. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore are obviously majority Chinese and so carry the same Confucian culture with them.

The countries in the Sinosphere were fairly interconnected. The tributary system is relatively well known. But most Westerners aren’t aware that most countries in the Sinosphere also participated in the Chinese Imperial Examinations. As the imperial center of an extended tributary system, China naturally attracted the smartest Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese to take part in the Chinese Imperial Examinations and join the Chinese empire as Mandarins. Even during the cyclical waning parts of the Chinese Empire when Korea, Japan, or Vietnam would gain more independence, they adopted the same Imperial Examination system that focused on producing Confucian scholars. To this day, the Koreans believe that they may be smaller than China and Japan, but they are the true inheritors of Confucian culture and are more Confucian than the Chinese or Japanese. This is more speculative, but part of the interconnectedness may also be genetic. The Chinese believe, according to their lore and historical texts, how in the ancient times before time, Korea and Japan were first seeded by Chinese fleeing persecution, wars, etc., and who decided not to return to their homeland.

Obviously, this is all highly inconvenient history to the national stories of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam today. And this might all be written off as Chinese chauvinism or even Chinese propaganda. Furthermore, none of this means that Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are not truly sovereign and independent nation states now. But it shows how deep Confucian culture has been seeded in all the countries in the Sinosphere.

I would argue that modern politics have not changed this. The East Asian democracies of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore may have many of the forms of Western democracies, but they are functionally very different. Most don’t know that South Korea and Taiwan were under military dictatorships long after their liberation after WW2 and only became democracies within the last generation, 1987 (SK) and 1997 (TW) respectively. Singapore is well-known as a one-party democracy with only one party ruling since independence shortly after WW2, but Japan is also essentially a one-party democracy. Since WW2, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (which is associated with Japan’s pre-WW2 right-wing militaristic government) has been in power every year other than a single election they lost from 2009-2012 due to a brief civil war within the LDP. They have since regained power and don’t look to ever lose power in the foreseeable future.

My observation is that East Asian populations continue to be mostly apathetic to politics, trusting their elders/experts/betters to make the important political decisions. This is very Confucian.