Taiwan’s success has been ascribed to many factors, including an emphasis on education, extensive infrastructure development, early and thorough land reform, very high rates of saving and investment, a mixture of constructive foreign influences and diffusion of commercial ideas from Japan and the United States, an effective government industrialization strategy, the free market’s release of human energies and creativity, a 1960s boom resulting from the Vietnam War, the initiation of an export-led growth strategy in the midst of the rapidly expanding world economy of the early 1960s, direct American aid—and Taiwan’s use of that aid for investment rather than consumption, the work ethic and productive attitudes of the Taiwanese labor force, a long history as an entrepreneurial culture, the movement into entrepreneurship of capable local islanders who sought opportunities for advancement but were blocked from the political arena, and the survival instinct— the necessity of economic development as a defense against attack from the PRC.