confucian thougts on merchants

Answer 1

The Confucian opinion of merchants is based, partially, on what can be described as a productivity scale. In Confucian, and by extension across several East Asian societies (e.g. Japan), merchants were often ranked lower in social systems. This is due to the idea that merchants did not produce anything of value for themselves. Even peasants, seen as a lower social stratum in Western societies, produced their own food, for example. Therefore, in Confucian systems, the Peasants would usually have been placed above merchants.