What makes a man turn neutral?

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"Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?" - D.O.O.P. Captain Zapp Brannigan

My contributions

A list I helped to add into the Mercantilism article

The Austrian lawyer and scholar Philipp Wilhelm von Hornick, in his Austria Over All, If She Only Will of 1684, detailed a nine-point program of what he deemed effective national economy, which sums up the tenets of mercantilism comprehensively:

• That every inch of a country's soil be utilized for agriculture, mining or manufacturing.
• That all raw materials found in a country be used in domestic manufacture, since finished goods have a higher value than raw materials.
• That a large, working population be encouraged.
• That all export of gold and silver be prohibited and all domestic money be kept in circulation.
• That all imports of foreign goods be discouraged as much as possible.
• That where certain imports are indispensable they be obtained at first hand, in exchange for other domestic goods instead of gold and silver.
• That as much as possible, imports be confined to raw materials that can be finished [in the home country].
• That opportunities be constantly sought for selling a country's surplus manufactures to foreigners, so far as necessary, for gold and silver.
• That no importation be allowed if such goods are sufficiently and suitably supplied at home.

Other than Von Hornick, there were no mercantilist writers presenting an overarching scheme for the ideal economy, as Adam Smith would later do for classical economics.

A bit of an improvement to the page on China's Imperial Examination system

This system had a huge influence on Imperial Chinese society and was partly responsible for changes in the power structure of the Tang and Song Dynasties that would hold long after their dissolution. The system assisted in the replacement of what had been relatively few aristocratic families with a more diffuse and populous class of typically rural-dwelling, landowning scholar-bureaucrats, organized into clans.

Changes to Confucianism's Influence in Modern Times section

Important military and political figures in modern Chinese history continued to be influenced by Confucianism, like the Muslim warlord Ma Fuxiang. The New Life Movement relied heavily on Confucianism.

Referred to variously as the Confucian hypothesis and as a debated component of the more all-encompassing Asian Development Model, there exists among political scientists and economists a theory that Confucianism plays a large latent role in the ostensibly non-Confucian cultures of modern-day East Asia, in the form of the rigorous work ethic it endowed those cultures with. These scholars have held that, if not for Confucianism's influence on these cultures, many of the people of the East Asia region would not have been able to modernize and industrialize as quickly as Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and even China have done. Most scholars attribute the origins of this idea to futurologist Herman Kahn's World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond. In years since, this hypothesis has been thoroughly discredited. See Hicks' account of it referenced above for details, or for an alternate and more current explanation, Cristobal Kay's "Why East Asia Overtook Latin America: Agrarian Reform, Industrialization, and Development."