Fifty years ago, modernization theorists explained the backwardness of East Asia as a consequence of its Confucian culture. Then, starting in the later 1980s, and esp in the early 1990s, with the christening of the 'East Asian Economic Miracle', East Asian economic success was attributed to Confucian culture -- you know, the other axis of Japan-China-Korea. Round about the same time came all that stuff of the Lords of the Pacific Rim, the Bamboo Network, etc. (which, in the context of some of the stuff here, is interesting, because if anyone had dared suggest anything like a Jewish network, as freely as they were/are talking about a (specifically overseas) Chinese network, there'd likely have been howls of anti-semitism). In 1997, with the East Asian Financial Crisis, this culture -- you know, guanxi, and the like -- was said to be the source, or at least a major source, of the crisis. And so it goes -- a crude summary, but I think accurate in its essentials.