Confucius was never born

What if the greatest teacher in Chinese History, Confucius, was never born. And consequently, the Ru School thinking didn't exist. What effect would this event makes on Chinese History and the world?
 

Hendryk

Banned
I gave this some thought at one point, and came to the conclusion that the consequences wouldn't necessarily be as far-reaching as one might think. Confucianism, or Rujia, wasn't so much an invention as the written-down version of a civilizational ethos as old as China itself. This ethos would still exist without Confucius, meaning that the basic societal values of East Asian cultures wouldn't be markedly different.

Without Confucianism, some other philosophical school would eventually be picked up as the imperial state ideology--Moism, for example, or perhaps a suitably watered-down version of Legalism. But beneath the formal trappings, it would still be about legitimizing the social hegemony of China's dominant class, the scholar-officials of the state bureaucracy.
 
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