 Cultural factors can provide moral foundations for distinctive political practices and institutions (or at least different from those found in Western-style liberal democracies). In East Asian societies influenced by Confucianism, for example, it is widely held that children have a profound duty to care for elderly parents, a duty to be forsaken only in the most exceptional  circumstances.[7]  In political practice, it means that East Asian governments have an obligation to provide the social and economic conditions that facilitate the realization of this duty. Political debate tends to center on the question of whether the right to filial piety is best realized by means of a law that makes it mandatory for children to provide financial support for elderly parents as in mainland China, Japan, and Singapore or whether the state should rely more on indirect methods such as tax breaks and housing benefits that simply make at-home care for the elderly easier, as in Korea and Hong Kong. But the argument that there is a pressing need to secure this duty in East Asia is not a matter of political controversy.