Confucianism was chosen by the chinese power-that-be because he encouraged obedience and conformity. It's the reason Chinese society stagnated with a monolithic central authority. With a more libertarian approach, there would be more trade and research and given chinese huge population and food availability, they might have made a lot of technological progress and we would have a colony on Mars by now.

So in that way confucianism was similar to christianity during the dark age in that they were used by the powerful to sedate the masses.