Persistence of Confucian Values? Legacies of Imperialism in China & Taiwan

In this paper, we analyze the long-run effects of Western and Japanese imperial expansion on the survival of Confucian values in China and Taiwan. Mainland China and Taiwan had been under the rule of the Qing dynasty and shared the same culture and societal structure before the onset of imperial expansions in the mid-nineteenth century. We show that due to the cultural proximity of Japanese invaders to Taiwan, Japan engaged strongly in the development of an efficient public administration in Taiwan. Mainland China, however, was invaded mainly by Western empires from 1842 to the early twentieth century and thus experienced a different cultural treatment. This gave rise to extractive Western institutions in combination with a substantially weakened Qing government, which led to a relatively stronger divergence of Confucian values from their original path. In Taiwan, the smaller distance between Japanese and Chinese languages preserved crucial Confucian values, such as the practice of religion, generalized trust and female participation in the labor force. In contrast, the large cultural distance between mainland China, on the one hand, and Britain, France and Russia, on the other, prevented formal state-building and facilitated individualism and hierarchical family relations. Confucian values are more likely to persist in the long run in Taiwan and those provinces of mainland China that were partly under Japanese occupation.