Victor Lieberman in Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830 that one reason the “Indian model” of statecraft and culture was more favored to the “Chinese model” is that the former is far less intense and easier to execute than the latter. We now know that a substantial number of Indians actually migrated to Southeast Asia in the 1st millennium, but that’s not sufficient to explain everything. The Thai arrived in Southeast Asia as Mahayana Buddhists but everywhere shifted to Theravada (the Shan in Burma are Tai).

Lieberman’s thesis is that the full package of Confucian statecraft requires a large literate bureaucratic class. Vietnam after 1500 shifted in large part to this model, but it was the exception, not the rule. And Vietnam is the mainland Southeast Asian state that looks much more to China than India in its high culture. The reason the Chinese model was hard, and really only Korea pulled it off (Vietnam and Japan executed parts of it), is that it requires a level of cultural conformity and investment in education for the elites that is a massive opportunity cost in time. It’s a lot easier to just express loyalty to the semi-divine king rather than study classical texts in the hopes of achieving high office.

But, I just realized that the modern world is much more amenable to the Confucian model! Mass literacy is already common, and the bureaucratic state is the rule, not the exception.

And now, more than ever, we need virtue in our elites. The rational “eat what you can kill” model of modern elite culture in the West is producing a group of individuals who are feeding off the massive carrion of their dying societies.