North Korea: 2012-2016

[Dayuhan]

Addressing the original post...

Confucian culture is all about respect to one's superiors. All Confucian cultures are more centralized than their respective Western Communist or capitalist counterparts. Sometimes, Confucian societies can be pushed to defer to foreign rule: for instance, Japan and South Korea have adopted capitalist and democratic systems. Neither of these cases were really homegrown, the result of indigenous protest, but rather come from deliberate US policies.

Not precisely homegrown, though certainly evolved in a uniquely indigenous fashion... and certainly not, in either case, constituting "foreign rule".

One might debate the extent to which North Korea can be described as a "Confucian culture".

Nixon's rapprochement to China may not have been meant as a signal for them to keep their political system, but it did give them 'face' enough to open up to the world and start down the path to development. It may be unclear if that made China more or less of a threat down the road, today, but it was clearly the moral approach to take, as it brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Are you implying that Nixon's move was the sole cause of China's "start down the path of development"? I think you might find on examination that there was a good more to it than that.

Every Confucian society of geopolitical importance which has developed has done so as a result of American interference of some sort. (Taiwan, the only one which didn't originate from American designs, is kind of the exception that proves the rule, as their influence in the region has steadily been declining for practically as long as it's existed.) The only question is, how? There's no Taiwan here - selling South Korea to them would be crazy. So how do you make the first diplomatic overtures?

Japan was a developed industrial power well before the US got involved, and I think the case for claiming that "American interference" caused Chinese development is sketchy at best. I don't see any real historical evidence to support the idea that US interference is a necessary element to produce development in an East Asian state.