China was somewhat unified and had a big chunk of the world's population and was more likely to record population levels -- though I'd guess there are huge error bars around the Three Kingdoms War and An Lushan Rebellion. If you control for political unity and population, were Chinese death rates in armed conflict higher than other regions?
 

The three historical figures I can think of who built giant institutions lasting thousands of years

Why draw the cutoff at thousands of years? And I'd guess recent institution building is much more relevant to EAs than ancient.

China does capitalism well without conflating capitalism with democracy

There were already the examples of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. (One could also consider European and South American states that were right-wing dictatorships). 
 

Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds.

Christian worlds? Secularism has been important in France since the French Revolution. What about India or Japan? What about Hellenistic culture or Rome?
 

Robust models of a region usually depend on knowing the region's history.

The question is how much "memory" or "persistence" the time series has. Mostly history is screened off by the present and recent past. You wouldn't predict North vs South Korea by looking at Korean history for any time period up to 1930s. 

The three historical figures I can think of who built giant institutions lasting thousands of years are Paul the Apostle, Mohammad and Qin Shihuang. 

I will not exactly classify Qin Shihuang as in that vein.  While the idea of the Mandate of Heaven and the idea that China should be unified into one dynasty has been fully established by him (Almost all rebellions in Chinese history were about overthrowing the emperor and replacing it with a new one, but only rarely about changing their government structure), the Qin dynasty collapsed with his son. Qin is not exactly known for being a long-lasting nation.

I believe Confucius is a much better example. His philosophy and teachings have been passed down all the way to today's China, and has held its importance for thousands of years.

I realize this is a 3mo old comment.

>Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds. This makes it easier to think about conflicts. I feel it produces a better understanding of political theory and strategy [? · GW].

Does not entangle? I thought China is the only country of note around that enforces their version of Catholic church with Chinese characteristics (the translation used by Wikipedia is "Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church", apparently excommunicated by the pope in Rome). One can discuss how it compares to Church of England's historical past or more recently, the protestant skepticism about JFK's Catholicism, but it is kind of remarkable on its own right.

(edit. Thinking about the little bit I do know about Chinese history ... Taiping Rebellion?)

China is nowhere near the power of America. A huge majority of their population are still peasants. Its power comes from the abuse and misery of the humans within it. 

China does not have the best poetry in the world, that is just your opinion.

China doesn't entangle religion with politics because all the people of culture were killed or fled to Taiwan. Communism banned it.

Based on the founding and core principles of capitalism, China fails, it succeeds at theft. Almost all their technology is stolen from the rest of the world.

You can get people to look at Chinese history all you want but no one will take you seriously if you sidestep the atrocities, that are even still happening. 

Yes to all. To add an attributable citation for the concept of tian 天, here is a comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] I wrote six months ago.

天 refers to material things which affect you but which you yourself lack the power to significantly influence. The standard and most poetic translation of 天 is "heaven", but 天 also includes the gods, fate, sky, weather, climate and all the other material things far above you. To the median person living today, 天 includes everything from the Federal Reserve to the orbit of Jupiter.

Many readers of Less Wrong come from a Western intellectual tradition where "heaven" is a moral immaterial Christian concept. I'm trying to draw attention to the fact that 天 is an amoral material relationship.

Note the link I use for "the gods". These are contradictory polytheistic gods, not coherent monotheistic gods.

Whether to describe Confucianism as spiritual depends on what you mean by "Confucianism" and "spiritual". Consider this scene from Mulan. It has spiritual elements but I would hesitate to describe it as "spiritual". It is related to Confucianism but the religious parts come from ancestor worship.

I wouldn't say that Confucianism is a religion.

If we go for a very technical take, the term "religion" refers only to Christianity. That's because the term was adopted during the Reformation era, and later expanded during the Enlightenment, to make some sense of what was going on between the different Nation States going for this or that version of Christianity, and then by contrasting all of those takes with the novel alternatives of Deism, Agnosticism, Atheism, of political power grounded on the people vs. on God etc., all the while "back porting" it to the question of the earlier disputes between Christendom's (the original term) original great schism and earlier heresies, and between those as a whole vs. Judaism, Islam, and so-called Paganism. As such, any attempt of extending it to anything beyond primarily Christianity internal disputes, and secondarily Abrahamic disputes, is fraught with complications, since one's operating more on the basis of analogies than on a strictly defined conceptual axis. For more details, check Catholic philosopher Edward Feser's blog post What is religion?

Given that, taking Confucianism to be a religion, or taking it not to be a religion, are both arguably valid, since it comes down to which aspects one's emphasizing and deemphasizing in their analogical approach.

Now, I consider Confucianism a religion because it had and has a priesthood, rites, temples, and presented itself as a continuation and development of ancient Chinese beliefs. Confucius himself, for instance, was a well regarded and accomplished expert in the art of ritual animal sacrifices, and it'd be very odd to try and disengage his religious piety from his intellectual work, when both in fact complement each other. It'd be akin to thinking of the Neoplatonic philosophers, and Neoplatonism, as non-religious despite many of them being pious worshippers of several Greek deities, deities who in turn can be taken to be as abstract as Confucianism's Tian. In fact, the very Physis referred to by the scholar mentioned in the Wikipedia article was a duly worshipped primordial goddess in the Orphic tradition in Greece.

Other polytheistic and/or ancestor-worshipping belief systems have similar traits. In fact, in the set of human belief systems, it's modern Western ones that stand out as somewhat weird -- or rather WEIRD -- in their sharp distinction between secular and religious spheres of influence and action. Most everyone else doesn't do that. Hence, maybe it'd be more accurate to say neither that Confucianism is a religion, nor that Confucianism isn't a religion, but rather that Confucianism, Neoplatonism, Hinduism and others are all holistic paths (that they're "daos"), and that both Western religions and non-religions alike are, all of them, so many daos.