Persistence of Confucian Values? Legacies of Imperialism in China & Taiwan

In this paper, we analyze the long-run effects of Western and Japanese colonization on the survival of Confucian values in China and Taiwan. Mainland China and Taiwan had been under the rule of the Qing dynasty and shared the same culture and societal structure before the onset of expansionary colonization in the mid-nineteenth century. We introduce a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and apply the Language Barrier Index (LBI) provided by Lohmann (2011), which captures the cultural distance between the colonizer and the colonized. We show that due to the cultural proximity of Japanese colonizers to Taiwan, Japan engaged strongly in the development of an efficient public administration in Taiwan. However, mainland China was colonized mainly by Western empires from 1842 to the early twentieth century and thus experienced a different cultural external treatment. This gave rise to extractive institutions, which strongly diverted Confucian values from their original path. Hence, the smaller distance between Japanese and Chinese languages preserved more crucial Confucian values such as family ties and confidence in the central government. In contrast, the large cultural distance between mainland China, on the one hand, and Britain, France and Russia, on the other, prevented formal state-building and facilitated individualism and higher levels of distrust toward central government. Confucian values have been more likely to persist in the long-run in Taiwan and those provinces of mainland China that were partly under Japanese colonization.