From all that I've studied of history, it seems undeniable that cultivating a strong business class & commercial traditions definitely goes a long way to making a country strong. It's how the Italian & Dutch maritime powers were able to punch way above their weight for centuries (Venice vs. the Byzantines and the early Netherlands vs. Spain + Portugal, respectively). America, of course, was not only at its strongest but also most prosperous - for everyone, not just the uppermost crust of society - when the middle class was thriving. And China was approaching an early industrial revolution under its most innovative and merchant-friendly dynasty, the Song, who had set up what we might recognize as a proto-capitalist system with the world's first paper money, joint-stock companies, etc.
It's difficult to imagine a world where the Song got to continue on that trajectory instead of being crippled by the Jurchens & then obliterated by the Mongols. It would, at minimum, certainly have been a world where China consistently remains the top world power. As it was, instead China historically got centuries of stagnation under the neo-Confucian Ming and then oppression & ridiculous amounts of corruption (even by Chinese imperial standards) under the Qing. The same is true of Korea (more neo-Confucian stagnation) and Japan (stagnation under the isolationist Tokugawa Shogunate, ultimately broken by Matthew Perry after said stagnation left them in the West's dust technologically).
From all that I've studied of history, it seems undeniable that cultivating a strong business class & commercial traditions definitely goes a long way to making a country strong. It's how the Italian & Dutch maritime powers were able to punch way above their weight for centuries (Venice vs. the Byzantines and the early Netherlands vs. Spain + Portugal, respectively). America, of course, was not only at its strongest but also most prosperous - for everyone, not just the uppermost crust of society - when the middle class was thriving. And China was approaching an early industrial revolution under its most innovative and merchant-friendly dynasty, the Song, who had set up what we might recognize as a proto-capitalist system with the world's first paper money, joint-stock companies, etc.
It's difficult to imagine a world where the Song got to continue on that trajectory instead of being crippled by the Jurchens & then obliterated by the Mongols. It would, at minimum, certainly have been a world where China consistently remains the top world power. As it was, instead China historically got centuries of stagnation under the neo-Confucian Ming and then oppression & ridiculous amounts of corruption (even by Chinese imperial standards) under the Qing. The same is true of Korea (more neo-Confucian stagnation) and Japan (stagnation under the isolationist Tokugawa Shogunate, ultimately broken by Matthew Perry after said stagnation left them in the West's dust technologically).