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).