Covid-19: A Confucian Underbelly?

31 March 2020

In its way the table below is accurate, but in the sense of social science it is at least problematic. To say on 30 March that data for 28-29 March shows that at a global level the number of deaths from the corona virus as a percentage of total cases was 4.7%, is as good an estimate as we have at that time.

We know now that the denominator of this particular vulgar fraction depends heavily on the efficiency of identification and testing, the date of first case and the size of the total population. But the first of these varies enormously, but not directly with, say, GDP per person or government expenditure on health generally or, during this crisis, the amount spent on managing it. The numerator is more drastic and modest, so more reliable. Some nations might have disguised number of deaths, but with some difficulty – for most nations it is a frank measure of reality and so a better figure for analysis. More mundanely, at any juncture during the COVID-19 crisis it’s as good as any other in delineating a global pattern.

In Group 2 of the below table six East Asian nations provide 14% of total cases and a death/cases figure of 3.7%, very significantly smaller than the world average. This group contains China, the original epicentre, with a death/cases ratio of 4.0% and a huge weighting of 86% of that group’s total cases.

In Group 1, four western nations provide 45% of total cases and a death/cases figure of 6.3% a large upward deviation from the world benchmark. This group contains the USA with a death/cases ratio of 1.8% and a heavy weighting of 39% of that group’s total cases. It is clear enough that on our rough and ready measure and despite the apparent very low ratio for the USA, East Asia outperformed the West with not much over than half the West’s death/cases ratio.

This finding has not been recognised or much remarked upon. There is some tardy recognition in the Western media of the efficacy of the early and astute character of Asian government intervention despite the relative lack of medical facilities in comparison to the far richer western nations. Given that the four western nations with their total population of 497 million registered 46% of global cases, and well over three times the East Asian cases, suggests that this sadly high western figure was no function of large populations, in fact all but the reverse.

The Japanese case from group two with the most comparable population and economic history and income per head, has a death/rates percentage figure of 3.1 percent, around one-third that of the average of the combined European nations of group one, Italy, Spain and Britain. Finally, differences in standards of living in terms of purchasing power parity between groups one and two seem not to have been a limiting factor. The unweighted average of $PPP (purchasing power parity) for the Western group being $45,234, for the East Asian group $51,113.

Within the East Asian group, variations on this measure do not seem to explain different virus experiences. Japan and South Korea, for instance, have comparable standards of living but Japan’s death/cases ratio is twice that of Korea.

The inclusion of the 5 South Asian nations of group three gives some check on generalisation in showing an overall even lower deaths/cases average than East Asia at 3.3%. But here there are some more straight forward factors at work. Generally, their time has yet to come, initial cases of the virus being only in February or even March, and all being later than the East Asian group, so it is too soon to see the possibly dramatic results of the near future. Here, the number of cases per million is much lower than anywhere else with India’s at only 0.7. The better measure of deaths/cases already shows some high ratios especially that of Indonesia at 8.9%, not far off that of Italy.

East Asian nations share a large number of socio-cultural features, ranging from written language, life aspirations and the high importance both economically and socially of small businesses, to what I have referred to, vividly if clumsily, as an underbelly of very long-established Confucian values. The presence of the latter within the lives of many East Asian peoples, as well as their governors, might go far in explaining much of the pattern of what we are witnessing in the varying efforts of the management of COVID-19.

These economies all have very large informal components composed of millions of small businesses set alongside a fast-growing modernised sector. It is from the latter that we first saw the pictures of many families thanking the medical services by clashing and ringing their metal cutlery and plates on balconies in basically middle-class dwelling areas. A much greater and poorer mass of large city dwellers and street people can only handle the situation of danger to health and collapse of local markets by tramping away from the bright lights back to the villages and country towns from which they came. The results of this sort of massive virus impact will be seen for some time into the future.

SOURCES: Coronavirus Worldometer

Cheung, Yin-Wong, ‘Purchasing Power Parity’, in Reinert, Kenneth A. et al. (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy, Princeton, 2009.

Nor can the poor performance of the West be readily explained in terms of the three most oft-debated ‘factors’ - medical facilities and prior investments in health, relevant scientific and medical knowledge or, even, tardy or inefficient government policies.

Clearly, the investment of the four richer western nations in health facilities was – measured in strictly financial terms and applied to formal public facilities – far greater than that of heavily weighted China or South Korea. In group 1, scientific, technical and medical knowledge and the communities of expertise surrounding them were at a higher level than anywhere else on earth, and the western group had at least a 2-week advantage over the East in terms of later initiation.

It is also now admitted that China did indeed pass what it knew about the virus from early January to both the WHO and the US authorities. Comparative government policy is more difficult to evaluate as a possible cause of differing instances and patterns. There is a great fuzz of quibbling in and between nations – as well as in international organisations – concerning the appropriateness or degree of public interventions.

In both Britain and the United States flamboyant performances by Prime Minister and President do not make up for seeming fundamental flaws in efficiency of testing and provision of care or protection facilities – it certainly cannot help if a President seeking further office announces repeatedly and in the face of expert opinion that the population should be congregating in churches whilst preparing to go back to work! In both UK and US more debate and attention, and far more funding, has been directed to the supposed needs of the economy now and in recovery mode.

The unfortunate Italians were the earliest in Europe to face the steep incline in cases and deaths and record at 28-29 March the highest death/cases ratio (10.8%) on the 2nd highest number of total cases (92,472).

This does not cover all explanations that might be offered, but it does embrace the ones now most debated. Elsewhere I have briefly suggested that there are physical and structural components of any disease environment – such as proximity, permeability, and character of the frontiers of an epicentre; densities and institutions within cities; relations of small businesses to their local communities, and so on – but these cannot be emulated and tend to increase variations without forming patterns.

The most likely candidate as an explanans of the pattern (as far as we can see such a thing), is cultural and relates to comparative degrees and types of civility, compliance and cohesion and the comparative financial and political costs of achieving such desiderata at a time of crisis. In other words, and still admitting all the possible faults in starting with problematic data, analysis of what is happening at a global level must start with the stark difference in Western to Asian experiences and performances whilst emphasising that we are addressing a classically complex system.

This latter might encourage us to abandon the enterprise or it might force us to admit of diverse forces encompassing the economic and the political embraced within environs dominated by anthropological and cultural processes and institutions.

The advantages of this suggested refined perspective are that it might just lead to a reliable set of conclusions. It also might settle some of the debate over the efficacy of different governmental interventions, from China to the US. It may be that efficiency of officialdom in the crisis depends on prerequisite cultural factors outside of the short-term control of any authorities. Furthermore, the selection within governance of particular aims and instruments of management might itself be determined by the cultural frame within which politicians, governors and experts live and breath.

This is problematic to be sure, for it suggests that the period of crisis has established a sort of earthly, moving laboratory within which global comparisons and evaluations of varying national and regional cultures and modes of governance might be analysed, admired or found wanting. The crisis is a compound of a virus that is constant and cultural modes that vary. For present purposes, all else might be considered epiphenomenal or derivations of the two more basic compounded elements.

East Asian nations share a large number of socio-cultural features, ranging from written language, life aspirations and the high importance both economically and socially of small businesses, to what I have referred to vividly if clumsily as an underbelly of very long-established Confucian values. The presence of the latter within the daily lives of many East Asian peoples, as well as their governors, might go far in explaining much of the pattern of what we are witnessing in the varying efforts at virus management as expressed in the table above.

This is not easily identified in a quantitative fashion – during any one week, many families in Japan or in Taiwan and Hong Kong overtly worship as Buddhist, Christian, or amongst one of the many ‘new religions’ that developed mostly post-war. Those declaring themselves as ‘non-religious’ number around 50% (this includes communist China, but with Singapore as an exception declaring only 16% as non-religious), hugely higher than in South Asia (group 3) where basically no-one admits to being without active religious adherence.

Even the four western nations of our table register far lower levels of ‘non-religious’, at around a 20% average. But in East Asia the moral system of Confucius (551-479 BC) is in some fashion adhered to either alongside the other religions mentioned above, or is seen as ‘non-religious’ in that it advocates no god at odds with other deities and is most clearly a moral system designed to be lived within society without any external or eternal justification.

A mixture of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism vitiated by local practices and beliefs is very common, with South Korea probably in the lead with the Confucian component. If Confucian adherence is a major component of ‘Chinese folk religionists’ then the World Religion Database lists some 400 million for China under that heading for 2018.

Overall statistics do fail to capture the reality – most East Asians have a syncretic attitude to religion and their governments tend to have a very narrow and formal definition of any one religion, and of course Confucianism may act as a religion for all practical moral concerns without ever being defined as one. Ironically enough, Taiwan and to a lesser extent Hong Kong see themselves as the true bastions of Chinese cultural tradition and their societies and forms of behaviour take on strong Confucian forms, and are often adamant in defence of traditional festivities and ceremonies.

Confucianism as a moral system does not daily judge as a deity but is taken as providing overt precepts for good behaviour, defining the latter in terms of both the proper life for the individual per se, and as a mode of being that promotes a just and viable social and political system, or civilisation. Confucianism as an historically dynamic culture differs greatly in some respects between East Asian nations, and from an early date the island nation of Japan developed a form of neo-Confucianism that laid more stress on satisfying the moral conditions for vertical or hierarchical relations (for instance, the relations between Emperor and subject or father and daughter) than did the traditional Chinese mode which focused as much or more upon horizontal or community relations (for instance between brothers or friends). It has even been maintained that such distinctions explain the early economic rise of Japan and its adoption of styles of modernity that did not spell abandonment of early values and social roles.

In the more Chinese mode, Confucian culturalism cuts across the more ethnic or familial elements of identity that are so strong in western tradition, stressing in particular benevolence, justice, ceremony, knowledge and faith as principal virtues, but the first of these was and is seen as paramount.

It has been strongly argued that Chinese Confucianism’s stress on benevolence was especially adapted to the governance structures that existed there for so long, this giving it a broadly humanistic tenor, developed at a time when the mass of the people could reasonably believe that the Empire was the centre of the universe. Loyalties are as much to community as to family, but both are located in notions of obligation to authority and state. Again, loyalty to the state and to good governance is not a direct outcome of a ‘social contract’ of the more mechanistic or instrumental type developed for Europe by Locke and Hume and Rousseau during the Enlightenment.

Again, Confucianism does not make authority the outcome of a divine commission, as in the earlier western acceptance of the Divine Right of kings. Obligations arise, rather, as the organic outcomes of living in society, and resemble a network centred on no-one but located amidst all. No external deity is required though Confucianism did merge well with existing ancient moral systems, such as those of Mencius, Shintoism and Zen Buddhism in Japan, or those of ancestor worship elsewhere, and elements of all of these could merge into ideologies of action and national morality as with, in this case, the Japanese notion of Bushido.

It can, then, be reasonably argued that Confucianism was at the heart of the governmental imposition of a reign of moral order that linked governance to the moral relationships involved in the forging of a traditional civil society, and that today’s common adherence to Confucian precepts is a potent source of social behaviour, presumably most visible in times of stress such as famines, floods or threats from outside.

The adaptability of the complex mix of moral codes and religious doctrines from Buddhism and so on, meant that this social modus vivendi survived throughout the Maoist years and has been allowed more freedom in the years of economic growth. It helps explain early acquiescence to isolation and social distancing and other requirements of the authorities during the present crisis, the self-sufficiency of local communities that reduced costs and policing, and the respect for elders and superiors that inhibited bad behaviour in public, whether in shops or on street corners.

In contrast, the constitutionalism and democracy of the western mode has not stood up so well to the present crisis, as measured approximately in the table above. Western reportage is full of the drones that spy on people parking their cars in country towns, the quarrels and aggression found in supermarkets as food supplies appear to run out, the ham-fisted character of much policing as they enforce social distance rules along river banks and lightly-populated streets.

Britain provides the example of a police force that deliberately poured black dye into a local lake to discourage people from gathering there. Only in the West have we heard anything much of social pressure to minimise government expenditure and effort on older folk, or those whose immune systems are compromised, in order to give greater attention to the youngsters who might catch what for them could be considered at most a distressing flue. Reports are common enough that the teenagers from amongst that worthy majority gather on street corners with no thought to distance and follow individual shoppers and workers in order most deliberately to upset them if not threaten them.

Whilst in the main schools and hospitals have done their duty and often gone beyond, it does seem that for the western nations acquiescing to behaviour that is for the good of others as well as beneficial for oneself is more easily attained through known institutions than through local communities. Voluntarism attached to hospitals or food-banks can work but the more organic natural benevolence we might associate with a Confucian world seems a far weaker cultural trait.

In conclusion, COVID-19 is the same virus causing varying degrees and types of havoc throughout most of the world. The virus outbreak might well be viewed as a global laboratory for the functioning of humanity’s cultures and values, even for some comparative testing of different moral and behavioural systems across, between, and within today’s nation states.

Explaining differences in the pattern in which the virus spread globally is complex because data is problematic and we are dealing with a highly complex system that would never yield to any easy interpretation. Here we have argued from the table above that the most obvious explanations relating to different outcomes in different nations or regions do not seem to add up to much at this early stage.

This has encouraged us to turn away from conventional explanations relating to income, wealth and facilities or the character of government intervention, and towards more cultural elements, particularly the Confucianism permeating the modes of behaviour and social obligation that are to be found in East Asia, as against the more contractual and individualistic democratic cultures of the west.

The fact that our East Asian group embraces major non-western democracies does not weaken the position once we admit that - especially during the 20th century - political systems such as communism, nationalism and democracy have fallen across a broadly Confucian substructure or foundation. Whilst this may not normally be very visible, the ‘laboratory’ conditions provided by the Covid 19 virus point to the actual civil workings of the moral and political cultures within which we all live. How we then choose to judge these cultures is a matter for the future.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Ian Inkster PhD, FRHS, is Professorial Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London; a senior fellow in the Taiwan Studies Program, China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham; and the editor of the international journal, History of Technology. Since 1973 he has held professorial posts in the UK, Australia, and Taiwan. Image credit: CC BY-NC 4.0/Gabe Lorka/Flickr.

Faultlines9DLApril 3, 2020China, Covid-19, Confucian, WHO