In his 19th-century classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, German sociologist Max Weber argued that Asian values were incompatible with the development of a modern economic system. He saw in the brand of Christianity practiced in northern Europe the only ethical system with the attributes needed to make capitalism work.
At the beginning of the 20th century, many Asian intellectuals might have agreed with him. Commenting on Confucianism, the Chinese leftist thinker, Chen Duxiu, said in 1916, “If we want to build a new society on the Western model in order to survive in the world, we must courageously throw away that which is incompatible with the new belief, the new society, the new state.”
History, of course, has proved Weber and Chen wrong. It is now plain that the most dynamic practitioners of capitalism at the dawn of the 21st century are to be found in Asia. More strikingly, all of them are located within what might be called a Confucian cultural zone.
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