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I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it

I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit darker. It almost felt like another Chinese city. I had even been to HK several times when I was in middle school in Taiwan (I was born in America, but was a “reverse import” to Taiwan) as well as a mandarin language tutor during university, and was always amazed by the richness of HK culture from fishing villages in Saikung to bustling life in Tsim Tsa Tsui and in Central with relics of British colonialism. Now many unique elements of HK life had disappeared. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution. It has its own identity from the aboriginal population, the settlers from the dynastic period, Japanese colonization, and influences from the Republic of China refugees (or occupiers, depending on your POV, post 1949 Chinese settlers) and American forces. And since 2018, I’ve seen the Taiwanese double down on their Taiwanese identity and pride, and in many ways Taiwan is the envy of China (also literally). If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history. Now I would probably live in Taiwan and Japan. Edit: Taiwan hasn’t always been a democracy, and the path to democracy hasn’t been easy (just ask America). It’s not perfect like any other well-running democracy, but it’s the closest paragon we have in the Chinese diaspora. The presidency has transitioned peacefully to different parties since the 1990s.

chenster 4y ago
> it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution. Precisely, I couldn't say it better.
coldtea 4y ago
>Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy. A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
- daemoens 4y ago
  So it's still a bastion of democracy?
  - coldtea 4y ago
    No, it's just an ex-dictatorship with a progress towards a democracy and skeletons in its closet...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - fortuna86 4y ago
      You aren't refuting what he's saying you're just trying to change the subject.
      - coupdejarnac 4y ago
        This guy pops up in many China threads to regurgitate CCP talking points.
        coldtea 4y ago
        Yeah, god forbid somebody doesn't have the US viewpoint on foreign policy and other countries, especially given its excellent track record and how it has fucked up one country after another for a century! Anybody having different opinions must be burned to the stake!
scrubs 4y ago
Although off topic from the original post, would you entertain this question? What's Taiwan's position on integration with China? What does Taiwan want for itself? I'd like to hear more about that minus American and Chinese input.
- jasonjei 4y ago
  This is an extremely interesting question because I’ve heard various viewpoints. The vast majority want to keep the “technical debt” (legacy code being “Republic of China”) of this uneasy bridge to China—that is trade and movement of people between the strait, and maintaining the status quo of the “Republic of China” government (controlling Taiwan) and PRC (controlling China or “mainland”). Many Taiwanese don’t want war, but they already are functionally independent. The PRC has never governed in Taiwan. The ROC, which governed China from 1912 to 1949, governs Taiwan and its child islands. Many young Taiwanese just want to be Taiwanese and left alone, but the vast majority want to keep the status quo as long as it’s tenable (it’s not, Xi Jinping has indicated a timeline). The big question is how this might be possible without poking the bear that resembles Pooh… It’s obvious to most Taiwanese that China won’t keep its promises, since it made clear violations of promises made to the HK people and UK. Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war.
  - scrubs 4y ago
    Well, if China invades it'll have even less incentive to maintain anything remotely like pre-invasion. You gave HK as the example. That was only paperwork to get in the front door.
  - maxloh 4y ago
    > Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war. Maybe data suggest otherwise? The number of Taiwaneses that support Taiwan to "Maintain status quo, move towards unification" and "Unification as soon as possible" has been dropped from 12.8% and 5.0% in 2018 to 7.5% and 1.4% in 2019. Meanwhile the number of Taiwaneses that support "Maintain status quo, move towards independence" has been rised from 12.8% in 2018 to 25.8% in 2020. Note: I am a one of the HongKongers fled to Taiwan after the Anti-Extradition protest in 2019. [0]: https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963 https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963
duxup 4y ago
>Chinese diaspora I had no idea how wide it is until a family member married someone from Asia and he explained ot me that his family thinks of themselves as ethnically Chinese, although they're totally disconnected from China.
- dumpster_fire 4y ago
  Wait why is that a problem? Nationality and ethnicity are two different things.
  - duxup 4y ago
    I don't think / didn't say it was a problem.
    - dumpster_fire 4y ago
      Someone married an Asian whose family happened to be ethnic Chinese, which made you think "huh these people are everywhere". (With regards to the diaspora comment) Then the comment, paraphrasing, "they think they're Chinese when they're not Chinese nationals at all". If their ancestors were from China, they don't "think" they're ethnic Chinese, they are ethnic Chinese. Unless you get into the nitty gritty clans and groups of the gigantic landmass. The use of "think ... although" indicates you disagree with how they identify their ethnicity. Thus I assumed you felt it was a problem. Apologies if I read intentions that weren't there.
      - cushychicken 4y ago
        I think OP meant he was surprised that the family felt a strong enough link to China to identify themselves as Chinese, even across time and distance.
        dumpster_fire 4y ago
        Calling it a strong enough link is giving it too much credit. It's more of an acknowledgement of lineage. Not difficult when names, festivals, languages are retained. In fact, if you're within 3 generations of emigration, you would even know the province and town your great grandparents came from. Just as an example of something with a flimsier premise. Say a German American who doesn't speak the language, don't have known family there, have no loyalty to Germany, celebrate none of the German festivals, and the only indication left is a last name Schmidt. We don't say, "huh the German diaspora is everywhere" when these people say their ancestors are from Germany.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
> and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. No, it's unrealistic to think the the ROC would ever effectively surrender to the PRC however HK's reintegration was managed.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Hong Kong was promised to have democracy, human rights and access to China. If they had kept those promises, then I believe many Taiwanese would have welcomed reunification.
  - gudh 4y ago
    Well, I doubt about that. Reunification? Maybe welcomed by the elders, among the young people, majority prefer to be independent
  - re-thc 4y ago
    We all knew (hopefully) that would never happen (keep their promise). It's nothing China specific. Even lots of elected politicians fail on it in any country.
    - chii 4y ago
      I think hindsight might've clouded your assessment of the attitude during the time pre-HK crackdown. It was originally a time of optimistic hope that China would become more and more democratic, and the integration of HK back to the mainland will not have been hard (at least, china would meet somewhere in the middle).
      - re-thc 4y ago
        There was already a wave of people considering, planning and did actually leave pre-1997 and around that time. A few did go back to HK afterwards when things looked better but left again due to the current issues. I don't know who was optimistic. The West? Definitely not those in HK. It was a time when anti-China sentiment was high and supported by the media, artists, etc as the trend (vs the crackdown now). There were songs and campaigns supporting those that wanted freedom. Learnt from history many of the older generation that have witnessed the war and after knew of how CCP and army worked. No 1 wanted a death sentence either. Those have worked in the mainland know the "law" doesn't exist as it does in the West (including HK at the time). Gang activity vastly dropped post-1997 because of a fear of the death sentence. A lot of them and their money left for other countries.
dirtyid 4y ago
>It almost felt like another Chinese city ... >If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history OTOH this attitude is why PRC finally calibrating HK for PRC nationals/one-way permits instead of privileged foreign expats was long overdue. Mainlanders I know in HK find the new mix PRC/HK mix more preferable than UK/HK, less visible discrimination etc. Local nativism still exists but less overt than pre NSL. Applies to the mainland as well - first exodus of privileged discontent expats who thought they were indispensable in the mid 2010s - only to be replaced by qualified nationals. Think of it as PRC fixing their H1B problem. Something many in tech have comparably aligned opinions on. E: over comment limit @charlieyu1 That's ~2 years worth of one way permits from PRC. Xi can snap his fingers and send 1M unemployed college educated mainlanders to HK tomorrow if he wants. Let's not pretend it's a big / existential loss, reality is PRC now has an abundance of talent who are much more deserving of living/running HK than most HKers who were merely privileged to be born in a city with constrained immigration requirements that puts mainland hukous system to shame. Under any reasonably fair system, HK should be treated like just ANY OTHER CHINESE CITY, like how under qualified people get squeezed out via gentrification in tier1 cities in every other country leading to local culture changes. It's not pretty, but it's how most of the world functions. Ultimately HK "culture" is the result of undue privilege enforced by 2 systems that benefit locals and expats instead of 1B+ PRC nationals. Expats I get, because some expertise needs to be imported and you need foreigners in the country for track2 diplomacy. But unlike pre 2000s when PRC human capital was borderline North Korea, there's nothing particularly deserving about a person born and raised in HK anymore. If anything they are increasingly less deserving, with a particularly bad human capita / talent pool. HK _still_ some of the poorest tertiary education statistics by high income standards (~25% when it should be 40-50+%) to stay competitive. Meanwhile PRC is spitting out 8M+ higher-ed a year, there's no reason why HKers or expats should have priority over qualified mainlanders anymore. If HKers want to emigrate, go ahead, there's no shortage of deserving replacements in mainland with 100x more bodies to draw from. For mainlanders, continuing HK privilege simply doesn't make sense anymore.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  And the result is mass exodus of Hongkongers, especially the younger generation. 110K people moved to UK alone in the last two years. That's 1.5% of population, and UK alone. People are leaving the city faster than back in East Germany before Berlin Wall. And why people born and raised in Hong Kong have to give way to privileged mainlanders who don't share any culture with us at all?
robomartin 4y ago
How would you wrap Singapore into your comment? I was recently there and took note of what looked like significant Chinese cultural influence almost everywhere.
- refurb 4y ago
  76% of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese, so no surprise you saw a lot of Chinese influence there.
- jasonjei 4y ago
  Singapore is a republic with a large population of the Chinese diaspora. However, the control of government under its system has not changed parties since its independence from the UK (whether you agree or not, some have called it de facto single party state). Chinese culture is weaved extensively into its culture, including Chinese character names in identification cards for those that identify as Chinese ethnicity. I have many Singaporean friends of Chinese ethnicity, and most would see themselves distinct from China—not Chinese but of Chinese heritage.
  - ashconnor 4y ago
    Singapore is a complex beast. On the one hand, all the political tools to kick the PAP out exist. Elections are free albeit not entirely fair. That said the PAP has used the legal system to exclude opposition candidates and the election districts are gerrymandered [0]. But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections [1]. They've steered the economy well. The PAP regularly receive praise here on HN because of their effective technocracy. [0] - https://newnaratif.com/how-gerrymandering-creates-unfair-elections-in-singapore/ https://newnaratif.com/how-gerrymandering-creates-unfair-ele... [1] - https://elections.viz.sg/ https://elections.viz.sg/
    - chii 4y ago
      > But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections It only takes one person going "rogue" to topple this system of trust. Is it so hard to imagine that not all authoritarian systems could be continuously benevolent?
puppymaster 4y ago
and it's not just one of those fake democracy - it's as free as a true democratic country can be, as experienced anecdotally and demonstrated in their constant top 3 finish in Freedom Index.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Which Freedom Index? There are a few.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fhe 4y ago
would you consider living in Singapore? It seems to have a lot going for it, maybe apart from the high living expense.
- re-thc 4y ago
  And there's never a (proper) Winter night :)
thowieruoi3243 4y ago
> it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. I don't want to reduce what you've said, but the fact is that Taiwan grew rich because of US support that helped integrate it into the global economy, and that wouldn't have come without its opposition to the mainland. Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR. India plans on doing the same wrt to China, but that country, like Africa, is too deeply colonized (likewise, with a despicable morally corrupt elite) to do anything of value to its own people IMO. People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream. Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth (regardless of what 'expats', who often both fetish-ize and dehumanize Asians, think).
- dannyobrien 4y ago
  i can't speak for the Taiwanese link, but my recollection was that China's rise in wealth (and investment and support from the US) only really took off in the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- sfmike 4y ago
  hard no. usa helped but taiwan themselves made TSMC's due to their work and family culture and studying and working hard their entire lives. To say Nvidia and AMD and Gigabyte and the numerous brands from Taiwan are due to USA is farfetched. It's actually more reasonable to say it's due to China or Malaysia/Thailand etc where the manufacturing is then USA.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    They got all the know how from the US as a jump start. Plus loads of financial aid especially during the 90s. Sure, during the 2000s they moved ahead as they weren't stupid and didn't blow that chance, they're smart and hard working, but their rise is ultimately due to the US great interest in that island for military/strategic reasons.
wolverine876 4y ago
> retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution Very interesting. Would you go into more detail?
dandy23 4y ago
Your comment is not that relevant to the article as you talk about Hong Kong and the article about mainland China. Of course there might be similarities, but the Hong Kong story is still completely different.
brwck 4y ago
[flagged]

chenster 4y ago

> it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution. Precisely, I couldn't say it better.

coldtea 4y ago

>Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy. A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

daemoens 4y ago
So it's still a bastion of democracy?
- coldtea 4y ago
  No, it's just an ex-dictatorship with a progress towards a democracy and skeletons in its closet...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fortuna86 4y ago
    You aren't refuting what he's saying you're just trying to change the subject.
    - coupdejarnac 4y ago
      This guy pops up in many China threads to regurgitate CCP talking points.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        Yeah, god forbid somebody doesn't have the US viewpoint on foreign policy and other countries, especially given its excellent track record and how it has fucked up one country after another for a century! Anybody having different opinions must be burned to the stake!

scrubs 4y ago

Although off topic from the original post, would you entertain this question? What's Taiwan's position on integration with China? What does Taiwan want for itself? I'd like to hear more about that minus American and Chinese input.

jasonjei 4y ago
This is an extremely interesting question because I’ve heard various viewpoints. The vast majority want to keep the “technical debt” (legacy code being “Republic of China”) of this uneasy bridge to China—that is trade and movement of people between the strait, and maintaining the status quo of the “Republic of China” government (controlling Taiwan) and PRC (controlling China or “mainland”). Many Taiwanese don’t want war, but they already are functionally independent. The PRC has never governed in Taiwan. The ROC, which governed China from 1912 to 1949, governs Taiwan and its child islands. Many young Taiwanese just want to be Taiwanese and left alone, but the vast majority want to keep the status quo as long as it’s tenable (it’s not, Xi Jinping has indicated a timeline). The big question is how this might be possible without poking the bear that resembles Pooh… It’s obvious to most Taiwanese that China won’t keep its promises, since it made clear violations of promises made to the HK people and UK. Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war.
- scrubs 4y ago
  Well, if China invades it'll have even less incentive to maintain anything remotely like pre-invasion. You gave HK as the example. That was only paperwork to get in the front door.
- maxloh 4y ago
  > Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war. Maybe data suggest otherwise? The number of Taiwaneses that support Taiwan to "Maintain status quo, move towards unification" and "Unification as soon as possible" has been dropped from 12.8% and 5.0% in 2018 to 7.5% and 1.4% in 2019. Meanwhile the number of Taiwaneses that support "Maintain status quo, move towards independence" has been rised from 12.8% in 2018 to 25.8% in 2020. Note: I am a one of the HongKongers fled to Taiwan after the Anti-Extradition protest in 2019. [0]: https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963 https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963

duxup 4y ago

>Chinese diaspora I had no idea how wide it is until a family member married someone from Asia and he explained ot me that his family thinks of themselves as ethnically Chinese, although they're totally disconnected from China.

dumpster_fire 4y ago
Wait why is that a problem? Nationality and ethnicity are two different things.
- duxup 4y ago
  I don't think / didn't say it was a problem.
  - dumpster_fire 4y ago
    Someone married an Asian whose family happened to be ethnic Chinese, which made you think "huh these people are everywhere". (With regards to the diaspora comment) Then the comment, paraphrasing, "they think they're Chinese when they're not Chinese nationals at all". If their ancestors were from China, they don't "think" they're ethnic Chinese, they are ethnic Chinese. Unless you get into the nitty gritty clans and groups of the gigantic landmass. The use of "think ... although" indicates you disagree with how they identify their ethnicity. Thus I assumed you felt it was a problem. Apologies if I read intentions that weren't there.
    - cushychicken 4y ago
      I think OP meant he was surprised that the family felt a strong enough link to China to identify themselves as Chinese, even across time and distance.
      - dumpster_fire 4y ago
        Calling it a strong enough link is giving it too much credit. It's more of an acknowledgement of lineage. Not difficult when names, festivals, languages are retained. In fact, if you're within 3 generations of emigration, you would even know the province and town your great grandparents came from. Just as an example of something with a flimsier premise. Say a German American who doesn't speak the language, don't have known family there, have no loyalty to Germany, celebrate none of the German festivals, and the only indication left is a last name Schmidt. We don't say, "huh the German diaspora is everywhere" when these people say their ancestors are from Germany.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

> and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. No, it's unrealistic to think the the ROC would ever effectively surrender to the PRC however HK's reintegration was managed.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Hong Kong was promised to have democracy, human rights and access to China. If they had kept those promises, then I believe many Taiwanese would have welcomed reunification.
- gudh 4y ago
  Well, I doubt about that. Reunification? Maybe welcomed by the elders, among the young people, majority prefer to be independent
- re-thc 4y ago
  We all knew (hopefully) that would never happen (keep their promise). It's nothing China specific. Even lots of elected politicians fail on it in any country.
  - chii 4y ago
    I think hindsight might've clouded your assessment of the attitude during the time pre-HK crackdown. It was originally a time of optimistic hope that China would become more and more democratic, and the integration of HK back to the mainland will not have been hard (at least, china would meet somewhere in the middle).
    - re-thc 4y ago
      There was already a wave of people considering, planning and did actually leave pre-1997 and around that time. A few did go back to HK afterwards when things looked better but left again due to the current issues. I don't know who was optimistic. The West? Definitely not those in HK. It was a time when anti-China sentiment was high and supported by the media, artists, etc as the trend (vs the crackdown now). There were songs and campaigns supporting those that wanted freedom. Learnt from history many of the older generation that have witnessed the war and after knew of how CCP and army worked. No 1 wanted a death sentence either. Those have worked in the mainland know the "law" doesn't exist as it does in the West (including HK at the time). Gang activity vastly dropped post-1997 because of a fear of the death sentence. A lot of them and their money left for other countries.

dirtyid 4y ago

>It almost felt like another Chinese city ... >If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history OTOH this attitude is why PRC finally calibrating HK for PRC nationals/one-way permits instead of privileged foreign expats was long overdue. Mainlanders I know in HK find the new mix PRC/HK mix more preferable than UK/HK, less visible discrimination etc. Local nativism still exists but less overt than pre NSL. Applies to the mainland as well - first exodus of privileged discontent expats who thought they were indispensable in the mid 2010s - only to be replaced by qualified nationals. Think of it as PRC fixing their H1B problem. Something many in tech have comparably aligned opinions on. E: over comment limit @charlieyu1 That's ~2 years worth of one way permits from PRC. Xi can snap his fingers and send 1M unemployed college educated mainlanders to HK tomorrow if he wants. Let's not pretend it's a big / existential loss, reality is PRC now has an abundance of talent who are much more deserving of living/running HK than most HKers who were merely privileged to be born in a city with constrained immigration requirements that puts mainland hukous system to shame. Under any reasonably fair system, HK should be treated like just ANY OTHER CHINESE CITY, like how under qualified people get squeezed out via gentrification in tier1 cities in every other country leading to local culture changes. It's not pretty, but it's how most of the world functions. Ultimately HK "culture" is the result of undue privilege enforced by 2 systems that benefit locals and expats instead of 1B+ PRC nationals. Expats I get, because some expertise needs to be imported and you need foreigners in the country for track2 diplomacy. But unlike pre 2000s when PRC human capital was borderline North Korea, there's nothing particularly deserving about a person born and raised in HK anymore. If anything they are increasingly less deserving, with a particularly bad human capita / talent pool. HK _still_ some of the poorest tertiary education statistics by high income standards (~25% when it should be 40-50+%) to stay competitive. Meanwhile PRC is spitting out 8M+ higher-ed a year, there's no reason why HKers or expats should have priority over qualified mainlanders anymore. If HKers want to emigrate, go ahead, there's no shortage of deserving replacements in mainland with 100x more bodies to draw from. For mainlanders, continuing HK privilege simply doesn't make sense anymore.

charlieyu1 4y ago
And the result is mass exodus of Hongkongers, especially the younger generation. 110K people moved to UK alone in the last two years. That's 1.5% of population, and UK alone. People are leaving the city faster than back in East Germany before Berlin Wall. And why people born and raised in Hong Kong have to give way to privileged mainlanders who don't share any culture with us at all?

robomartin 4y ago

How would you wrap Singapore into your comment? I was recently there and took note of what looked like significant Chinese cultural influence almost everywhere.

refurb 4y ago
76% of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese, so no surprise you saw a lot of Chinese influence there.
jasonjei 4y ago
Singapore is a republic with a large population of the Chinese diaspora. However, the control of government under its system has not changed parties since its independence from the UK (whether you agree or not, some have called it de facto single party state). Chinese culture is weaved extensively into its culture, including Chinese character names in identification cards for those that identify as Chinese ethnicity. I have many Singaporean friends of Chinese ethnicity, and most would see themselves distinct from China—not Chinese but of Chinese heritage.
- ashconnor 4y ago
  Singapore is a complex beast. On the one hand, all the political tools to kick the PAP out exist. Elections are free albeit not entirely fair. That said the PAP has used the legal system to exclude opposition candidates and the election districts are gerrymandered [0]. But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections [1]. They've steered the economy well. The PAP regularly receive praise here on HN because of their effective technocracy. [0] - https://newnaratif.com/how-gerrymandering-creates-unfair-elections-in-singapore/ https://newnaratif.com/how-gerrymandering-creates-unfair-ele... [1] - https://elections.viz.sg/ https://elections.viz.sg/
  - chii 4y ago
    > But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections It only takes one person going "rogue" to topple this system of trust. Is it so hard to imagine that not all authoritarian systems could be continuously benevolent?

puppymaster 4y ago

and it's not just one of those fake democracy - it's as free as a true democratic country can be, as experienced anecdotally and demonstrated in their constant top 3 finish in Freedom Index.

throwaway2037 4y ago
Which Freedom Index? There are a few.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fhe 4y ago

would you consider living in Singapore? It seems to have a lot going for it, maybe apart from the high living expense.

re-thc 4y ago
And there's never a (proper) Winter night :)

thowieruoi3243 4y ago

> it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. I don't want to reduce what you've said, but the fact is that Taiwan grew rich because of US support that helped integrate it into the global economy, and that wouldn't have come without its opposition to the mainland. Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR. India plans on doing the same wrt to China, but that country, like Africa, is too deeply colonized (likewise, with a despicable morally corrupt elite) to do anything of value to its own people IMO. People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream. Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth (regardless of what 'expats', who often both fetish-ize and dehumanize Asians, think).

dannyobrien 4y ago
i can't speak for the Taiwanese link, but my recollection was that China's rise in wealth (and investment and support from the US) only really took off in the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
sfmike 4y ago
hard no. usa helped but taiwan themselves made TSMC's due to their work and family culture and studying and working hard their entire lives. To say Nvidia and AMD and Gigabyte and the numerous brands from Taiwan are due to USA is farfetched. It's actually more reasonable to say it's due to China or Malaysia/Thailand etc where the manufacturing is then USA.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  They got all the know how from the US as a jump start. Plus loads of financial aid especially during the 90s. Sure, during the 2000s they moved ahead as they weren't stupid and didn't blow that chance, they're smart and hard working, but their rise is ultimately due to the US great interest in that island for military/strategic reasons.

wolverine876 4y ago

> retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution Very interesting. Would you go into more detail?

dandy23 4y ago

Your comment is not that relevant to the article as you talk about Hong Kong and the article about mainland China. Of course there might be similarities, but the Hong Kong story is still completely different.

brwck 4y ago

[flagged]