Oranckay has a very good analysis of the Korean stem cell fiasco (hat tip Marmot).  The key point is the social context that enabled and supported the fraud even after some questions were being raised:

Put simply, I think Korean society as a whole has itself to blame for
the international embarrassment. It got really hard to question him
once he published the 2005 article then went to speak at a conference
in the U.S.,
upon his return to Korea that he’d gone to “the heart of America” and
“planted a Korean flag on the top of the hill of bioscience.”

    National pride, especially among younger Koreans Oranckay argues, made it socially impossible to question the underlying science.  To do so would have been seen as unpatriotic.   That sounds convincing to me.

     And let me point out, given my earlier points about Confucianism, that nationalism is a very different creature than Confucianism.  While it may be true that Confucianism can be, and historically has been, appropriated by nationalist narratives – "we are a Confucian people" – there is nothing necessarily nationalist about Confucianism in and of itself.  Indeed, nationalism is a modern phenomenon, bound up with macro-historical processes of political, social and economic modernization.  For most of its history, Confucianism existed outside of a nationalist context.  I would even go so far as to argue that Confucianism is more universalistic and cosmopolitan than it is nationalist.  From Confucius’s point of view, if you learned how to be civilized, than you were a part of civilization, regardless of your ethnic background.  What mattered was not what was in your blood, but how you behaved.

     Bottom line: it was nationalism that enabled Dr. Hwang’s grand deceit, not Confucianism.