Influence in Modern Times
Important military and political figures in modern Chinese history continued to be influenced by Confucianism, like the Muslim warlord Ma Fuxiang. The New Life Movement relied heavily on Confucianism.
Referred to variously as the Confucian hypothesis and as a debated component of the more all-encompassing Asian Development Model, there exists among political scientists and economists a theory that Confucianism plays a large latent role in the ostensibly non-Confucian cultures of modern-day East Asia, in the form of the rigorous work ethic it endowed those cultures with. These scholars have held that, if not for Confucianism's influence on these cultures, many of the people of the East Asia region would not have been able to modernize and industrialize as quickly as Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and even China have done. Most scholars attribute the origins of this idea to futurologist Herman Kahn's World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond. In years since, this hypothesis has been thoroughly discredited. See Hicks' account of it referenced above for details, or for an alternate and more current explanation, Cristobal Kay's "Why East Asia Overtook Latin America: Agrarian Reform, Industrialization, and Development."
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