the main inhibiting cause was the intellectual climate of Confucianist orthodoxy, not at all favorable for any form of trial or experiment, for innovations of any kind, or for the free play of the mind. The bureaucracy was perfectly satisfied with traditional techniques. Since these satisfied its practical needs, there was nothing to stimulate any attempt to go beyond the concrete and the immediate.<sup>17</sup> At least one author has suggested that an additional factor in explaining the abortive nature of China’s economic and technological potential stemmed from the confinement of women to the home, which severely restricted the employment of women outside of the household and limited the supply of female workers to labor-intensive industries, such as textiles.<sup>18</sup> No need to go into great length here into the mindless excesses of the Mao era—the abuse, the needless suffering, the fanatical attachment to spent ideologies and false theories, the unfathomable social and human cost.

So, what dimension or period of Chinese development is properly explained by its alleged adherence to a Confucian ethic? How helpful is Chinese “culture” in explaining China’s rapid economic development during the past quarter century? Maybe China’s recent rapid growth has less to do with Chinese values per se, and more to do with the forces unleashed as a result of integration with the global economy, or efforts to introduce more secure property rights, or the active encouragement of internal migration from the country side to the cities. A macroeconomist might point to currency manipulation and an artificially weak exchange rate as being an important engine of Chinese economic growth over the past two decades. Incidentally—to add a further complicating issue—why have the Chinese living abroad (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia come to mind) tended to do so much better than those staying home?

In thinking about the development experience of other countries beyond China or East Asia, we find cultural explanations of economic performance to be saddled with complications, which tend to obscure rather than clarify the issues. Let us take up quickly a couple of examples.

In his contribution to _Culture Matters_ Samuel Huntington (2000) comments on coming upon economic data on Ghana and Korea in the early 1960s and being astonished at how similar their economies were: broadly comparable levels of income per capita, a similar structure of production, and roughly equal levels of foreign aid. Thirty years later the contrast could not be more pronounced: Korea is a rich industrial power with a large footprint in the global economy and Ghana has remained more or less where it was at the time of independence, except that its per capita GDP is one-fifteenth that of Korea.<sup>19</sup>

> 17 Balazs, Etienne, 1964, pp. 13–27.

> 18 Goldstone, 1996. He further states: “In northwest Europe, with its pattern of late marriages and nuclear families, there existed a stage in the life course of most women—between puberty in their early teens and marriage in their mid-twenties—when they were available for labor and routinely performed work for wages outside their natal households. _No such stage existed in the life course of Chinese women, at least from the Ming through the end of the Imperial era (to 1911)_ (emphasis in original) _._ This would have posed a great obstacle to the creation of textile factories along the lines of their development in Europe and North America at any time in China’s late Imperial history” (p. 3).

> 19 By 2008, the PPP adjusted ratio of Korean to Ghanaian per capita GDP was actually 18.2, not 15.