The East Asian Package

> Check out this famous chart based on the World Values Survey. It’s gerrymandered in a way that would make a Republican state legislator blush. All East Asians get grouped into the “Confucian” category, despite China being closer to Belarus than it is to South Korea, and Japan being as close to Protestant Europe as it is to its neighbors. Given how distant China is even from Taiwan and Hong Kong, one could argue that it would be too much to grant that all Chinese-derived nations and territories have a similar culture.

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> boundaries. In contrast, in East Asia there has never been a strong idea of an identity that encompasses Japan, China, and Korea and separates their civilization from those of other peoples, or at least nowhere near to the same extent. Thus, while it makes sense to speak of a European culture, the idea of an “East Asian culture” seems like a convenient shorthand used to arrive at a quasi-explanation of why countries that happen to be next to each other have similar outcomes. Europe is even more of a coherent concept in the World Values Survey cited above, unlike the gerrymandered East Asian category.

> None of this is to say that some ideas like Confucianism and Buddhism haven’t crossed the borders between China, Korea, and Japan. Only that political, social, religious, linguistic, and other kinds of links between the nations of the region have been extremely tenuous and weak compared to Europe, and also other parts of the globe we consider broad civilizations like the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world.