Don’t forget that Confucianism values education highly, allowing for the meritorious (exam passers) to get important government jobs without having family connections or being of noble birth. Confucianism also includes the concept of a just ruler, answerable to society, not just to God. If the ruler is inept he loses the “mandate of heaven” i.e. legtimacy.
Corruption exists in every society: how about Indonesia? (Muslim) Italy? (Catholic)
Responding to a positive response to my own post (rather than a negative) is going to seem self-congratulatory, so I’ll start by saying it isn’t.
As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said through Sherlock Holmes, “One can say what the average man will do, but one cannot say what a specific man will do,” or words to that effect. What I posted was not a stereotyping, but it was meant to be a generality that applies in many/most cases. Unfortunately, and as per usual with such posts, some claim that I was stating universalities when they weren’t.
In my original post I also said:
I found with Koreans that girls seemed to respond to the fact that westerners treat boys and girls as equals. Both in schools and Koreans on TV, women/girls tended to speak better than men/boys, likely because of equal attention and/or the females seeing it as a way to get ahead.
And on a final note, the “lack of self-consciousness when amongst strangers” certainly explains the public nose picking. 